This grief is making me tired.

I wanted to be writing about backpacking in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula today, to be sharing with you some details, lessons, and views from my recent adventure. But I can’t, not right now. Life as we know it has been interrupted. There’s been a huge bump in the road, a snafu. A shift in the fabric of the universe.

My sister died. And that’s all I can think about right now.

It was sudden. I’m stumbling around wondering what exactly to do with myself, as I have been for the past 28 hours or so. My family came together last night, all who could make it, to cry and hug (two things we do not do often); to offer support and share the pain that each of us were just beginning to feel. There’s been an outpouring of condolences, thoughts and prayers, and well wishes on social media as well as multiple organized efforts to help her husband and two young children through the next few weeks. It’s touching to see the reach my sister has had in her community. She is, or was, an amazing person. Everyone is sorry and sad.

This loss, her death, the permanency of it is only just starting to sink in. It’s still catching me off guard as the initial news did. A sucker punch to the gut, a riptide pulling me off my feet to sweep me into the tumultuous depths. Waves of numbness followed by deep, hollowing grief are washing over me, changing the shape of my soul. I’m not sure what to do with it all, not sure how to adapt, how to be okay today. Or tomorrow. Or next week.

There aren’t words in my head, there is no vocabulary for a world without my sister in it.

My sister and her daughter circa 2014