By Emily Barthisler

I was in second or third grade when my friend lost her beloved grandfather. She was overcome with sadness, crying at school, on the bus ride home, spontaneously at sleepovers and Brownie meetings. I didn’t understand it. I, too, had lost a grandfather — one I’d never even gotten to meet, the myth of a man who left this earth right before I arrived in it. I wondered if that made my loss greater? Or non-existent? Can one mourn what one has never had?

I felt selfish, wrong. Who was I to miss my grandfather when I had another one on the other side of my family, not to mention many other loving family members? My lost grandfather loomed large in my life, despite having never truly been in it. Did I even deserve to claim I had “lost” him?

We judge others for their volume and ferocity of grief over pets, early miscarriages, and relationships that only lasted a few weeks. We tell ourselves that “almost-losing” doesn’t count. We watch a friend grieve and tell ourselves we’re not also affected. We chide ourselves for not crying enough when the loss is actually ours.

What qualifies as loss? And what if someone else has objectively lost more than we have: do we not also grieve?

I told myself so many things about my grandfather. On good days, I was sometimes convinced that, maybe, I was him reincarnated. On darker days, I was less smart, less fortunate, less clever for having not been touched by him. When my big sister, all of three years old, had told our grandparents that my mom was having a baby, our grandfather cried. Years into his battle with cancer, Poppy knew he wouldn’t live long enough to meet me.

Was that the same as love? Did he love me if he never knew me? Did that count? Comparing one’s grief to anyone else’s is foolish and fruitless, but that has never stopped me.

I wonder what he would have thought of me. Is he somewhere watching everything I do? Is he the force that tells me right from wrong, the one that guides me, sends me my best ideas, and stops me from my worst impulses?

I craved a connection with Poppy more than anything. He was a writer, so I decided I would be a writer. He wrote books, so I would, too. He wrote for a newspaper, and so would I. People said we looked alike. My middle name was his first name. I clung to any and every potential connection.

When I was in my teens, my grandmother told me that Poppy had written a draft of a novel (It was terrible, he’d told everyone), and he had put it in a drawer, never to be read by another soul. An idea struck me: I would find that novel, polish it up, add my own twist, and publish it! A book co-written by two people who had never met but who shared a name and a face and who knows what else.

When my grandmother died, we cleaned out the house in Washington, D.C. that she and my grandfather had shared. My dad and I scoured the place: he for his Mickey Mantle rookie card, and I for that novel. Sadly, we never found either one.

I did eventually write a novel, one about the aftermath of gun violence, which happens to have been an issue close to Poppy’s heart. It didn’t occur to me at first that perhaps this story was the closest I might ever come to co-authoring that missing novel with the grandfather I never met. It’s a story of loss and family, and I can see now that I was writing with him in mind all along, even if I didn’t realize it until years later.

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Emily Barth Isler is the author of AfterMath, a middle-grade novel about grief, resilience, friendship, math, and mime. Activist and comedian Amy Schumer calls the book “a gift to the culture.” Emily lives in Los Angeles, California, with her husband and their two kids. A former child actress, she performed all over the world in theatre, film, and TV. In addition to books, Emily writes about sustainable, eco-friendly beauty and skincare, and has also written web sitcoms, parenting columns, and personal essays. She has a B.A. in Film Studies from Wesleyan University, and really, really loves television. Find her at www.emilybarthisler.com