Returning to Normal After a Teammate’s Death

You are about to compete for the first time since we lost someone.

The game is on the schedule. The uniforms are in the locker. The world outside this building does not know — or has already moved on from knowing — what this room is still carrying. And there is something genuinely strange about putting on the uniform and going out there when someone who should be here is not.

I want to name that before we go.

Read this passage slowly.

Let that sit for a second before you move.

David’s lament over Jonathan is not the performance of appropriate grief. It is a man sitting in the specific loss of a specific person he loved. The love for me was wonderful. He names it directly, without embarrassment, without rushing toward resilience. The grief is proportional to the love. The love was real. So the grief is allowed to be real.

Here is the truth about competing for the first time after a loss: you will feel more than one thing at once. The grief will be present. The competitive instinct will also be present. The desire to honor the person who is gone by competing well will be present alongside the guilt that competing at all might seem like a betrayal of the grief. All of those things are allowed to be true simultaneously.

Nothing about competing today dishonors the person we lost. The game was part of the world they were part of. Playing it, playing it fully, is not a declaration that the loss doesn’t matter. It is a declaration that life continues — that we carry the people we lose into the continuation, not out of it.

Go compete. Carry them with you. Let today’s game be part of how you honor what they meant to this program.

Let each player answer if the group is small enough. The personal answer is more meaningful than a collective one.