“I bet you can’t sit in this chair for an hour,” my uncle said, grinning, while somewhere behind him another uncle held one of those big 80s video cameras, the kind with the bright light that flooded the whole room and made everything feel important. “If you do, I’ll give you a quarter.”

A whole quarter.

I remember how impossible it felt, trying to stay still and quiet in a room like that, full of cousins, laughter, wrapping paper flying, voices everywhere, the kind of noise that made up our whole world.

There were 16 of us—8 girls and 8 boys—all about the same age, growing up together in a kind of beautiful chaos where my cousins were my very first friends, where being together meant constant playing and an energy that meant you were never really alone.

And somewhere in all of that—Joel was there.

My cousin, Joel, passed away on Sunday, and even though we weren’t close in the way people usually mean, he was part of my beginning, part of those early years filled with family gathered at my grandparents’ farm, where life felt full in a way that’s hard to recreate.

He was the one from the big city two hours away, the hockey player, a little outside our small-town rhythm, and even though we didn’t stay connected as adults, especially after my grandma died and everything slowly drifted apart, he was never separate from that beginning. He is also the first of us to pass away, and there’s something about that that shifts the ground a little, like the realization that time is no longer something happening far away, but something quietly moving through all of us.

And what I’m realizing is this: grief doesn’t require closeness to be real, it doesn’t ask for recent conversations or even maintained relationships, it simply arrives wherever there was once connection, even if that connection was minimal or sporadic.

So if you’ve ever wondered whether you’re allowed to grieve someone you weren’t close to, someone who lived more in your past than your present, I want to tell you—you are, because grief doesn’t measure worthiness, it simply honors that something existed.

I’m not grieving a close relationship, I’m grieving a shared beginning, a familiar presence inside a loud and crowded room, a piece of where I came from, and I think there is something quietly important in allowing that to be enough.

Maybe that’s the lesson I’m holding this week—that we don’t have to rewrite relationships to make our grief make sense, we can simply hold them as they were: not more, not less, just true.

Rest easy dear cousin, maybe Grandma will make you doughnuts up there.

Oh and yes.. my uncle had to give me that quarter. I was and always will be up for a challenge.