Steven LaChance Blog

Death itself has never been the thing that frightened me. What terrifies me is the thought of losing everyone I love before my own time comes. That fear has been stitched into me over the years, thread by thread, through loss after loss. When you are young, you believe there is time. You imagine decades of shared laughter, holidays, and quiet mornings together. You assume that love will wait for you. But when death comes early and often, that illusion shatters. It changes the way you see the world. It changes the way you hold the people you love.

Growing up as a gay man in the eighties meant living beneath a shadow that never lifted. I came of age in a time when funerals felt endless, when laughter at bars and parties was undercut by whispered names of those already gone. AIDS swept through my world like wildfire, leaving nothing untouched. Friends I thought would grow old with me vanished before their lives had even truly begun. At an age when I should have been discovering who I was, I was learning instead how to write eulogies. It carved something into me, an awareness that nothing is promised, that joy is fleeting and love must be fiercely protected.

But not all my grief is tied to that chapter of my life. The deepest wound came when I lost my sister, my closest friend, my compass, my mirror. She was the one who understood me without explanation, the one who knew the sound of my soul. Losing her felt like tearing away a part of myself I could never recover. There is an emptiness that follows a loss like that, a silence that lives in the corners of every room. You learn to carry it, to live with it, but a part of you is always reaching for someone who is no longer there.

My father’s death left another hollow place within me. He was my anchor, a steady presence in a complicated world, and losing him felt like watching the foundation of my life collapse. Grief stacked upon grief until I became someone who knows too well what absence feels like.

I do not fear my own death. I fear the slow erosion of my circle. I fear the quiet of a house that once echoed with voices, the fading of the stories only those we love can tell. I fear being the one left to remember.

I think often of a friend I sat with as he was dying of AIDS. His body was frail, his voice soft but steady, and he looked at me with a strange tenderness as he said, “Your curse in this life will be to outlive us all.” He did not say it with anger. It was a gift, a truth he wanted me to hold close. At the time, I could not understand it. I was too young, too full of hope, to see what he meant. But as the years passed and the funerals continued, as losses stacked like stones around me, his words began to take shape.

He was right.