We were in the awkward phase of closing out the meeting when my phone rang and my daughter’s name showed up as the caller. She was out with my wife, so I didn’t think much of the call, but it was odd. My kids don’t call me at the office unless it’s important.

I could not put my finger on why, but suddenly there was a weight in my chest like someone apologizing for the interruption, then making eye-contact with me before saying “you’ve got an urgent call,” as they opened the door enough for me to pass through.

The person I was in the meeting with noticed my hesitation and asked, “Do you need to take that?” I replied, “I’ll call… you know what. Yeah, give me a second. It’s not normal for my kids to call while I’m in the office.”

The call started and it was my wife. She was crying in a way I hadn’t ever seen. When she saw me the words “Dad is dead…” raced from her mouth like a statement that wanted to be a question.

My co-worker caught a glimpse of my sobbing wife and involuntarily asked, “Is everything alright?” clearly knowing that things weren’t. “My father-in-law is dead.” I didn’t want to say those words, but they just came out.

I raced back to my desk, fighting tears back, threw my laptop into my backpack and told my manager that I had to leave. “My wife just called. Her father’s passed away.” The words seemed unreal and the tears were half a blink from falling out of my eyes. “Get home, don’t worry about work. Let me know when you are there and if you need anything from us.”

The two-hour drive home was silent and loud at the same time. The road noise screamed the words my wife said, and my heart was coaching me to let all the emotions out now so I could be strong for her when I get home. As I walked to the front door she came out with less energy than someone at the height of a flu and fell into my chest, soundlessly sobbing.

I don’t know her pain, but I will. He had been a father to me since I was seventeen and I could do nothing more than choke down the emotions because I know he’d want me to take care of his baby girl. It’s what men do. We put ourselves last. We do this to protect those who need to focus on what’s in front from what may be trying to sneak up from behind.

The next fifteen or twenty days were an emotional roller-coaster. We expected the broken hearts, and the loss of appetites, but not the lower back pain, or stomach cramps. We didn’t consider the migraines or how everyday pains would be amplified. Matt, a good friend and Active Release Therapist once told me that physical pain is an emotion. Is this emotion what caused us to literally feel death?

I didn’t tell her about how the pains I easily dealt with from decades of BJJ worsened every time I thought of my father-in-law. Neither of us spoke about how we lay awake breathing deeply to fake sleep. How we would look at each other and the kids wanting to ask how they were but didn’t because we feared reminding them their grandfather was not going to be around to peel fruit for them anymore.

We kept our physical emotions hidden in busy work. Tears were masked in tasks of cleaning, walking the dog, or going out with the kids. The low-grade fevers were blamed on changing seasons. Even with music in the background, the car rides became quieter. Miles seemed longer and tempers became shorter despite this reminder that life ends, and it’s never the right time. I wanted to be there. Not stoic, or emotionally numb but strong enough to be gentle. I just didn’t know how.

I didn’t know how to deal with this death, but I knew someone who would. My uncle recently passed away, which meant that my cousin would know how it feels to lose a father. He is the oldest of our generation. The first of us to live, and the first of us to experience this kind of grief. I needed my cousin to help us through this. My texts normally take a few days to get a response, but “Did your body hurt after Tio passed away?” was answered almost immediately with “All over”

Two words… that’s all, no more, no less, and everything made sense. The phone sat in my hands and the tears rolled into my beard. My wife had been watching me, thinking I was ignoring her. The frustration melted. In her silence I said, “I asked Ray if his body hurt when Tio died. He said, ‘All over’” then she and I sat there with those words.

When Matt told me that pain is an emotion, I put it in the same category as healing with sound and crystals. The kind of pseudo medicine that comes off like someone selling snake-oil, but it’s not. I knew that my pain at the time was directly related to my injury.

fMRIs use the invisible waves of magnets to see inside the brain then transmit millions of little signals into a computer that then turns them into images on a screen. If I’m really stretching to win an argument, that would be how I’d do it, but science would laugh me off the stage.

In 2003, researchers at UCLA published a study in Science showing that social pain activates the same region of the brain as physical pain. I once attended a religious lecture on the mercy of God where the lecturer said “They didn’t die because they had cancer. They had cancer because they needed to die. The cancer is what God gave us so we could cope.”

I accepted the death, but I needed something to help with the pain. Eisenberger and her colleagues at UCLA concluded that “social pain is analogous in its neurocognitive function to physical pain, alerting us when we have sustained injury to our social connections, allowing restorative measures to be taken. Understanding the underlying commonalities between physical and social pain unearths new perspectives on issues such as why physical and social pain are affected similarly by both social support and neurochemical interventions and why it ‘hurts’ to lose someone we love.”

I take it a step further. I take it a step further and say that the physical pain is how our bodies cry. Our hearts can move our eyes to tears. Our stomachs can refuse food because a lifetime’s worth of memories eating together will never have a new conversation at that table.

Our bodies will never feel another hug, hold another hand and feel the warmth of their skin, or the poke of their finger as they startled us. Our ears won’t hear their laugh before we see them, and our eyes will not laugh at the prank we saw them playing.

In an extreme state of grief we are most vulnerable, leaving us open for being taken advantage of. As a man, the immediate moment of mourning is not mine, it’s for her. I will privately and silently break. If I break in front of her it will be long after she’s healed, or in the presence of a man who will protect me and keep my pain safely from those who could manipulate it.

No one ever told me that it would hurt my knuckles, or my ribs when I lost someone that close. No one ever told me until Ray did. He comforted an entire family without having the strength to comfort himself.

The only loss worse than losing a parent is the loss of a child; I pray to never feel that. What I’ve learned is that pain cannot be pushed into the shadows of thought. Science proves it’s alive in the same parts of your brain that alert you to a cut on your hand. No one questions physical pain when blood confirms the reality of it. What our bodies feel as we process death doesn’t live in the imagination. It’s our body grieving in a way every other sense could not. Grieve with your body and allow someone to hold your body that’s grieving.