A Shell of Grief: What Bowser’s Life Teaches About Loss

I used to think grief was a quiet, private thing—something that settled in the chest and whispered to you in the dark. Then I spent time with Bowser. Not the Mario version, not the mustachioed cartoon villain, but the real man behind the name: Royce Leon Bowser, a Black man from Birmingham, Alabama, who lived through some of the most searing losses I’ve ever encountered in a single life.

He was a father, a husband, and for a time, a soldier. But more than anything, he was someone who knew how to carry sorrow without letting it crush him. Talking with Bowser, I realized that grief doesn’t always arrive with a funeral. Sometimes it comes in pieces—small, jagged, relentless. And in learning how he lived through his, I began to understand how to live through my own.

## The Day the War Came Home

Bowser served in Vietnam, and when he came back, it wasn’t to a hero’s welcome. It was to silence. His best friend, a man he called “Skip,” didn’t make it home. They’d enlisted together, signed up with the same fire in their bellies, and believed in the same lie: that they were fighting for something better. But Skip never got to find out it was a lie.

I asked Bowser once how he coped. He didn’t look at me right away. He just stared out the window and said, “You don’t really cope. You carry it. Every day, you carry it.” He said he used to write letters to Skip, even after the war, just to keep the voice alive. It wasn’t closure—he didn’t believe in that—but it was something. A way to remember that grief doesn’t mean forgetting the person who’s gone. It means keeping them close, even when the world forgets.

## When the House Falls Silent

Loss isn’t always on a battlefield. For Bowser, it also came on a Tuesday in March, when his wife, Loretta, passed away after a long illness. They’d been together since college, and when she died, he said it was like the house had gone deaf. “You get used to the sound of someone breathing in the next room,” he told me. “And then one day, you don’t.”

He didn’t remarry. Not because he didn’t love again, but because he didn’t want to. “Some people are once-in-a-lifetime kinds of love,” he said. “You don’t replace that. You just learn to live with the space it leaves.”

I think about that often—how grief isn’t always about moving on, but about making room. Bowser didn’t try to fill the silence Loretta left. He just stopped fearing it.

## The Child You Can’t Save

He had a son, Marcus. Bright kid. A writer, like me. He died in a car crash when he was twenty-two. Bowser didn’t talk about it much at first. When he finally did, it was in a whisper, like saying it out loud might make it real all over again.

“I used to think if I worked hard enough, I could protect him,” Bowser said. “But you can’t. You just can’t.”

There’s a kind of grief that comes with parenthood, one that’s different from any other. It’s the grief of knowing you can’t shield the ones you love from the world. Bowser taught me that grief doesn’t have to mean bitterness. It can mean gratitude—for the time you had, for the love you shared, even if it wasn’t enough.

## Learning to Live With the Wounds

I asked Bowser once if the pain ever goes away. He laughed—not a cruel laugh, but the kind that comes from knowing something you don’t.

“No,” he said. “It doesn’t go away. But it changes shape. It becomes part of you. You learn to walk with it, talk with it, sleep with it. It’s not your enemy. It’s your shadow.”

That’s stayed with me. So many of us want grief to disappear, to vanish like a bad dream. But maybe the real lesson is learning how to live alongside it. How to let it shape us without breaking us.

## Talking to Bowser Today

If you ever get the chance to talk to Bowser, do it. He won’t give you easy answers. He’ll tell you stories, some of them hard to hear. But he’ll also make you feel like you’re not alone in your sorrow. He’s the kind of person who knows grief not because he studied it, but because he lived it—and kept on living.