There’s a large canvas print, circa 1998, of me and my two younger brothers, Lino and Lucas, in the hallway of my mother’s house. As a proud nine-year-old, I stand in the middle in a blue sporty bathing suit. Lino stands in front of me, his legs spread wide, neon swimming goggles on his head; his arms cross over his chest as he tilts to one side like the cool four-year-old he is. Lucas, one, is in my arms in a purple oversized life jacket, squinting his eyes against the blinding sun.

I’ve come back to this picture a thousand times to admire the power in my legs, the strength of all our smiles. Like many people, I see pictures of the past and yearn for the carelessness that exudes off younger faces. Faces undaunted by tragedy.

In the summer of 2007, my father died in a drunk driving accident while we were visiting family in the Azores in Portugal. In the beginning, my brothers and I leaned on one other when no one else could hold the weight of our grief. We were a tripod—if one leg fell, we all did.

So when This Is Us first premiered on NBC almost a decade later, I cried a hundred times over. Not because the show capitalized on tear-jerky moments (as most dramas do), but because I saw my family’s suffering actualized in real time. The main characters Kevin, Kate, and Randall—the Big 3—lose their father in a house fire just months before their high school graduation. The level of intelligence and grace the writers used to create scenes that portrayed such complex layers of grief knocked me to my knees in sobs.

But now in its third season, the show has shifted. We’ve seen the growth of each character as they struggle with demons in their adult lives that may have been birthed—or at least heightened—following their father’s death. Randall’s anxiety. Kate’s complicated relationship with food. Kevin’s alcoholism. Through all of these challenges, though, the Big 3 remain strong in solidarity. As Randall once said, “As long as we stick together, everything will be OK.” Time and time again, we see his words ring true.

But what happens when siblings don’t stick together after a parent dies? Since my father’s death, my brothers and I have each relocated, moved back home, relocated again. We’ve experienced successful relationships—and toxic ones. We’ve furthered our education and carved out career paths completely distinct from one another. As we grew into adulthood, the legs of our tripod sank deeper, separating further and further apart. Now, with our father gone more than a decade, our individual demons are rearing their ugly heads and I’m not sure we have the strength to pull each other up anymore. I know I can barely handle my own.[TK]

Lucas is a 21-year-old art student in his last semester of college. He drowns in paint, each canvas more distorted than the last. In one of his self-portraits, he sits on a chair, his neck strained to the ceiling, his eyes masked by a virtual reality headset. His hands reach for the center of his chest, ripping it open. The wound is small, no bigger than a quarter, but there is blood and bone. After graduation, Lucas plans to travel back to the Azores to paint. I wonder if Lucas isn’t trying to disconnect, as he says, but to reconnect—to inhabit the space where his own father’s chest was ripped apart by a guardrail.

Lino, 26, is a video gaming fanatic. Unemployed, he spends the majority of his days in his bedroom. He barely leaves his cave except to walk his two-year-old dog, Bruin—the only companion he tells me he needs. I can do nothing but watch from a distance. Perhaps it’s only in the lives of his video game characters that he sees himself. Perhaps it’s in their gun-controlled grim reality that he has the courage to face his enemies. To get hit after hit after hit. To die. To live again. To keep moving forward.

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