This weekend was the hardest part of the whole process to date.

Interviewing my family members, reducing them to tears… It was not easy. It did make for good content, but it was hard to stand there, on the other side of the camera, waiting for a quote, or a soundbite or an audio clip, helpless. I couldn’t go over and hug them, console them or tell them it was OK. I had to step outside of myself, outside of the story for a moment and let it play out.

I always say the best follow-up question is silence. Instead of jumping in to direct your subject to a new topic, or ask a more pointed question, it’s often best to just stand and stare. You can nod your head and wait… just wait… Sometimes they’re wait with you, but usually – and I always find this to be the case – they will continue on with their story, their explanation, unfolding even more details than what they’ve already surrendered.

But with my family, it was hard. I had to let it go, soldier on through the silence, the sadness and hope there was better things ahead.

After remembering the good times to start the video, I had to ask the painful question of the months, weeks and days leading up to the murder on 12/19/09. That was easily the hardest part. But I always tried to come out on the other end with something happier.

“What will you remember most about him?”

“If you had to explain him in 30 seconds, what would you say?”

“Can you give me a few words about what kind of man he was?

These always led to smiles, or happy tears, out of the darkness.

Afterward, my interview subjects all expressed gratitude toward the project and the process. They felt like a weight was lifted off them. They could finally talk frankly and openly about the man he was and what his loss meant to them, to us, to our family.

I’ve seen the help this project has given my family. Now I need to see it through.

I’ve been writing the section about when we heard about my grandfather’s death. I was in a writing zone, so I was furiously typing, both from my memory of the events and the memories of my family members that I interviewed. I tried to stay locked in, to keep typing, to keep putting text on the screen and get the thoughts out of my head and onto the screen. But I couldn’t. Years later, recalling all of it, I found myself emotional.

Sitting in a Starbucks in New York City isn’t the best place to be re-confronted with awful memories. I can vividly remember holding my mom as she screamed. I will never, ever forget it. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do in my brief life. I will never know how this truly affected my mother, and the rest of my family, but I know how it affected me.

I know, because I felt all those things all over again. So much so, I had to stop writing it and come write this. I needed to put my feelings down instead of relaying others. Yes, I’m very much part of the story I’m telling and I’m trying to divorce myself from it, ever so slightly, to get the real scope of what happened into text without interjecting my feelings, but it’s difficult.

In this day of Facebook statuses, tweets, photos and video sharing sites, it’s easy for me to share my feelings on anything, at anytime. But recalling old memories… There’s no social network for that. As an over-sharer, it’s weird to have to keep something bottled up, so I put it here.

It’s why I think this story was so important and needed to be told.

It’s easy for all of us in the family to keep things bottled up, but it’s better — I think — to get everything out, even if it does mean reliving some awful memories. We have to sift through those to get to the important stuff… the happy stuff… the good memories. Those are the ones we need to cherish, not the ones when Grandpa was ripped from our lives.

We need to re-live it now, so we never have to re-live it again. So we did.

I’ve been doing a lot of research into murder statistics across the country and specifically to the state of New Jersey, and it is quite depressing. There were nearly 14,000 murders across the county in 2009, the FBI said, which is just a staggering number of people.

Of that, only 15 percent were over the age of 50 and nearly two-thirds were committed with a firearm.

It’s very sobering to read these numbers and see these statistics. I don’t think this was as emotional a night of writing as it was when I had to write specifically about my grandpa’s death, but just an awful reminder of what is going on in our world today, around us always, as we continue with our lives ignorant as can be.

On Thursday, I went back to New Jersey for the wake of my step-grandmother Marion’s mother. It was my first family funeral since my grandfather’s and it was different. It was so much smaller — more intimate — than my grandfathers.

We had to have two sessions and two rooms dedicated to his wake. Hundreds, thousands of people came that day. We shook all of their hands. Thanked them for the well wishes and moved on to the next person in the line. It was very long, very emotional and very surreal. It was almost like an out of body experience. I remember it, but I don’t remember being there for it.

The one thing that really sticks out to me is talking to a reporter from The Star-Ledger. I’ve actually reached out to her for this story and she’s sent me a few connections. We actually work in neighboring buildings in New York City now, which just goes to show how small a world it is.

At the wake for Marion’s mother, there were so many photos of my grandfather, and I’m in many of them too. It’s weird seeing yourself as a kid, knowing what you know. With his life cut so short, is there more I could have done while he was still alive? I know these are questions that don’t have answers, but I thought them when I was there. Sometimes, you just can’t help it.