In the days since Darrell Sheets passed, nearly every voice connected to the Storage Wars universe has found its way into the public conversation — cast members, crew, fans, former producers, people who spent a season beside him and people who spent a decade — and the tributes have arrived in every form that grief takes when it belongs to someone genuinely loved, from the raw and unguarded to the carefully composed, from social media posts that ran long because the writer could not find a stopping point to brief, broken sentences that said more in five words than most eulogies say in five pages. And then there is Barry Weiss.

The man known to millions of Storage Wars fans as The Collector — the silver-haired, motorcycle-riding, effortlessly cool wildcard who brought a wit and a warmth and an irrepressible sense of humor to every auction he ever walked into — has said nothing. Not a post, not a comment, not a single public word in the direction of a man he knew better and longer than most of the people who have already spoken, and the silence that Barry Weiss is keeping is a silence so complete and so conspicuous that the fans who noticed it stopped asking why he hasn’t spoken and started understanding, in the way that grief teaches you to understand certain silences, that the reason Barry Weiss has not said a word about losing Darrell Sheets is probably the most honest and most heartbreaking answer of all — that some losses sit so deep and so close that the only truthful response to them is the one that cannot be put into words at all.