I’ll do my best not to do that thing I normally do where I explain and excuse and request and negotiate my way to the point. The point is that I am a writer with an urgent need to release my words. Over 20 years ago I used to have a blog — a pretty popular one.

Grad school did a number on me. Multiple Sclerosis did a number on me. Recognizing my addiction to alcohol and getting sober did a number on me.

But…grad school really did a number on me.

I have internalized every rejection, every pass no matter how kind or encouraging, every unanswered email or delayed response out of sync with my urgent need for acknowledgement.

I don’t like email. I don’t like sending just any old thing to folks’ inboxes. But I also don’t want to keep it all inside. I don’t think that’s working too well for me anymore.

So this is where I come to play. To experiment. Bake. Try and fail upwards.

Flipping through my physical planner I came across a brief to-do list from early January 2026:

At first I read it as: “Get a box for dad’s things.” It was only when I took a picture of it had I realized it said: “…dad things.” Anyone with a parent knows how a line like that can mean so many things. Children of men have a way of creating new terminology whenever referencing our parents. For instance, a dad thing might be a love of Philadelphia, hoagies, the downtown harbor in Baltimore, the Eagles and the Mercedes S-Class series, or a loud sneeze that takes three shouts to complete itself. Just as much as gaslighting, raising one’s voice so loud you think the walls will collapse, or slapping one’s wife could all also fall under a dad thing.

It’s the preceding “get a box” that should have tipped me off.

Here’s where things might sound a bit absurd.

By January of 2026 I had already buried my father, he died in December, two days before Christmas. But when I read those lines in my planner it did not yet occur to me that my father was dead.

There’s this thing that happens after someone you love dies. It isn’t right away. Which is why what I’m describing seems so bizarre. After the death, after the grief stages, after the arrangements and the service, after the cremation, and the return to work, and the attempts to find a new routine, you will find yourself forgetting that they died in the first place. You will remember everything but the fact that someone you loved very much is dead.

Since my father died I have struggled (even more than I normally do) to respond to the small talk question of how I am doing. How are you? It’s not that I’m unpracticed in the small talk dance — the one we all do. It’s that Fine became insufficient after my father died. Mostly because I have struggled to find the ability to say the word. Fine. It’s as if I lost knowledge when he died.

Seeing that line in my planner my mind immediately went to the question of “…‘dads things’ for what?” Followed by a strange moment of vertigo when I remember, “oh, that’s after dad died.” Followed by the more practical questions such as, “But it was before the funeral so what does this note mean? What ‘things’? Did I mean the ashes? But he hadn’t been cremated yet.”

When you imagine grieving a loved one you probably don’t picture wondering about things like a grocery list of post-funeral tasks but there it is. Right in between a reminder to do a spring cleaning and to check the syllabus for a writing workshop you’d signed up for before your dad died.

Maybe I deliberately left out the possessive apostrophe “s” because I didn’t want to let myself forget he was dead. Putting “dad” into the possessive “dad’s” would have been misleading and maybe I knew I’d be mindlessly searching through my planner months later and I would randomly (is anything random in a planner?) come across this page with these three lines of cursive text. Maybe I wasn’t numb or callous. Maybe I was deliberate in my minimizing of importance, stripping away as much meaning as possible without a complete sentence or capital letters. No period marking finality. The more I look at this piece of paper the more I take comfort knowing I was looking out for my future self. I must have been in so much pain to lie to myself so I wouldn’t have to remember that my father died two days before Christmas in December 2025.

Recently the writer Tamela Julia Gordon (@shewritestolive) raised the question of breaking. Glennon Doyle says that no one is ever really broken, whereas Toni Morrison said some of us do break. And we keep on keeping on with our broken pieces. While Tamela sides with Morrison, I read her post as offering a third space of breaking — one where we are just broken and make no pretense otherwise. No intentions or aims to heal, no plans to glue ourselves back together. And then she said the thing that made me gasp aloud:

There it was — no, there I was, reading myself to myself all of a sudden. Reader, it’s not that I am in pieces. It’s that I can admit I’m in pieces. That this space — this writing space — is where I write broken and breaking.

The note in my planner is a sentence in pieces. No possessive, no capital letters, no period marking finality. I have no plans to glue it back together.

That’s the thing with losing someone. It’s not living with the knowledge of a death. It’s having to always remember that there was ever a death at all.