On a whim…

There is a kind of fullness that doesn’t feel like happiness and doesn’t ask to be.

It isn’t sweet. It isn’t savory.

It simply rests.

Tonight I feel absence more clearly—not only my own, but the quiet spaces carried by people I love and others I care about. Some have lost children. Some have buried spouses. Some have said goodbye to friends only days ago. Some may not feel anything sharp at all—only a hush they can’t quite name.

I don’t know what anyone else is carrying tonight. I don’t even know that they are struggling. But I know that if I were standing where they stand, this night would ask something of me.

I sat with family today, grateful and at peace, and still aware that the deepest part of me was keeping watch elsewhere. Not lost. Not lonely. Just faithful—to love that has shaped a life, and to lives shaped by love that did not end when death arrived.

This isn’t grief that wants to be fixed.

It’s recognition.

I’m learning that much of what draws me to write is not the need to be understood, but the hope of finding witnesses—people willing to stand quietly together and notice what still abides. How love, once fully given, continues to act in the world through memory, attention, and changed lives.

If something in these words feels familiar to you tonight—unnamed but steady—know this: you are not behind, and you are not alone. Some things do not pass. They remain. And learning to live with them is its own kind of peace.

Christmas does not arrive in triumph.
It arrives in peril.

A child born to frightened parents.
A promise given without guarantees.
Power revealed not in taking, but in bearing.

Tonight, the world still trembles under lies told for safety’s sake.
Still mistakes strength for domination.
Still prefers what can be seized to what must be received.

And yet—
God comes anyway.
Unarmed.
Truthful.
Willing to carry what we cannot.

This is the joy of Christmas.
Not loud.
Not sentimental.
But faithful.

May we receive it in truth.

Fine, and Also Not Fine: Learning to Live in the Truth of “OK”

People ask how I’m doing, and I say I’m fine.

And in a narrow sense, I mean it.

What they’re usually asking—quietly, indirectly—is whether I’m frightened by a medical diagnosis. If that’s the question, then yes, I’m fine. I’m steady. I’m not hiding under the covers. I’m not waiting for catastrophe.

But if people knew the deeper question—

Are you untroubled? Are you your usual self? Are you moving through the world the way you used to?—

I suspect they wouldn’t ask it. And if they did, then finally, I could answer honestly:

No, I’m not fine.

But I am OK.

And OK, for me, means something like readiness. It means accepting the whole terrain—life, uncertainty, endings, beginnings—and still being able to write my way through it. OK means: I’m present. I’m listening. I’m awake to what matters.

The truth is, my single source of anxiety right now is not mortality—it’s finishing the work I’ve begun.

That might sound strange, but I feel more alive in the writing than anywhere else. Not drained—energized. Not collapsing—expanded. It’s the kind of aliveness that brings tears the way Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony brings tears, or Turandot, or remembering the first time you stood before Monet’s water lilies. Tears that arrive because something beautiful just told the truth.

No one rushes in to diagnose you when you cry at art.

No one prescribes counseling because you were moved by wonder.

For too long, I practiced the art of locking everything down—the quiet discipline of emotional tidiness. But now when I write, if I stumble onto an image that rings clear and honest, how could I not weep? If I didn’t, I’d wonder whether the writing had lost its pulse.

And so tonight, I find myself tired.

Not from overwork.

Not from illness.

Not from fear.

I’m tired from being misunderstood.

I used to imagine the “solitary life” of a writer as long hours in a quiet room. But now I see it differently: solitude is what happens when your inner truth no longer fits into the questions people know how to ask.

Even so—I return to the page.

Because I’m not fine.

Because I am OK.

And because writing, for however many days I’m given, is the most alive I have ever felt.

.

Every human being has a duty to humanity.
That’s not a slogan. It’s a fact.

We like to imagine duty belongs to the ones in uniform — soldiers, officers, firefighters — the ones who put themselves between us and danger. And we tell them, “Thank you for your service.”

But if I’m honest, I hear something else under those words:
“Thank God you did it, so I didn’t have to.”

That’s not gratitude. That’s relief wearing the mask of virtue.

Their duty does not excuse ours.
Their courage does not cancel our obligation.

Every parent, every citizen, every neighbor — every human — carries a duty that can’t be delegated:
the duty to act humanely toward other humans.

Once upon a time we knew the rule:
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

Now, too often, the rule is this:
Do unto them what you imagine they’ve done unto you.

That’s not righteousness. That’s rot.
And if we keep walking that road — nursing our injuries, feeding on resentment, and calling it justice — we’ll damn ourselves.

And when we finally reach hell’s gate, even hell itself may whisper,
You’re too far gone to live here.

⸻

Remembering Joe on All Saints Day, and finding again that love doesn’t end — it just changes direction.

I’ve come to think of remembrance as its own kind of liturgy — a way of practicing presence until the veil thins. This reflection began that way, on a cold November afternoon in Somerville light.

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The sky was that pale, unforgiving white that settles over New England in November.

All Saints Day — a day built for remembering.

The calendar had lined itself up with Joe’s funeral again, so we went as a family — bundled against the wind — to stand a few minutes by his grave. Nothing ceremonial, just the old discipline of showing up. Letting silence say what words can’t.

Time has thinned the noise around my grief, and what’s left is simple: I miss him.

Joe wasn’t just my brother-in-law. He was a gatekeeper, a protector, and, in time, a friend forged in the odd fraternity of honor.

I can still see that first dinner — the table at Applebee’s, the air thick with steak sauce and family laughter, the eve of my marriage to his sister so near it made me clumsy. Joe watched me across the table with that steady, measuring gaze of his, as if weighing the man about to marry the woman he’d sworn to protect.

When the toasts ended, he drew me aside. His voice was low, stripped of charm.

“Listen closely,” he said. “If you ever hurt her — if you ever cause her unnecessary pain — just hear this: I know people,” his Somerville, Massachusetts accent making the words unmistakable.

It was half threat, half blessing. I understood both. Beneath the warning was love in its purest form — love that guards as fiercely as it gives. To marry her was to step inside a circle of unbreakable loyalty, and I never forgot it.

Years later, at his funeral, I met some of those people — men of quiet, intimidating bearing, the kind who keep their promises long after the one who made them is gone. By then Joe and I had settled into something easy and real. I think he knew that, too.

This year, under that washed-out sky, we stood again — his widow leaning on his son. The wind had that dry, papery sound only graveyards know. In the stillness the daughter turned to me.

“Uncle,” she said softly, “would you offer a prayer?”

I wasn’t ready. I haven’t been a public pray-er for years. The pulpit gave way long ago to the desk; spoken faith turned to written faith. My ministry now is metaphor — the quiet sermon that arrives on paper. But her eyes asked for something I couldn’t withhold.

I closed mine and waited. A recent poem of mine surfaced — about a man lost in the snowy woods of New England. He’s wandering, the trail gone, when he finds a doorway standing by itself among the pines. Out of place, yet warm light spilling from within. He doesn’t know where it leads, only that he’s drawn to it.

That doorway has become my theology: the life beyond this one as passage, not conclusion. A threshold that feels strange and familiar all at once.

So I prayed. Not a sermon, just a few honest lines. I called on the Almighty — the only name wide enough — and gave thanks for Joe: for his humor, his loyalty, his steadfast love. I invited each of us to speak to God in our own language. Gratitude more than request. Then silence again.

When I opened my eyes, the cold seemed to ease. Joe’s widow lifted her face, her hands trembling on her cane. What passed between us wasn’t thanks but recognition. For an instant she seemed to feel him near — the warmth behind that imagined doorway brushing against the November air.

I felt it too — that quiet pulse that isn’t sorrow so much as longing, the need to stay connected, to trust that love alters shape but not direction.

And under that pale sky, I understood that this, too, is prayer:

  to live awake to presence,

  to remember without grasping,

  to keep watch for the door that opens, quietly, toward home.

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DW, November 1 · All Saints Day

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