Winter, After the Silence

11 02 2026

It has been a while since I’ve written.

Not because nothing has happened. Quite the opposite. Life has been arriving in waves, and I have been standing in the surf without quite knowing how to describe the undertow.

Winter has hit harder this year.

In the early morning hours, walking home from the train station, I navigate mobs of crows clustered in the trees overhead. They cry out before they let loose, peppering the sidewalk with their droppings — a crude warning system. I walk carefully. There is something about the darkness at that hour, the industrial quiet broken only by wings and wind, that feels both ancient and immediate.

Crows Overhead

Along the way I pass people sleeping in doorways. Sometimes there are dogs curled beside them, wrapped in blankets, loyal in ways the rest of us struggle to be. The city breathes differently at that hour. Stripped down. No pretense. Just bodies trying to endure until daylight.

“You’re a very empathetic person,” my therapist friend once told me. “You give so much. Most people aren’t like that.”

I didn’t know what to say then. Empathy feels less like virtue and more like exposure. You feel everything. You absorb it. And lately, there has been a lot to absorb.

The people I looked up to most of my life are dying now. My father included. I have tried to memorialize them the best way I know how — in words — but grief does not move in tidy lines. It comes in waves. Regret rides in with it. Regrets, I’ve had a few. Some small. Some seismic.

The transit agency job keeps my writing afloat. I’m taking a college course in electricity, too. Dad would have liked that. There is something solid about learning how currents move, how power is transferred. It makes the invisible visible.

When I was disqualified from the rail operator position, the union stepped in and saved my job. That was the good news. The bad news was the overnight shift — outside, in winter — moving, coupling, and decoupling trains for the next day’s service.

The yard is all steel and breath and repetition. My fifty-year-old body has begun to protest. I sleep more. I battle colds and congestion. I’ve run out of sick time. With budget cuts looming, I pray for health the way some people pray for miracles. Just get me to spring. Let me sign up for a day shift. Let light return in some practical way.

David remains my rock. At his age, working forty hours a week in retail is no small thing. I wish he didn’t have to, but it keeps him moving. That’s the trick, isn’t it? Motion as survival. My step count has never been higher since taking the yard hostler role. A coworker told me, “I have no desire to be caged in that cab for ten hours a day.” I understood what he meant. Movement feels like proof of life.

Still, I miss the sun. I miss Florida’s warmth, even though there have been days colder there than here in the Pacific Northwest. It isn’t just temperature — it’s the rain. The gray. The way it seeps into the psyche. After eight years, I sometimes think I have battled depression to a draw. Not defeated it. Not surrendered. A stalemate.

I try not to get pulled into politics. I am a public servant. But the news some days is unbearable. The cruelty. The speed with which outrage ignites. Digital life has given us constant connection and constant combustion. It is hard not to look. Harder to look away.

I think often of the summers when I worked in the parks. The disconnection. The way nature set the pace. I fell in love in Yellowstone. It was, without exaggeration, the best summer of my life.

There are alternate versions of me that sometimes feel more vivid than the one I inhabit. The version who eloped to Italy with Ann. She loved me. It was true. I often wonder what that life would have been.

But there was a secret then. A stigmata I carried too long. It shaped my choices, narrowed my courage. Decades pass in the space of one unresolved truth. And just like that, the realization lands: I will never be a father. The sting comes sharp and sudden, like a Georgia yellowjacket on a hot afternoon. You don’t see it coming. You just feel the burn.

At my annual physical, I learned I have high blood pressure. Dad had it too. I ask myself why I cannot relax. Am I still trying to prove something? Am I restless because some part of me believes another life-altering opportunity has slipped by? Is this as good as it gets?

I flew to Alabama to see my mother and brother. I won’t write more about that. Empathy again — the instinct to protect, to soften edges, even when they cut me.

Tomorrow night, I will return to the train yard. The crows will still be there. The cold. The coupling and uncoupling of cars. The small prayers whispered into the fog.

My spirit is not broken. But it is bruised.

And I am hopeful — stubbornly, irrationally hopeful — that this static feeling will pass, that something in me is still recalibrating, that winter, like grief, like regret, like love withheld and love remembered, is not the whole story.

It is only a season.


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Categories : Birds, Dad, Exercise, The Train, Uncategorized, Yellowstone

In Memoriam

30 11 2025

There are days you know are coming, and yet when they arrive, they catch you unprepared, as if you had misunderstood the terms. I had just bought a plane ticket to Alabama, picturing an ordinary visit: my mother in her new kitchen, my father settled into the small routines of a life that had narrowed but not yet vanished.

Then came the message from my brother: ‘Urgent, please call.’

When I did, he was crying.

“Dad’s gone,” Keith said.
Two words, and everything after them felt strangely suspended, as though spoken from another room.

My father went to sleep on Thanksgiving and did not wake up. The do-not-resuscitate order held back the paramedics from trying to undo what his own body had already begun. In its way, it was a mercy.

He had dwindled to ninety pounds. “Nothing but skin and bones,” my brother kept repeating, as if naming the truth could soften it. A year of strokes, Parkinson’s, diabetes — an accumulation of slow undoings. He had long been unable to walk, living in the narrow corridor between decline and endurance.

My mother moved him from Florida to Alabama so Keith could be close enough to help. “This is not how I wanted to spend our golden years,” she would say on the phone. No answer made any of it less true.

From across the country, guilt was easy to reach for. Anger too. Anger that I didn’t get to say goodbye, didn’t get the hug, the last talk about camping trips, the golf clubs he gifted me or the way he taught me to tie a necktie. His final message came in 2021: Happy Thanksgiving, John. I love you too. After that, the words no longer held their shape. His mind couldn’t steady them.

Watching him fade, even from a distance, was its own kind of grief — this man who had built a dream house with his own ambition, who traveled the country to watch the Seminoles play, who climbed the corporate ladder in the way men of his generation believed they were required to. He came from the deep South, from a world where tenderness was rationed, where men learned early to keep their guard high and their feelings unspoken. Toughness wasn’t just a personality — it was cultural instruction.

It is impossible to understand him without understanding that.

He was hard on me growing up. Hard in ways that left marks — some visible, some not. The hole in the drywall stayed for months after one fight, a quiet reminder of what happened when tempers ran too hot. Maybe he believed he was preparing me for a world he thought would be even harder. Maybe he feared what he didn’t understand about me. Maybe he was reenacting the discipline he had survived.

He wasn’t a saint, though he belonged to the Knights of Columbus. But he was also not a villain. He provided everything he knew how to provide. He earned status, built a life from almost nothing, raised two sons, and gave generously to his community. And like many men of his time and place, he struggled with the more fragile currencies — encouragement, softness, apology. If he withheld love, it was because no one had taught him how to offer it.

His marriage to my mother was a 55-year journey with its battles; divorce hovered more than once. I hated the way he treated her near the end, but even then, she stayed. Some loyalties in the South are stitched early and hold long after they fray.

Mike & John, circa 2021.

When my aunt told me, “Your dad has never been an easy man,” there was an entire history folded inside those words—his upbringing, his hardships, the stoicism expected of Southern men, the unspoken wounds that harden into personality.

Dad didn’t want a memorial or service. It fits. Men like him didn’t believe in being publicly grieved. Instead, he asked that his ashes be scattered into the Apalachicola River, the water that first shaped him. A return to the beginning.

My last memory is from last summer: him smoking on the porch in the punishing Florida heat, the light hitting him in a way that made the pain visible. As I walked away, I glanced back. Our eyes met for a moment, and I knew — even then — that this might be the last time. And it was.

When he died, the surprise was not in the timing but in my own response: a brief indifference, followed by a deeper ache — for my brother and mother, who carried the weight of his long decline, and for the boy in me who had always wanted something gentler from him.

A part of me is gone with him. A part that learned discipline, work, and endurance. A part shaped by his silences as much as his words.

In the end, he deserved better. We all did.
But this was the life we shared, tangled and imperfect, marked by the culture that raised him and the quiet love he never could express.


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