I didn’t expect my eyes to well up, but they did—fast and without warning, like a sudden summer storm you swear you didn’t see coming. It caught me off guard mostly because this wasn’t supposed to be that moment yet. It’s just a proof. Not the finished book. Not the one that gets stacked on tables or slid into bags at events or signed with a Sharpie that never quite works the first time. And still. Holding it in my hands made everything real in a way my brain hasn’t quite ca

I expected notes. That’s what you brace for when you hand something precious to an editor. You expect margin comments. Structural concerns. A polite but firm list of things that need work. What I did not expect was to be told, in calm, measured language, that the book already does what it set out to do. The response began by describing my manuscript as “a collection of well-crafted essays assembled as a sort of episodic memoir,” and went on to talk about how grief is present

Grief and loss don’t define me. They inform me. For a long time, I thought grief had rewritten my entire identity. After Ken died, everything felt marked by before and after. I didn’t recognize the guy in the mirror. I didn’t recognize the world he lived in either. It felt like grief had stamped my passport and decided where I was allowed to go next. But with time, I realized something important. Grief didn’t take over my story. It reshaped it. It sharpened what mattered. It