During the summer of 2018, I spent four months working on our house in Southern Arizona, preparing to sell it. We were moving to Montana. It was a fine summer, one of my favorites. I worked with my hands, used a variety of tools, and connected in a deep way with the objective reality of rehabbing our house.

When I swung my hammer, I hit the nail solid, or I didn’t. The world was real, and it did not lie.

I was living my best life. While I was not technically a “professor,” this fact did not hinder my students from calling me one. I was working at the university in the mountains, teaching in the fire science program and running it. Because I was on an academic schedule, I had four months off. I was home on summer break, preparing our house to sell, before our final move up north.

As I prepped our house for the market, I tiled our master bathroom. I used a beautiful porcelain 36″ tile with ridges and contours. I set the tile on a diagonal, and it looked sharp. It lit the master bathroom up. It was a nice upgrade.

The water in Arizona is hard, loaded with minerals and quick to stain and leave deposits on glass shower doors. I tried, at first, to scrub the existing shower doors clean but quickly realized the best move was to buy new doors.

I was home alone. The new doors were purchased and in the garage. I took one of the old glass doors off, out of the rails, and was carefully walking it out of the bathroom. One of the corners hit the new tile floor, and the glass door instantly disintegrated in my hands. It literally turned to dust, shattering into a trillion pieces. I stood there in disbelief, holding my breath so as not to inhale the fine glass shards.

It took me the rest of the day to clean up the glass. I imagine there are still little pieces of glass in that bathroom somewhere.

This immediate shattering, a disintegration into a trillion pieces, is what happened to our lives 11 months ago, on October 8th, when we learned Cooper was gone, by his own volition.

Instant. Dust.

I have had hard times in life. No surprise, we all have. If you’re a Christian, you know you will bear a cross at some point in time. If you’re a Buddhist, you know life is suffering. If you’re an atheist, sometimes life is just a flat-out suck fest. The journey is sometimes rough, the valleys often unforgiving, and, god dammit Mama, you never told me there would be days like this.

But like a reed in the wind, when I have experienced pain and suffering in the past—the valley lows, those unforgiving life circumstances—I bent far over, but I never broke. Until now.

I think, retrospectively, lacking humility, breathing big and puffing up with hubris, I fancied myself as something special. I bent far over, touched the ground, cried, hurt, felt pain, but somehow regained my shape and became a reed reaching for the sun again, no longer bent over, touching the ground.

Fall down seven, rise eight.

Then, Cooper. Shattered. There is no regaining my previous shape. A threshold was reached, and I broke. I am broken. A trillion pieces of Dad, lying on the bathroom floor.

Not just my body, but the inside, too. My soul. My heart, my will, my spirit.

Let’s be honest, a good mosaic artist can’t put a trillion pieces back together again. Even if it were possible—damn, that’s an interesting human. That’s not a human.

So it’s transformation then, a reorganization into a new person—a new husband, dad, son, brother, friend, coworker.

This is why we say there is a cost to resilience. Scars. Shadows. Crossing thresholds, transformation, reorganization into something new.

As I reorganize, I find my confidence as a parent has been shaken. Again, in hubris, I once believed myself a pretty darned good father. I felt like we, as parents, fairly well had our shit together. We did all the things good parents do. Nice homes, good neighborhoods, quality education, solid friends, time together as a family, dinner together, sports, church, family vacations, music, art, an active interest in our children’s lives, love, care, tenderness, and toughness, too. Lions must roll. And so we did.

I took pride in the fact that we never used child care while our kids were growing up. We made choices. It was just us, mom and dad, raising our children together. As a firefighter, I would get off shift in the morning, go home, and put my kids in a baby backpack and go for a hike, or a baby stroller and go run. I cherished our afternoon naps together.

We were able to get all three of our sons through college debt-free, and we will do the same for our daughter, who is now in college. I used to admire this accomplishment.

As I consider my children today, and what I have to offer them, I am thankful they are older. I am skittish to offer them advice, to say too much, to lean in too far. I fear—did I lean in too much in Cooper’s life? Was I overbearing? Did my advice hurt more than help? Or, was I not there enough, too absent?

What role did I have in my son’s demise? It can’t be that it takes a village to raise a child, but when they take their own lives, they are on their own, 100% responsible.

About two years ago, I sat in a restaurant and watched young children running and screaming through the aisles while their parents sat back and said nothing. They thought it was cute. These “parents” acted like their children’s best friends, not parents. I remember thinking to myself, “what a shit show.” Now, I pause. I pause some more, and I think, what the fuck do I know? Actually, probably not much. You know what, screw it—run kids, run! Jump on the tables, bounce from booth to booth, show your best friends what you’re capable of.

As a parent, then, on the backside of losing a child, I find my confidence in fathering shaken. I wonder, would I come to me for parental advice? I don’t know.

We—my wife, our children, and I—have gone through a lot these past 11 months. We have experienced many firsts. Immediately, in October, we celebrated two birthdays without Cooper. Then Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Cooper’s Birthday, Fourth of July, and family vacations, all without Cooper.

Each of those days was hard. I am experiencing renewed sadness and grief as we approach October 8th, the one-year anniversary of Cooper’s death. As the seasons change, the cool mornings set in, the leaves change color and begin to fall, and school starts, there are several familiar signs that have me feeling it in the body.

It’s true, what they say—the body does keep the score. The issues are in the tissues.

Meaning, the mind/brain is connected through a thousand-billion neural pathways to the body, the gut, the heart, the belly, etc. Our mind is literally in the body. All of the reminders, the pain, and the grief that shattered me on October 8th—my body knows this date is coming up again, and it’s guarding up.

The good news is, I recognize it. I know my body keeps the score, and I know I have many issues in my tissues that are going to flex during this next month. I see you, body. I certainly feel you.

Metacognition. I see myself thinking about the issues in my tissues. Meta-emoting. I feel myself feeling the feelings.

The obstacle is the way, right? The only way out is through, right? When you think you’re done, you’re only 40% done, right?

Check in on myself. Breathe. Ground.

Chin up, shoulders back. Stand tall. Be strong and courageous. Never, never, never give up.

And so it goes, daily.

I’ve always been a little strange. My firefighter buddies used to bust my chops and tell me I would drive a convertible MG and ride around with a tweed coat and skull cap and be a professor. They were not far off.

But I do find myself even a bit stranger these days. I notice small things, especially animals and nature. I am very attuned to nature these days, and especially birds. I am captivated by birds. Or are they souls stopping by to say, “hi?” And which one of you is Cooper?

Before this tragedy unfolded in our lives, I was learning Finnish. It’s quite an interesting language. It’s a Uralic language, and not something we are used to hearing. Our ears are attuned to Romance languages, but not Uralic.

Learning a new language is challenging; we all know this. The best way to learn a new language is immersion. Here I am, right here, right now. I am learning the new language of grief.

Part of this new language is learning to speak with nature and birds and red foxes. Most bereaved parents and siblings already know this grief language. You learn it quickly. It’s like we’re all deaf, signing to each other, and having a conversation about spirits and birds and souls and issues in the tissues and all of the things, and nobody else knows what we are saying.

11 months. Damn.

I rarely watch television. Lately, I have been watching the documentary, 100 Foot Wave.¹ I am watching it over and over and over again. I love it.

Why am I drawn to the ocean and waves in this season of my life, as I am reorganizing myself, transforming, on the other side of crossing a threshold? Why is the laid-back surfing life speaking to my soul so strongly? Why does Nazaré, Portugal present to me as so appealing while watching this documentary?

Perhaps, I wonder, if I could go back and do it all over again, and if our family were a laid-back surfing family, would it have made all the difference?

If Cooper were raised as a surfer, would I be writing this blog post right now?

Victoria and I started off doing it right. We did. Then we got caught in the hype, living the American dream. Working hard, earning the money, paying the bills, focusing on the kids, wanting to give them the best life.

And, perhaps, all they ever wanted to be were surfers, mosaic artists, and carpenters, swinging a hammer true.

Such is the new language of grief…

1. 100 Foot Wave. Directed by Chris Smith, produced by Joe Lewis, Maria Zuckerman, Ryan Heller, and Michael Bloom, HBO, 2021. ↩︎