I bought my first house in 1990—a three bedroom townhouse in suburban Baltimore. I didn’t think I needed a house. It was something people told me I should do—prepare for the future. But I was excited about one thing. I could finally get a dog. Turns out, those people were right. My future came more […]
In 2016, I moved to a small townhouse in Aberdeen to start my post-child-raising life. Roxy and Blitz came with me. We kept to ourselves and really didn’t get to know the neighbors. A couple years after I moved in, I walked out of my front door and there was a man moving in two […]
Dakota and I walked along the shore of Lake Michigan on a summer afternoon in Door County. Dakota loves the water, so I let her wade in. My father texted. “It’s time to come back for dinner.” I called Dakota to come, but she wasn’t ready to leave. Usually, Dakota wears a harness for exactly […]
Starting a blog seems like a very 2005 thing to do. So why am I doing this here and now? Last fall I used my Facebook account to send a message to my wife and her son. Nothing special—just a product I saw that might help the sagging fences in our yards.Less than a minute […]
The day we got Alex’s diagnosis was one of the worst in our lives. We sat with her, trying to say the right things, trying to make it feel manageable. We told her we would be with her every step of the way—that this was just a temporary setback. Nothing worked. The only thing that […]
At 6 a.m., nurses rushed into the hospital room. “We have to go now,” one said as she unlocked the bed and started pushing it toward the door. The other nurse handed me a set of scrubs. “Put these on and meet us in the OR.” They were small. I was not. I grabbed a […]
One of the hardest things about grief is that time marches on. You want the world to stop because yours just did. But it doesn’t. And it’s both heartbreaking and a little cruel to watch everything continue as if nothing changed—as if it never mattered that Alex was here in the first place. I know […]
In February of 2025, I became a grandfather for the first time. After losing Alex, I didn’t know if that was something I would ever get to experience. Watching my granddaughter grow this past year has been one of the great joys of my life. And with each passing month, it brought me back — […]