I Already Am One

There comes a point after surviving a tragedy when people stop asking how you’re doing.

It’s not because they no longer care. It’s because life keeps moving. They assume that because you’ve continued showing up, you’ve somehow figured it all out.

And in some ways, yeah, they’re kind of right.

Seven years ago, my wife died from metastatic breast cancer. She was 39. That evening, I stood in the doorway of her Hospice room after she had taken her last breath. Before walking out, I paused, hoping, however irrationally, that time might stop.

It didn’t.

But I crossed the threshold anyway.

From that moment, I was the sole parent to our then four-year-old son. There was no grand decision to be strong. I simply woke up the next morning because a little boy still needed breakfast.

People often say to me, “You have to be both mom and dad.”

I understand what they mean, but I don’t agree.

Moms are moms. Every child deserves one. I can’t replace my son Eliot’s mother. Instead, what I’ve tried to become is a diversified father.

I’d like to think I’ve always been a Swiss Army knife of a dad.

I’ve spent countless evenings reading Dahl, Twain, Verne and Steinbeck with him. Fifteen minutes later, I’m frantically watching YouTube videos on how to divide fractions so I can help him with his homework. You’ll find me in the stands for every baseball game, in the kitchen making dinner, riding beside him on our bikes, or remembering to pack an extra snack. Along the way, we’ve talked about trust, compassion and what it means to be a good person.

I’ve learned that fatherhood isn’t about becoming everything.

It’s about becoming whatever is needed that day.

Hollywood likes fathers who learn one life-changing lesson before the credits roll. Real fatherhood doesn’t work that way. It quietly reshapes you over thousands of ordinary days, asking something different of you each morning.

Most importantly, it has taught me that strength isn’t the absence of emotion. It’s the willingness to be fully present, even when you’re uncertain, exhausted or afraid.

My son has seen me cry.

He’s seen me grieve, only to see me laugh the next day.

He’s seen me apologize when I’m wrong.

He hasn’t just watched me build a new life from the remains of another one. He’s helped me build it.

If I’ve taught him anything, I hope it isn’t that men don’t break. I hope I’ve taught him that broken people can still love deeply, keep promises and continue moving forward.

Those first few years after my wife died were about survival. We created routines because routines made life feel predictable. Friday nights at the same pizza place, where the hostess is genuinely happy to see us and our waitress knows our order before we even sit down. Neighbors who became family. Small traditions that quietly reminded us we still belonged somewhere. I wasn’t chasing dreams. I was trying to give my son a childhood that wasn’t defined by what we had lost.

Eventually, survival became living.

That’s when I really began writing again, returning to the passion I had set aside some twenty years earlier.

At first, writing was simply a way to make sense of everything I’d lived through. Then opportunities began to appear. I started producing stories for WYSO, Dayton’s NPR affiliate, interviewing veterans, caregivers and ordinary people with extraordinary lives. Helping someone else tell their story became one of the most meaningful things I’d ever done.

In 2023, one of those stories even received an Associated Press Media Editors Award. For the first time in a long time, it felt as though the quiet work I’d been doing had found its audience.

For years I’d done what responsible adults are supposed to do. I worked in banking, earned a dependable paycheck and built a life that looked stable from the outside. But writing had become more than something I loved. It had become the place where everything I’d experienced finally seemed to have a purpose.

By 2024, I believed there was another threshold waiting for me. This one wasn’t born of loss or necessity. No one expected me to cross it. There was no promise of success on the other side. Only uncertainty. Even still, I stepped away from the security of a nine-to-five career and committed myself completely to writing.

Immediately, the phone stopped ringing.

No one said I’d done anything wrong. No one told me they didn’t need me anymore. There was simply…silence.

For months I treated that silence like a verdict. Maybe I’d said everything I had to say. Maybe I was never as good as I thought I was. Maybe the stories that had helped me survive weren’t worth hearing after all.

It’s amazing how quickly we allow someone else’s silence to become our inner voice.

Then one afternoon I looked around my house. Not at the walls, but at the man I’d become.

I had survived watching the love of my life die and guided my little family through the unimaginable (during a global pandemic, no less). I had built a home, created new traditions, produced and edited stories that had moved people, won an AP award, written more than a dozen short stories, finished my first novel, begun two more, and learned how to talk about grief without letting it become my identity.

It was then I realized something that now seems embarrassingly obvious.

The validation I kept chasing had never actually created the work. The work had existed long before anyone applauded it.

For years, writing had been a way to survive. Now it became a way to imagine. I spent long, quiet days following my curiosity wherever it led, refining a voice that had been forming for years but had never before been given the time to fully emerge. I found myself creating towns that existed nowhere on a map, characters who became so familiar they felt like old friends, and worlds where the surreal and absurd weren’t escapes from reality but different ways of understanding it.

Those are the stories I want to read.

And now, every time I send one of them out into the world, I know what waits on the other side: rejections, silence and long stretches of uncertainty. Experience has given me enough evidence to know that effort doesn’t guarantee outcomes and that good work isn’t always rewarded. The risk of originality is that no one may like it.

But if originality were easy, far more people would choose it.

I’ve reached a point where I’m no longer interested in chasing trends or reverse-engineering what someone else wants. If these stories ever find an audience, I want it to be because they couldn’t have been written by anyone else. If they don’t, I still want to know I spent my life writing the stories only I could have written.

Maybe that’s the lesson I’ve been trying to teach my son all along, even if I’m still learning it myself: some risks are worth taking not because success is guaranteed, but because authenticity is the only thing I’ve found that truly survives.

I don’t know if an agent will ever call. I don’t know whether these novels and short stories will ever find the audience I hope they deserve. But at 48, after everything it’s taken to get here, I’d rather spend my life in the company of my stories than spend it chasing stories that were never really mine.

The irony isn’t lost on me: I waited so long for someone else to tell me I was a writer. I don’t need anyone’s permission.

I already am one.

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