Tag: grief

365 Day Coming of Age Prompt Project/Theme 5 - Body, Identity, and Change

Unfinished, Yet Worthy – Day 51

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Prompt – Who You Thought You Were Becoming

Reading through old college papers this past weekend felt like opening a time capsule written by someone who believed becoming was a destination instead of a motion. Every paper held a version of me trying to decide who deserved to exist long enough to grow. The theme was always the same regardless of the assignment. The theme was simply becoming. I wanted the chance to stay somewhere long enough for roots to allow something to grow.

Growing up between bases meant growth was temporary and stunted. I learned to adapt faster and grow shallow rather than deep. Peace at all costs became the unspoken rule, which meant parts of me stayed small so the room could stay quiet. I tried on identities the way other kids tried on jackets. Some fit for a season. Some fit well enough to almost feel true. But none stayed long enough to mature into anything stable.

What I wanted most was not a specific identity. I wanted permission to become something recognizable. I believed everyone else had already arrived somewhere solid while I kept circling the runway waiting for clearance to land. I thought if I chose the right role, did the right thing, performed the right version of myself, then maybe love would return, conversations would reopen, and I would finally be seen as someone worth staying for. The moment never came, at least it was not a moment.

Becoming did not announce itself with applause or resolution. It stretched across years instead. It took me across oceans to Japan where silence felt honest for the first time. It carried me into Rwanda where history sat heavy in the air and made my own questions feel smaller and sharper at the same time. It placed me at tables with presidents where power felt strangely human, almost fragile. It sat me in pubs glowing with warm wood and laughter where friendship felt less like performance and more like breath. It led me into churches that promised healing yet left echoes of harm that took years to untangle.

I still have not crossed a finish line; rather, I am content with standing in the space where old versions of me linger while new ones are still learning how to breathe. Past and present speak at the same time, asking different questions with the same voice. Clarity never arrived the way I expected; instead, I know becoming is not a destination. The person I thought I was becoming dissolved somewhere along the way of me actually becoming him. What remains is not fixed, but rather a life being lived. I am less interested now in arriving and more willing to stand in the in between, where memory, grief, and possibility sit side by side and refuse to resolve into anything simple. And for the first time, my worth is mine. It is no longer measured by who stayed or who left; it is measured by the simple fact that I am still here, still becoming, and no longer apologizing for taking up space.

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365 Day Coming of Age Prompt Project/Theme 4 - Friendship and First Tribes

Terms and Conditions – Day 35

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Prompt – A falling-out that still sting.

Friends come and go. That has always been the deal. It was the quiet contract of the military, the rotating cast of names and addresses that followed me from place to place. College became the same kind of temporary, only dressed up in credit hours, retention rates, and being “mature” about it all. People arrived, people disappeared, and then people became a story told in passing.

After graduation, shortly following a quick stint as an accountant, Kari and I moved to Japan for a teaching job that came with a built-in expiration date. The contracts were one year, which allowed for a tidy little ending. The Japanese school system also had a way of enforcing impermanence. Teachers were moved around periodically, as though the goal was to prevent deep bonds from forming. It felt almost religious, like attachment itself was a rule that was not supposed to be broken. I broke it anyway.

In Japan, I was an expat with a small group of young, inexperienced teachers. We were all hungry for belonging, and we were far enough from home that the hunger got louder. We did life together in full. We carried the hard parts and the easy parts, and we laughed at the absurd parts that only make sense when daily life is built in a language that still feels borrowed. We became tight, not in a casual way, but in the way people do when they become each other’s lifeline in a foreign country.

It was beautiful. It was real. It was the kind of closeness that made ordinary days feel like a story worth keeping.

When we returned home, we tried to bring the bond with us. We talked about forming a team of four couples to go back to work as missionaries – whatever the fuck that meant! We met a few times to dream and map out a future that felt like a second chance at that Japan closeness. I let myself believe it could happen. I let myself imagine a circle that would hold.

There was a lunch get-together. Kari and I were not invited. Later, someone lied about it with the kind of polite, church-friendly dishonesty that is supposed to keep the peace while it quietly kills the truth. Eventually, one person came clean, and in that moment I remembered why I used to prefer transient relationships.

I had broken the rules. I had allowed myself to get close. I had allowed myself to love people, not as passing characters, but as anchors. I had trusted the story. I had trusted the holy language people use when they want to make ordinary friendship feel sanctioned and permanent.

Love hurts when it ends. This one stung because it was real. It was tied to some of the most beautiful years of my life, and it was wrapped in religion like a ribbon that also functioned as a blindfold. The pain was not the lunch. The pain was the realization that the bond had terms and conditions, and I had not been told what they were until I failed them. Even now, the sting still registers because the years were real. Japan was real. The laughter was real. The belonging was real. A single lunch betrayal cannot erase that, even if it tried.

Some friendships are seasonal. Some are sacred. Some are both, right up until they are not. I can grieve what ended without pretending it never mattered. I can hold the good years in one hand and the betrayal in the other and finally stop forcing them to cancel each other out.

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365 Day Coming of Age Prompt Project/Theme 4 - Friendship and First Tribes

Detours and Dead Letters – Day 34

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Prompt – How the Friendship Changed

This is part three of a three prompt series. The first post is here and the second post is here.

Jeremy and I did not explode. There was no betrayal, no raised voices, no dramatic final scene with the kind of closure often found in movies with an amazing music and video montage. The friendship changed the way military friendships usually change. One day, the routine is intact. The next day, a family is loading boxes, a moving truck is idling, and the neighborhood has a new vacancy. One day we were hanging out during recess. The next day, he was going back to Texas.

In my mind, it felt like leaving. For Jeremy, it was a homecoming. He acted like the universe was correcting a mistake. He was a Texan through and through. He loved the heat and was ready to say goodbye to the winters. Alaska was, at best, an interruption for him…a detour. Texas was a return. I understood that much, even at that age. Still, understanding did not make his leaving hurt less.

We both said the things kids say when adults are listening. We promised to keep in touch. We said we would write. We said we would call when we could. And of course, we said we would not forget. Those sentiments were offered like bandages, thin and polite, as if language could seal up the gaping wound not even fully realized yet.

I upheld my part of the promise, writing him every week. Jeremy did not. I remember the ritual of writing him more than what I wrote him. I used the same pad of paper every time. I tried to make our ordinary days sound interesting, worth staying connected to. I narrated the small things because small things were what connected us. I wrote about a new snow fort, “our” new teacher, and the new kid who moved into his old house. I folded the letter carefully, far too small, slid it into the envelope, wrote his address, and then I waited.

He never responded. Not one time. At first, I worked hard to excuse his silence. I invented reasons for the friendship to remain intact, even if only on my side of the map. Maybe the mail got lost. Maybe his mother forgot to buy stamps. Maybe he wrote back and it disappeared into some military black hole where all the missing things go. I was loyal, and I was young enough to believe that if I kept showing up, the world would meet me halfway.

Then, slowly, I realized a letter was not coming. I was writing to myself. I was crushed for a long time, and I never talked about it. It did not look like grief adults would recognize. It looked like me becoming even more careful and small.

I did not make another best friend until two moves later, at Plattsburgh Air Force Base. Between Jeremy and Plattsburgh, I learned a lesson that felt less like wisdom and more like a bruise that never healed.

People say they will write. People say they will call. People say whatever they need to say in the last hour before goodbye because the truth is too sharp to hold in your mouth. When people are not close to one another anymore, even if they once were, shit changes. Distance does not just stretch a friendship. It edits it. It removes the ordinary moments that keep love warm and alive. It replaces them with intention, and intention is harder to sustain than people admit because it requires work.

Looking back, I can see something tender under the damage. I kept writing because connection mattered to me. I believed in continuity, even when my life trained me in detours. That belief did not save the friendship, but it revealed something about me. I was the kind of kid who tried to build a bridge. I was the kind of kid who stayed, even when someone else did not.

And maybe that is the quiet hope inside the story. The friendship changed, and it hurt. It left a mark. But it also showed me, early, that I was capable of devotion, of showing up, of loving in a way that was not performative. The loss taught me caution, yes. But the writing taught me something else too. It taught me that my instinct, even then, was to reach out, to connect, to make meaning, so I could stay human in a life designed around leaving.

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365 Day Coming of Age Prompt Project/Theme 4 - Friendship and First Tribes

One Street Over – Day 33

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Prompt – How did the friendship start?

For those who want the beginning context for today’s prompt, the first post about Jeremy can be found here.

My first real best friend was Jeremy. He was a Texan through and through, transplanted abruptly to Alaska. The shock showed on him, as this was his first military PCS ever. I arrived from California, where my family left March Air Force Base because of an incident I have only ever heard in fragments. The whole truth never mattered as we would have eventually left anyway. I had just finished second grade and knew almost nothing except that something had ended and something else had begun without my consent.

The drive up the ALCAN highway was relentless. When my family finally reached Elmendorf Air Force Base, there was no housing assignment waiting for us. We were placed in temporary living quarters for far too long. After weeks on the road with my family, traveling a half-paved road a thousand miles long in a U-Haul, the TLQ did not feel like home. The place felt heavy in ways I had never experienced before. And it got weird.

Colors in the TLQ would thin and deepen without warning, where color should have remained constant. Corners stayed cool while the center of rooms held warmth. The hallway carried a faint blue cast that no one else seemed to notice. Temperature changes brought memories with them. Grief lingered as anger did too. There were people there as well, not figures meant to frighten, but impressions. More like presences. I did not see them with my eyes alone. I felt them with my body. That kind of noticing is exhausting, especially for a child. I needed someone to help me carry it.

Jeremy showed up.

Beginnings and endings rarely announce themselves. They arrive disguised as coincidence or as a kid who happens to live one street over. At the time, it felt like luck. Looking back, it is clear that something essential was taking shape, something the universe wanted me to notice.

He had never moved before. Not once. His entire life had existed in one state until it did not. He was burdened with the newness of goodbyes and hellos. I was practiced in leaving. Somehow that made us fit, as we each had something to carry for the other.

That friendship did not begin because we were alike or because we chose one another with intention. It began because two children were standing inside unfamiliar spaces, each holding more than was reasonable for their age. Something in him recognized something in me, and the recognition was mutual.

I understand now that this is often how early friendships form. Not around joy, but around need. Around the quiet relief of not being alone with what is not yet understood. Long before we know how to tell our stories, we sense who might be able to hear them. That was the beginning. Not a single moment, but a shared breath, an inhale and exhale taken together, a small and steady proof that even in unfamiliar places, connection finds a way to form.

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365 Day Coming of Age Prompt Project/Theme 2 - Family as First Universe

Fine, and Other Lies We Learned – Day 14

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Prompt – What was a secret your family carried?

Pink Floyd, Van Halen, Skid Row, Meat Loaf, U2, Ozzy Osbourne, and even Barry Manilow gave me heart and gave me a language I could own. Their songs taught me how to feel without apology and how to sit with emotion long before I had the words, the permission, or the safety to do so. Music became my private tutor. However, that education came at a cost.

At fifty-one, my ears feel at least twenty years older than the rest of me because concerts were never simply live shows. They were full-body immersion experiences built from stacked speakers, vibrating floors, and sound loud enough to register as belonging, even for the most awkward of us packed into the crowd. Like most people my age, I never protected my hearing because it never occurred to me that I was borrowing against something future me would need to navigate ordinary life.

Now conversations require intention and precision. If someone does not speak clearly, with attention to tone, volume, and rhythm, the words scatter before they reach me, and I find myself asking for repetition or filling the silence with a reflexive huh. I miss parts of sentences and occasionally whole meanings, and whispers are simply not accessible to me anymore. Still, I carry no regret because losing the ability to hear whispers forced me to notice something I had been living with all along.

Whispers had always been part of my life, long before the music ever stole them from me. Whispers and mumbled speech were the true secret my family carried, not one dramatic confession or a single locked drawer hiding a headline-worthy truth, but something far quieter and far more durable. The secret was cumulative, made of a thousand small omissions, a thousand almosts, and a thousand things that were never named but were felt every single day.

The secret lived in the spaces between words. It lived in dinners where everyone ate but no one spoke about what hurt. It lived in rules enforced without explanation and affection that arrived sideways through duty. It lived in silence that passed for peace and order that pretended to be safety. Nothing was hidden exactly. Everything was simply unattended.

Each person in my family carried their own version of the unspoken. Grief without language. Anger without permission. Fear disguised as discipline. We learned to move around one another carefully, like furniture in a dark room, memorizing where not to step. Over time, caution became habit, and habit hardened into our culture.

Those secrets were never malicious, at least not at first. They were inherited. They were learned through the belief that survival mattered more than honesty, that stability mattered more than intimacy, and that asking for help meant failure. The secrets survived because they felt normal, because they never announced themselves, and because they whispered. That was the most dangerous part. No one ever learned how to hear them.

No one named the absence. No one said that something essential was missing. We were fed, housed, dressed, and moved efficiently from place to place. On paper, we were fine. The secret hid inside that word until fine became the highest achievement and the finish line. I grew up believing that families simply endured one another, that love was proven by staying rather than speaking, that conflict was something to avoid rather than move through, and that feelings were personal inconveniences best handled alone. I did not know these were beliefs. I thought they were facts.

When the secret finally revealed itself, it did not arrive as scandal, but as grief. Grief for what none of us were taught. Grief for the conversations that never happened. Grief for the care that wanted to exist but never learned how to speak. Our secret was grief.

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365 Day Coming of Age Prompt Project/Theme 1 - Origins: Early Glimmers

On the Edge of After – Day 11

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Prompt – A time you wanted to be younger again.

The piano opened first with a simple and steady melody, like someone knocking softly on a door they were not sure was the correct one. It felt hesitant and determined at the same time, as if grief and hope agreed to share the same bench and the same keys. The singer did not arrive with rockstar swagger, but like a sinner entering a confessional. His voice carried a tremor that lived just behind the note, a thin crack that told the truth long before the lyrics did. There was a pleading quality there. Not begging. Just longing for a different outcome than the one that already felt written.

The drums slid in, not loud, not dramatic, simply present like a heartbeat that remembered it had work to do. The song continued to build without rushing. Each layer came in carefully, the guitar weaving around the piano like hands trying to help without making things worse. Nothing in the mix tried to show off. Everything served the ache.

How to Save a Life played on the radio on my way out of Japan as Holly drove me toward the airport in April of 2007. The world felt both too big and too small at the same time. With my bags packed and goodbyes said too quickly, it felt like a chapter was closing without the dignity of a final paragraph. I did not know then how much that song would follow me, like a ghost that refused to leave the room.

There was a part of me that wanted to be younger in that moment. Younger and untouched back in 1999. Younger and unaware back in 1999. I wanted the version of life where choices did not echo so loudly, where leaving did not feel like breaking something inside my own chest. That quiet piano line carried the weight of questions I did not have the courage to ask. What could have been different? What should have been done or not done? What part of myself was I leaving behind without realizing it? What I was carrying with me “home”?

The song did not offer comfort. It did not fix anything. It simply sat beside me, naming the ache I could not yet name. As the chorus rose, I realized that some moments mark a before and an after. In that moment, I wanted to be younger. I wanted to be back in 1999 when I arrived in Japan, when mistakes felt smaller and outcomes did not carry so much weight. I wanted to be less worn out by the world and more untouched by loss. It was not nostalgia. It was grief disguised as wishing.

When the chorus lifted, it felt like someone replaying a conversation in their mind, hoping that if the words repeated long enough, the past might loosen its grip. The music did not save anything. It stayed and witnessed the silence between notes to speak the parts that hurt the most. By the end, the repetition became prayer and punishment at once. If only. If only. If only. The piano never stopped. It kept moving forward, even when the voice sounded like it might not. That was the tender cruelty. Time kept going. The song kept going. The loss remained.

And still, something else lived there too. A quiet thread of hope, not loud, not heroic, not cinematic. Just the steady recognition that I was still here. That the ache did not erase the love of Japan and my time there had indeed been real. That leaving did not cancel the life that had been lived. Inside that ache, a stubborn spark refused to vanish. It was not redemption and not resolution. It was the fragile belief that naming the truth, even when it hurt, could keep me from turning numb.

Maybe growing older does not steal everything. Maybe it gives language to feelings that once lived unnamed in the dark, and maybe that language makes the weight lighter to carry. Not gone. Not fixed. Simply held with more honesty and a little more gentleness.

Where did I go wrong? I lost a friend
Somewhere along in the bitterness
And I would have stayed up with you all night
Had I known how to save a life

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