a look back, at the future..

People say the most important part of a headstone isn’t the dates carved into the stone.

It’s the dash.

That small mark standing between the beginning and the end — our entire life reduced to a single line.

I think about that sometimes when I remember the people who are gone. I wonder if they would recognize the versions of themselves that live inside my memory. Memory edits things. Softens edges. Rearranges moments.

The people we remember are never exactly the people who lived, or maybe they are.

My faith tells me that everyone still here already knows where they stand with God. I believe that, even while I struggle with feeling less than worthy. Even while knowing I've fallen short of what was expected of me.

The past several years have worn me thin. Living alone turned out to be harder than I imagined, even for someone who thought he preferred it. Depression has been a familiar companion for years. Recently, grief pulled up a chair beside it.

They seem comfortable together.

There are moments now when I barely recognize the man I once was. The weight of grief settles deep into the bones. I try the old trick of telling myself that others have it worse, but the mind knows when it’s being negotiated with.

Still, I made a promise to my mother before she died.

I told her I would be okay.
I told her I would keep going.
And I told her I would keep moving closer to God so that one day we might meet again.

So I keep going.

Life has knocked me down more than once. Eventually, I learned something simple: getting back up isn’t just an option.

It’s the only thing on the list.

And so I move forward the same way everyone does — carrying regret, gratitude, faith, and memory through the narrow space we’re given.

The dash between the dates.

Notes from the Edge of the Circle

If I were to die right now while writing this, it might be months before anyone discovered it.

My bills are on autopay. Months sometimes pass without a text or a phone call from anyone I once knew. That’s simply the reality of the life I ended up living.

Being just a couple of years shy of seventy has me conserving what energy I have left to live the days God may give me. Yet I still spend long stretches of days looking back over this life, trying to understand how I arrived here—living in a quiet isolation that sometimes feels like a hermit’s life.

I’ve managed to avoid the usual woe-is-me that often accompanies stories like this. I did well financially and spent years traveling the world with a job that was often interesting and sometimes even fun. But none of those things ever quieted the restless places in my mind.

At my age, thoughts about mortality seem natural. For me they come almost daily. Not in panic or fear, but in quiet acknowledgment of how life has unfolded.

When the matriarch of our family—my grandmother—passed away, the family slowly drifted apart. What had once held everyone together disappeared, and we rarely gathered again except when someone else died.

The Bible says we are meant to leave our parents and go build families of our own. That seems to work for most people. I tried once. Soon after, I found myself pushed out of that life and never attempted it again.

Looking back, the pattern may have started earlier than I realized. As a child I was often told to play alone rather than with the other kids in the neighborhood. That solitude followed me through school and into adulthood, where being quiet and apart was sometimes mistaken for arrogance when it was really just distance.

A kid who played alone.
A man who stayed that way.

The square peg.

Being young and alone is one thing. Growing old and alone is something else entirely.

Still, I sometimes miss the years when it might have been possible to turn things another way.

In memoriam to easier times—and to those of us who never quite fit anywhere.