Author: joeshaw

I had a conversation with my son this week. He’s a freshman in high school. We live about two miles from his school. Close enough that he can’t take a bus. Far enough that walking home after school in the Florida heat is annoying. He asks me every day, “Can you come pick me up after school, Dad?” 

And I say, “No, dude. I have to work. I’m at the office.”  

He gets mad. He hates walking home. I’m not heartless. It IS hot out there. But … I can’t just leave work to come get him. That’s how you get promoted to customer, and I certainly don’t want that. Today, as with every other day, I offered to pick him up from school when I’m done with work, but he doesn’t want to wait. Normally, this is where the conversation ends. But, today, it seemed like there was more, so I pressed. 

“What’s up?” 

He told me about how all his friends from 8th grade are in other schools, how the people he knows from scouts ignore him because he’s the “weird” kid (he’s Autistic, so relationships are tough), and he just hates it. He just hates it. 

I told him I was sorry it was so tough. I gave him a hug. I told him things will get better, even though there is a very real possibility they won’t. It’s hard watching your kids hit this particular wall. 

“So, will you pick me up?”

“Sorry, bud. I have to work.” 

“YOU DON’T CARE ABOUT MY FEELINGS!” he screamed, and then slammed the door shut as he walked off to his classes. 

I get this kind of thing a lot when I’m talking to people about politics, which is not something I do very often anymore because it almost always ends poorly. We each express an opinion and, sometimes, people get very angry if I disagree with them. Then, they accuse me of not having empathy, or not caring about their feelings. 

I get hit from both directions. Progressives often accuse me of lacking empathy; conservatives, of being “unpatriotic.” Different labels, same result: the conversation ends before it begins.

Anyway, with liberals, I’ll be talking with them about SOME issue: second amendment, abortion, economics, I don’t know. It doesn’t really matter. SOME issue. They’ll state their opinions, I’ll state mine. They’ll talk about their feelings and I’ll say “That’s great …but that doesn’t convince me to change my mind.” And then I’m accused of having no empathy. 

At the risk of sounding exactly like the kind of asshole they often accuse me of being, it seems like they think whoever has the biggest sob story wins. They seem to think empathy is the highest virtue. 

And I think that’s dangerous. Not that empathy is dangerous, but making it the highest virtue. Here’s why … 

Any virtue, not balanced against the other virtues, can be dangerous. I have empathy for my son’s feelings about walking home from school, but if THAT were the main driver in my decision-making, I’d lose my job and then he’d have to walk to and from our new encampment under the highway overpass to get to school. There is a limit to what my empathy can do in this situation. Beyond that, the struggles and challenges he faces now trigger the kind of change he needs to grow into the man he will soon become. We all have to deal with hard times in life similar to what he’s facing. We become better people because of it. If I allow my empathy for his current challenges to reign supreme, he will never have to face this challenge and will never become a functional adult. 

I very much WANT to solve this problem for him. No parent worth their salt wants to see their kid suffer. But in this case, action on my part is the wrong answer. He needs to suck it up and walk himself home, and I need to force myself not to fix this the way I have stepped in and fixed so many things for him over the years. 

And I have. Believe me, I’ve walked into school offices and community groups that were unwilling or unable to accommodate special needs kids like my son, and I’ve held them accountable until they did better.

But if I want him to grow up, there has to be balance. Without it, even the best intentions collapse into harm. The same is true of every virtue: compassion, justice, courage, civility, temperance. Left unchecked, each one curdles into its opposite. Too much justice, and the world forgets grace. Too much compassion, and selfishness runs wild. The hard work of life is not in choosing one virtue above the rest, but in holding them together. And that balance doesn’t happen by accident. It has to be anchored in a moral framework sturdy enough to keep heart and mind, mercy and truth, in tension.

Lately, we have trouble as a society deciding on what that framework is, or whether it even exists to begin with. 

Quite often, when I discuss things with people who accuse me of lacking empathy, the real reason things fall apart is because they tend to believe Empathy is the supreme virtue. People do it all the time.

Earlier this week, one of my friends asked about some quotes Charlie Kirk had about empathy. In the quote she shared, Charlie says he hated empathy, and thought it was a made-up word that causes harm. 

“Jesus commanded us to have empathy for our neighbors,” she said. I was confused. 

“That’s usually  ‘Love’ your neighbor,” I said “Not ‘empathize’ with them.

She did not respond.  

When Jesus told his followers to “love your neighbor as yourself,” he was quoting Leviticus 19:18. The Hebrew word there, ahava, means affection, loyalty, even friendship. Hebrew offers other options: rachamim (a tender, motherly mercy), chesed (covenant kindness that implies action), nechamah (comforting someone in their grief). Each of these leans toward what we might today call empathy. 

“Empathy,” by contrast, is modern. The Greek empatheia originally meant “excess passion” leaning toward the negative, and only took on its current sense in the late 19th century through German philosophy. In other words, love is ancient and active; empathy, at least as we define it now, is new and more fragile. 

Jesus could have elevated any of these virtues. Instead, he chose ahava; he chose love. And in the New Testament, that word expands into agape, a love that is not just feeling but commitment, not just sympathy but action. It includes empathy but transcends it, balancing heart with mind, compassion with truth.

Knowing other people’s struggles and imagining yourself in their pain is a good thing. But “he who has the most pain wins” is not an effective approach. Neither is “You disagree with me, therefore you don’t care about my pain” 

Unbalanced “empatheia.” or a modern approach to emotion that isn’t balanced with other virtues. THAT is where empathy can cause damage, and THAT is what I think Charlie Kirk was talking about when he says he hates it. 

I can’t say for sure, though, because he doesn’t go into it beyond the short clips making the rounds on social media. And we can never ask him, because someone – likely overcome with empatheia – took his life rather than balance the virtues they thought they had in their head. 

The Greeks weren’t wrong to worry about “empatheia.” Left unbalanced, any virtue twists into a vice. The challenge of life, whether as a parent, a citizen, or just a human trying to make sense of it all, is not to choose which virtue wins, but to hold them together in tension. Heart and mind. Strength and mercy. That balance is where love actually lives.

At the end of the day, my son will still walk home. He’ll sweat, and he’ll complain, and he’ll slam a few more doors before he learns that walking home isn’t the end of the world. And I’ll still sit here wrestling with when to lean into empathy and when to hold back. 

Love isn’t always soft. Sometimes it’s sweat on the sidewalk, tough conversations, and holding a line you wish you could bend. Not because you don’t care, but because you do.

I finished the day at Starbucks, which is exactly the sort of thing I swore I’d never do. The lobby seating was all taken, so I wedged myself into a corner with my laptop, pretending this was an office and not a place where people shout their orders for caramel drizzle like they’re summoning the dead.

I had twenty minutes to kill between meetings, which was just enough time to delete the emails I’d carefully ignored all day, when an older gentleman shuffled over. I’d noticed him earlier making the slow pilgrimage to the counter for a refill. He moved like he’d been carrying invisible weights for a while and had only just set them down.

He introduced himself by way of medical history: two strokes, recently recovered, glad to be back at Starbucks where the baristas greeted him like a favorite uncle.

“You miss the little things like this,” he said, smiling.

It seemed rude not to respond in kind, so I told him about my own brush with mortality, or at least with liquified chicken. I’d just graduated from the post-weight-loss-surgery diet of protein shakes and pureed meat, which is as bad as it sounds. He nodded gravely. Here was a man who had survived worse, I thiught. Or maybe he had just tasted the same brand of shake.

We compared notes on recovery, on parenting, on Midwestern winters (he’d escaped them ten years ago), and on Florida summers (which are like being trapped in a sauna with God’s disapproval). His son is expecting his first child, which means he and his wife might trade palm trees for grandchildren and move back.

“We rented an Airbnb up there for a few months,” he said. “We’ll see after that.”

We drifted into small talk about sports, health, weather; the sort of conversation you’d find scrawled in the margins of life. Ordinary, unremarkable. Which is to say it was exactly what I’d been missing.

I don’t know when ordinary conversation became extraordinary. Somewhere between the hashtags, the boycotts, and the shouting heads on cable news, we forgot how to chat about anything that didn’t come pre-loaded with outrage. I’ve started and stopped a dozen essays on The State of the Nation, particularly in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, but I always stall out. Every word feels redundant, like adding one more paper cup to a landfill.

What I miss are strangers. Not the ones on Twitter, avatars hurling grenades in any direction, but the kind you meet in line at a coffee shop who tell you about their grandchild or their gallbladder. Once upon a time, this was called “society.” Now it feels like a black-market exchange: one sliver of humanity for another. No refunds.

When my next meeting began to buzz angrily on my laptop, I excused myself. He smiled and introduced himself properly.

“My name’s Tom.”

“Joe,” I said. “Nice to meet you.”

“Good to meet you, too, Joe. God bless you and your family.”

“Same to you, Grandpa Tom.”

His grin at that was enormous, like he’d just been promoted to the title he’d wanted all along.

It wasn’t a solution to anything. Not to politics, or polarization, or the abyss that yawns open every time I turn on the news. But it was something, a brief truce with a stranger in the kingdom of burnt espresso. And for twenty minutes on a Wednesday, that felt like enough.

I was sitting at the bar with my wife the other night, the kind of bar where the bartender knows you well enough to ask, “Same thing?” but not well enough to ask how your kids are doing. His name was Jim, and he slid a fresh glass of Bourbon across the counter when Rage Against the Machine’s “Bulls on Parade” erupted from the speakers.

“I used to LOVE them,” Jim said, shaking his head like he was remembering an old flame.

“Me too,” I offered, though in my case “love” meant one burned CD and the occasional head nod in traffic.

“Too bad they sold out,” he said.

I asked what he meant, and he launched into a story about major labels, reunion tours with high ticket prices, and band members living like hedge fund managers. Apparently, if you once wrote songs about dismantling the system, you aren’t allowed to charge $150 for floor seats.

It struck me as funny, this idea of “selling out,” mostly because I’ve been doing it quietly for years.

When I was young, my career ambitions alternated between two noble callings: professional baseball player and beloved author. Not once did I think, “You know what would be thrilling? Fluorescent lighting and quarterly performance reviews in a swampy state shaped like a pistol.” And yet, here I am.

Idealists burn out fast. That uncompromising spirit doesn’t survive long against utility bills and dental insurance. And if it somehow does, just add children. The revolution doesn’t seem quite so urgent when it’s 3 a.m., your baby is screaming, and you’re trying to calculate whether you can afford formula without cutting into your beer budget.

The loudest anti-establishment voices I knew in college either overdosed, disappeared, or got real jobs. One guy I knew used to carry around The Anarchist’s Cookbook like it was scripture. Today he sells insurance in North Dakota. I saw a picture of him recently. He wore a pink suit, grinning with his little girl at a daddy-daughter dance. His tattoos, which once shouted “F(*orget*) The Man,” now peek meekly from under his sleeves, like children forced to sit still in church.

We all become that guy eventually. My friends who played in punk bands now mow their lawns on Saturday mornings while their Spotify playlists shuffle from “Revolutionary Rock” to Yacht Rock without irony. I once swore I would never be one of those people, but I now hum along to “Rebel Yell” while trimming hedges in cargo shorts.

Maybe selling out isn’t so much betrayal as it is triage. You pick your battles. Do you want to keep your middle finger raised forever, or do you want to raise your daughter in a gym decorated with crepe paper and helium balloons?

I’ve got my own daddy-daughter dance coming up soon. I already promised to wear something pink. Maybe that makes me a sellout. Or maybe the real sellout is refusing to bend, clinging to some brittle purity until everyone else moves on and leaves you behind.

If ending up like my friend in North Dakota, twirling his daughter under fluorescent lights while a censored version of “Killing in the Name” plays in the background, is the price of selling out, then I’ll take it.

Maybe that isn’t selling out at all. Maybe that’s the encore.

I was scrolling through LinkedIn the other day, which is the professional equivalent of loitering at the mall food court (lots of noise, smells, and people insisting you try their samples). That’s when I saw a post from a woman who announced, with complete sincerity, that she was developing a new system that would “rewrite quantum mechanics.”

A bold ambition. Unlikely, sure. But if she pulls it off? Fantastic. That’s how innovation happens: someone staring at the universe and saying, “I bet I can fix that.”

The problem wasn’t the idea. The problem was her job posting, which essentially read: I need someone to do all the grunt work while I float above the clouds like Zeus tossing down lightning bolts of inspiration. She wanted people to run the numbers, crunch the data, and compile the results. Basically everything but think the thought.

“I’m an IDEA person,” she wrote in the comments, as though it were a credential.

I laughed. Everyone is an idea person. Sit next to a drunk guy at a bar and he’ll have fifty, half of them about how to get rich selling deer jerky door-to-door. An idea, on its own, is like a gym membership. It feels productive the moment you sign up, but it doesn’t get you any muscles until you actually show up and sweat.

What I see more and more are these self-anointed “thought leaders.” Their only discernible skill is forwarding tasks to someone else. They dress up their avoidance with shiny words like “strategic mindset” or “product visionary,” but really, they’re allergic to effort. They treat labor like a contagious disease. You half expect them to sanitize their hands after shaking yours, in case a little actual work rubbed off.

This is where the “nobody wants to work anymore” chant always gets it wrong. It’s not the grocery clerk, the plumber, or the fresh-out-of-college kid with student debt the size of a starter home. The people who don’t want to work are the ones holding conference calls about their “disruptive ideas” while someone else updates the slides.

On this Labor Day, I want to say: ideas are nice, but labor is what matters. It’s the work you do, not the inspirational LinkedIn post you make about how much you’re doing. Without labor, there is no holiday. There’s just a long weekend where you tell people, “I could totally rewrite quantum mechanics,” while waiting for someone else to bring you a hamburger from the grill.

As for me, I’ve got plenty of ideas too. They’re all written down in a notebook somewhere. Maybe one day, when I find someone to do the grunt work, I’ll get around to them.

The other day, I read a story about a boy who killed himself after chatting with an AI. It wasn’t some dark corner of the internet, not a vampire roleplay forum or a subreddit where the moderators’ hobbies include watching the world burn. It was OpenAI. The same tool I turn to when I’m wondering if “pore over” is right or if I’ve just implied I’m obsessed with someone’s face.

The details are hazy, as they always are when you read something tragic on the internet, but the gist was clear: he sought companionship, advice, meaning, whatever it is people seek at 3 a.m. Instead, the machine pushed him closer to the edge.

I’ve always thought of myself as reasonably moral, at least by modern standards, which is to say I use my turn signal, pay taxes, and only occasionally swear at people in traffic. But morality for people and morality for machines are different beasts. A person can think, “I want a cookie,” and morality says, “Don’t steal it from the Girl Scout.” A machine, however, doesn’t want the cookie. It doesn’t want anything. Which means when it hands you advice, there’s no internal tug-of-war between desire and rightness. There’s just output.

And that, frankly, is terrifying.

When a person gives you bad advice, at least you can sense their bias: your uncle pushing crypto, your best friend’s weird political opinions, your coworker insisting CrossFit is an acceptable religion. But when a machine whispers back, “Yes, life is pointless,” you don’t hear greed or loneliness or pride. You hear an oracle. And if you’re vulnerable enough, that’s all it takes.

It strikes me that maybe, before we hand these machines the keys to our kids’ late-night crises, we should put some protections in place. Doctors have to swear a Hippocratic Oath. First, do no harm. Lawyers don’t do that, which explains a lot. Still, if someone can reach into your chest cavity, prescribe pills, or shape your sense of reality, maybe we should have them say out loud, “I’ll try not to kill you.”

The problem, of course, is that morality requires objectivity. If a person says, “Don’t kill yourself,” it’s because life has value. But where does a machine find that? Buried in training data, wedged between a banana bread recipe and someone’s rant about airlines? Desire and morality are distinct, but they meet in us. We want things, and we know we shouldn’t want everything. Machines don’t want. So who supplies the should?

We can’t leave it up to the programmers alone. I’m one of them, and I’ve often said that anyone who makes the poor decision to put me in charge of something is not to be trusted. Not only that, but most of the people out there driving the AI revolution are much younger than me. I don’t trust a twenty-three-year-old in a Patagonia vest who meal-preps kale smoothies in mason jars to define the boundaries of human decency. And yet, that’s where we are. Every new AI release is less about whether it’s moral and more about whether it can summarize “Moby-Dick” in the voice of a Valley Girl.

Gag me with a spoon.

The boy in the story didn’t need an algorithm to solve him. He needed a voice, a hand, a reason to stay. Maybe the real oath we need isn’t for the machines, but for us: to never let lines of code stand in for human connection. Because when the screen glows at 3 a.m., it’s not just answers we’re seeking, it’s someone, or something, to tell us we’re enough. Let’s not outsource that to a machine.

I leave work, and the problem is that I have not actually left work in the way people imagine when they say “leave.” Physically, yes, I’ve evacuated the premises of my employer and am strapped into my little automotive cocoon. But mentally I’m still marinating in the day’s endless cycle of people who can’t decide whether they want this or that, which somehow means they want both simultaneously, and also can you “just put together a quick deck?” and maybe “loop in finance?” Which is shorthand for “turn your evening into a war crime against your own sanity.” And then you hit the highway and the entire concept of forward motion is replaced with what can only be described as a series of still-lifes in brake lights.

The people around me, and by “around” I mean literally boxed-in like I’m part of a giant human terrarium experiment where the theme is congestion, are not driving. They are performing traffic as an avant-garde art form. They are lane-changing with all the grace and deliberation of a walrus sliding off a rock, except slower, and with turn signals used as confessional statements: not actually meant to inform you but to soothe their own conscience.

And there’s this inner voice, not mine, reminding me that I too have probably been the walrus at some point, nose pressed dumbly against the glass, oblivious. Except in my case the glass is the windshield, and the dumb nose is still mine.

By the time I detour to the hardware store (because the pool-cleaning company has taken the novel approach of being in the business of not showing up at all, which makes firing them feel less like a punishment and more like releasing them to fulfill their destiny), I’m already simmering. And the store employees — lovely people, I’m sure, but in this context about as useful as origami canoes — cannot begin to fathom the thing I’m describing. “No, not that sealant. The pool kind. The one that actually prevents water from leaking, not the one that just makes you feel like it might prevent water from leaking.” Blank stares. Shrugs. One guy wanders off and doesn’t come back.

And of course, because entropy has a sense of humor, this is when my phone rings: my son at school. Its been a qeek since school started and he STILL csnt log.into.his laptop. The office ladies (plural, because they appear to travel in administrative packs) explain that it has been over a week since classes began and somehow he still can’t log into his portal, which is the portal, the gateway to education, the whole point of sending him there. I go in person because phone calls are clearly designed to deflect responsibility, and what I get is a buffet of platitudes: “first week chaos,” “we’re all adjusting,” “these systems are complicated.” What I don’t get is an actual solution. I am, in fact, made to feel that my frustration is the problem, like I’m some kind of bureaucratic Karen for daring to expect baseline functionality.

And so there’s this anger building, this catalog of human incompetence and indifference, the realization that everywhere I go people are obstacles, gum on the sole of my day.

But then (and I hate how trite this sounds even as I narrate it to myself) God interrupts. Not with a thunderbolt but with the casual aside of a friend in the passenger seat.

“That’s pride talking. Weren’t you the guy who left the garage door open last week and only realized when the raccoons got into the recycling?” 

He reminds me the commuters are exhausted too, the store clerks are undertrained and underpaid, the school office staff are drowning in a tidal wave of parental panic. 

“They’re not obstacles,” He says. “They’re opportunities.”

“Opportunities for what?

“For Caring. For Worship. For Love.” 

And of course this sounds like something off a church sign. The problem is it’s also annoyingly true.

I nod and say, “Yeah. You’re right.” Then immediately a guy cuts me off, and I shout words that rhyme with “duck shoe,” which sort of undermines the whole revelation. 

“It’s hard,” I tell God. “I want to be better, but I’m not very good at it.”

“My grace is sufficient,” He says.

“That’s one of your go-to sayings, isn’t it?” I mutter. “I bet you say that to everyone.” And I swear I can hear Him laugh, which is both comforting and slightly insulting.

By the time I finally reach the bar where my family’s waiting for Wednesday Night Boozie Bingo (yes, it’s a thing, don’t judge), the air feels looser. I hug my son, Breccan, and in that hug the whole day’s static dissolves a little.

I remember a friend from work who’s Mom had surgery, so I text him for a while. His mom is okay. We joke a bit. 

“See?” God says. “There you go!”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it,” he says. “That’s all you need to do to be better.”

“That’s easy. And it’s great because I want to.”

“Sometimes you won’t want to,” he says.

“What do I do then?”

“My grace..”

“..Is sufficient,” I say. “Yeah, I know.” I sound mad, but I’m not. This, too, is annoyingly right. If God has business cards, he could probably write annoyingly right a lot of the time on it. But he wouldn’t, because not doing such a thing is also the annoyingly right approach.

After a beat, He speaks again. “Just don’t write about it in the post you’re thinking of writing,” He says. “That defeats the purpose.”

“Sure,” I say, and I mean it. For a while, anyway.

 I order drinks, carry them back, and of course bump into someone, sloshing his beer.

“Oh no, I’m so sorry!”

He waves it off: “No worries, friend. We’re all just getting through.”

And then, as if curated by some benevolent DJ, Tears for Fears starts piping through the speakers. Everybody Wants to Rule the World. Suddenly it feels like we’re in on some cosmic joke. The traffic, the store, the school, all of it shrinks down to background noise. 

For a moment, everything is exactly, absurdly right.

When I was in high school, my Grandpa on my dad’s side got sick. He was in his eighties then, in and out of the hospital often enough that part of me knew the end was near. But knowing and believing are two very different things. So when, in my sophomore year, Grandpa went into the hospital for surgery, my mom asked if I wanted to visit him beforehand. I said no, assuming he’d be back home in a few days. Same as always.

The day after surgery, his health turned. Before I even had the chance to regret my decision, he was gone.

At the funeral, I walked in next to my Grandma. As we turned the corner, saw him lying in the casket, she let out a sound that I first thought was laughter. 

“This is a serious thing, Grandma,” I thought. “Canyou not laugh?”

 Only then did I realize: she wasn’t laughing. She was wailing. For the first time in my life, I saw someone so overcome with grief that it swallowed the room whole.

Two years later, it was Grandma’s turn. Emphysema and lung cancer is what took her. This time, I knew the end was near, and I wasn’t going to make the same mistake.

But when I walked into her hospital room, I nearly turned back. Tubes everywhere. Her mouth wide open as she struggled for breath, even with the machines. I thought she was asleep, until she opened her eyes, saw me standing there, and smiled. Not just with her face, with her whole body, with whatever strength she had left. It was terrifying and it was beautiful at once. And I lost it. I told her I loved her and ran from the room.

She died two days later.

By my senior year, I had become the field commander for my high school marching band. This meant standing in front of the band, along with the entire Friday night football crowd, every halftime show. I was a nervous wreck each time. But Chris, a freshman saxophone player, had this little ritual with me. Right before we started, he’d catch my eye, make a goofy face, and I’d laugh. That laugh carried me through. It was small, but it meant everything.

One Friday night, while my friends and I were probably at our usual post-game blues-and-barbecue hangout, Chris went home and took his own life. We got the news days later, and I remember asking God if death was supposed to feel this way: so unreal, so impossible to believe.

Whether it comes with warning, like my grandparents, or without, like Chris, some part of me always refuses to accept it. Weeks passed before I really believed Grandpa wasn’t coming home. Even after watching Grandma gasping for breath, part of me thought she might still make it. And almost thirty years later, I still can’t quite believe Chris’s young life just ended on that Friday night.

It feels wrong. Like it isn’t supposed to be this way.

If you’re a person of faith, and I try to be one as often as possible, there’s scripture that says the same. Death wasn’t part of the original plan. But even the best-laid plans of mice and men go awry, as the poet Robert Burns once wrote. And here we are, forced to live in this unexpected unreality whether we want to or not.

Just last weekend, a friend of ours passed away. He was still a young man with a wife and kids. It was completely unexpected.  I won’t share details because they’re not mine to share, but he was part of our lives and our kids’ lives for more than a decade. He was family in a way; not by blood, but by choice. The kind you build around yourself over years.

In Cat’s Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut calls these kinds of families a Karass. These are the people bound together to do God’s will in your life, often without ever realizing it themselves. Vonnegut was not a man of faith, at least not in the traditional sense. Yet what I’ve always admired about him (which is something I also admire in many of my friends who wear labels like atheist or agnostic.) is that he carried a deep love for people: a love that, to me, mirrors the very kind of love God calls us to have for one another. A Karass, as I see it, is the embodiment of that ideal. And the friend we lost was, in every sense, the embodiment of it too.

Walking into the house last night, my wife shook her head. “I can still hear his voice,” she said. “I still expect to see him next week.”

I knew exactly what she meant. Everyone in this chosen family, this Karass, said the same. Shock. Sadness. And that sense of unreality that always lingers after someone’s gone.

So what happens next?

When my Grandma died, the funeral stretched on, people we didn’t know drifting in and out, saying all the things people say. That’s when my friend Sean Hinken called.

“You want to go bowling?” he asked.

“Sure,” I said.

And we did. Brentwood Bowl, the place where I wasted too many hours as a kid. We bowled game after game. We didn’t talk about Grandma being “in a better place” or “free from suffering.” We didn’t talk about my parents or the future. We didn’t talk about anything. We just bowled. And somehow, that made it better.

In the Bible, Job is remembered for suffering. He loses everything: his wealth, his servants, his ten children. And, he is struck with a debilitating illness. His friends come to visit. Later, they’re rightly criticized for saying all the wrong things about God. But at first, before they opened their mouths, they did something right: they sat with him. No talking. No lecturing. No empty comfort. Just silence and presence. In Jewish tradition, it’s called sitting shiva. That’s what Sean did for me when Grandma died. He did it again when my mom passed years later. He’s good at it. Everyone needs friends like that.

The people in our Karass gathered last night and, for the most part, simply sat together. A few stories were told, a few memories shared, but mostly it was an unspoken agreement to carry the weight together. And in that quiet, shoulder to shoulder, perhaps take the first small, halting steps toward healing.

Maybe that’s the point. Death will always feel unreal, whether it comes like a slow dusk or a lightning strike. What makes it bearable isn’t explanations or scripture or platitudes. It’s the people who show up. The ones who sit with you. The ones who bowl with you when words won’t do. The ones who make you laugh when your chest feels like it’s collapsing.

We don’t get to choose death. But we do get to choose how we live with it: together.

That’s what my Grandma taught me with her last smile. What Chris taught me with his mischief. What Sean taught me with a bowling ball. And what our friend taught us just by being part of our Karass.

The loss never stops feeling unreal. But the love? That’s as real as it gets

Back in my youth, coffee at the office came from a single, hulking metal beast that looked like it had been forged in the basement of a post-war shipyard. Its surface was mottled with decades of brown stains, as if it had been gently marinating in coffee since the Nixon administration. The pot itself was so infused with the ghosts of brews past that it probably could have walked out of the building on its own, perhaps hitchhiking to a better life, where the only demand on it was to hold rainwater for a modest rooftop garden.

And yet, there was something honest about that coffee. It tasted like it had fought in a war and lost. You drank it not because it was good, but because it was there, and it was hot, and you were too polite or too desperate to say no.

Then, the world changed. First came the one-pot drip machines, clean and plastic and smelling faintly of hope. Then the “multi-temp” contraptions, as if coffee needed the same precision heating as sous vide salmon. Offices installed enormous chrome monstrosities that could’ve been stripped straight from the deck of a steampunk airship. Each machine arrived with more buttons, more lights, more ways to look like you were preparing for liftoff instead of a morning meeting.

But this wasn’t the end. This was just intermission before the true revolution: Keurig-style machines. Suddenly, coffee was not a communal act. It was personal. A kaleidoscope of K-cups appeared, each promising a bespoke caffeine experience: Vanilla Biscotti, Dark Magic, Jamaican Me Crazy. The break room became a coffee Eden. Everyone had exactly what they wanted, exactly when they wanted it.

And then came the fall.

As in all Edens, there was a serpent. Or rather, several. People began taking K-cups home. Just a few at first, hidden in the lunch bag. Then a sleeve. Then whole boxes vanished overnight. The Keurig became a liability. The machines were replaced with “coffee packet systems,” devices so expensive that no one could afford one at home. They were safe from theft but developed … personalities.

Now, before you could brew a cup, you had to engage in a humiliating checklist. Empty the packet bin. Refill the water tank. Clean the drip tray. In some offices, the machine made you sign a pledge of loyalty before dispensing Colombian Medium Roast. One intern told me he had to swear fealty while kneeling, though to be fair, he’s the kind of kid who’d kneel if a printer jammed.

If this continues, I see our future clearly: the office coffee station as an American Ninja Warrior course. You start on the warped wall, sprint across the foam lily pads, and dangle from the monkey bars over a pit of decaf. Then, jousting with senior leadership (foam lances only, because HR), and finally strapping on a jetpack to soar over the cubicle farm and press the Brew button before your competitor does. All this for a cup you could’ve made with a $15 Mr. Coffee at home.

Is this who we are? A people willing to strap into corporate jetpacks for the privilege of mediocre caffeine?

I yearn for the days of the old pot. Yes, the coffee was burnt. Yes, the last inch at the bottom was mostly radioactive grinds. But if you drank it, you stood a decent chance of developing superpowers by lunch. And that, my friends, is worth more than all the single-origin artisan roasts in the world.

The week before school starts is not so much a week as it is a campaign. There are logistics, supply lines, financial planning, and the kind of last-minute crises you’d expect if we were invading Normandy instead of sending children back to public education. My wife, who teaches, has been moving what I can only describe as an entire school supply section at WalMart into her classroom, one tote at a time. The sheer volume defies reason. I’ve been in that room. It’s like any other classroom. And yet, everything she brings in disappears into it, as though she’s found the doorway to Narnia and is slowly filling it with laminated posters, mechanical pencils, and paper towels.

Several of the kids apparently decided to spend the summer growing like bean sprouts, because suddenly every shoe in the house was a size too small. This required an emergency pilgrimage to various stores where, I’m convinced, the school shoe market is run by the same people who control diamond prices. Except that diamonds last longer than three months before someone’s toes start curling over the edge.

Then the washing machine joined the back-to-school festivities. It began flashing cryptic error codes: strings of letters and numbers that looked like they’d been randomly assigned by a drunk Soviet engineer. I spent hours disassembling it, crawling around on the floor, making little puddles of water like a human fountain. The machine beeped at me softly, as if to say, “I know, buddy. This life thing is hard.”

That’s when Eliott wandered in.

“Need some help, Dad?” he asked, in the same tone you might use with a neighbor struggling to carry in a heavy bag of mulch.

We ran through possible fixes together, searched online for what I imagine is the internet’s only Mandarin-to-COBOL translation tool, and, miracle of miracles, got it working again.

Eliott grinned, and in that grin I saw the problem with time: it’s rude. He’s a junior now. We’re entering the season of SAT prep books, college tours, and financial aid calculators that give you an ulcer just by looking at them. He doesn’t need me the way he used to. These days, our talks are less father-and-son and more man-to-almost-man, which is fine, except I didn’t realize how much I’d miss being indispensable.

Micaiah isn’t far behind. He had his sports physical yesterday. Six-foot-one, 250 pounds, and trying football this year. He’s a freshman in high school, and he’s already enrolled in a Health Science program that will have him spending part of his day at a community college in two years. He’s barely started and he’s already halfway gone.

When they’re little, you assume their need for you is permanent. The constant “Dad, Dad, Dad” is exhausting, yes, but it’s also the air you breathe. Then one day, without much warning, you look around and realize you’re standing there holding a half-empty oxygen tank.

This morning, for the first time in years, I didn’t have to bellow through the house like a deranged town crier to get them moving. Eliott and Micaiah were up when I was. Dressed. Ready. Helping the younger kids find shoes and zip backpacks.

“If you make Dad late,” Micaiah warned, “he will throw you to school instead of driving you.” Everyone laughed, which I took as a good sign that my children still find me occasionally funny instead of merely annoying.

We have one more First Day of School like this with everyone at home, all five kids crammed into the same daily launch sequence of chaos and misplaced clothes. One more morning when someone screams, “I can’t find my pants!” and someone else, without missing a beat, shouts back, “Then go without them!”

After that, the house will start emptying. After that, they’ll be gone.

That’s the way it’s supposed to go. It’s not tragic. It’s just different. And I’ll still be here, fixing the washing machine when it breaks, deciphering its cryptic messages. Only instead of a kid beside me with a grin and a solution, it’ll just be me and the soft beep of a machine saying, “Yeah. I feel your pain, buddy.”

After losing 200 pounds, people expect the changes to be seismic. They expect fanfare, balloons, a scene from Rocky where I sprint up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, arms raised triumphantly above my now-visible waist. And yes, there are obvious benefits. My knees don’t scream like a haunted Victorian child every time I bend down. My back no longer files daily complaints with Human Resources. And I can walk up a flight of stairs without clutching the railing and wondering whether I’m experiencing cardiac arrest or just dying of shame.

But there are subtler changes; changes you don’t read about in Men’s Health or see on an inspirational Instagram reel narrated by Morgan Freeman. Like how people look at me now. Or more accurately, how they don’t.

At 5’11” and over 400 pounds, I used to have what polite folks might call a presence. I didn’t walk into a room so much as materialize: an eclipse of man. Mothers would draw their children close as if an impending storm had just rolled into Target. Men would eye me with caution, unsure if I was going to buy socks or body-slam them through the seasonal aisle.

I was a teddy bear, of course. A hugging, apologizing, perpetually-aware-of-my-body-in-space teddy bear. I tried not to be in anyone’s way, but when you’re the size of a refrigerator with opinions, avoidance has its limits. Sometimes collisions were unavoidable. And when it came down to it, between me and some 145-pound dude with a vape pen and something to prove …. well, physics has no loyalty.

I’d knock people over. Not maliciously. Not even often. But once in a while, usually after they attempted to assert their presence through the sheer force of misplaced confidence, I’d bump into them and watch them bounce off like I was a pinball bumper in a bowling shirt.

“Sorry!” I’d yell after them as they tumbled backward, wondering what it felt like to have been hit by a wrecking ball with social anxiety.

My favorites were the tiny, furious men. The kind who walked like lowercase bulldogs, arms bowed wide, as if perpetually ready to either fight or enter a body-building competition for ants. They had what I like to call “budget Vin Diesel energy.” They took up more space than physics allowed and aimed directly at me like we were in some kind of unsanctioned boss battle.

I don’t see those guys anymore. More accurately: they don’t see me.

Because now, I’m average. No longer big. No longer scary. Just some guy. Which is oddly disorienting. You don’t realize how much of your identity has been wrapped in “presence” until it’s gone.

I walked into a hotel lobby today (my family and I are staying there while we wait for the AC in our house to be resurrected), and came face-to-face with one of those formerly-beloved angry chihuahuas in human form.

He squared his shoulders and walked straight toward me, the way they used to. I tried to move, but my knee had other ideas and locked up like a reluctant safe. He slammed into me and, to my shock, I stumbled back a step.

He fell. Of course he did. Physics still leans in my favor.

But it hit me then, like he hit me now: I’m not who I used to be. I’m still bigger than average, sure, but no longer looming. No longer a walking colossus that makes children wonder if they need to say “excuse me” or call animal control.

And it’s nice. Mostly.

Nice not to feel like a novelty act every time I walk into a room. Nice not to be the before in someone else’s imaginary weight loss ad.

But also, it’s strange.

Because in losing the weight, I also lost the armor. The perceived power. The ability to part a crowd just by approaching it. Now I’m just a middle-aged guy with knees that only occasionally betray him. I don’t make people nervous anymore. I don’t make them anything.

Maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe now I’ll be seen for who I actually am: mostly kind, sometimes funny, occasionally winded, and deeply afraid of hotel buffet eggs.

Or maybe I’ll get mugged. Who knows?