On January 10th I delivered my grandmother’s eulogy. Six days later my godfather passed away. And hours after battling some nightmare combination of food poisoning, exhaustion and flu, I lost my voice.

What did I say?

What did I leave out?

She reminded me…when you moved away it got hard to hear you. But then someone came into the room, so she hugged me and told me how beautiful it was.

Somewhere between landing at TF Green, the mostly frozen ground of a cemetery, visiting with over two hundred close family members, including my godfather who was still alive at the time, I snuck away with a friend for a field trip in the city where I was born.

Trip indeed.

As we drifted across snow blurred highways and streets littered with salt, soon to be extinct neon signs and traffic lights, I thought about all of it. Where life begins. How it unfolds. When it ends and who really decides what happens between arrival and departure.

As I sipped hot hibiscus tea, she asked where I wanted to go.

Here, there and everywhere. Which at the time meant the unofficial book tour I didn’t know I needed and certainly hadn’t planned.

Providence, Central Falls, the old drive-in where we watched Harry and the Hendersons a lifetime of summers ago, and the housing project on Lincoln Street in Woonsocket. How had something so small ever taken up so much space?

It’s all energy and predestiny; a waltz of wills between us and Them.

Wills…won’ts, do’s, don’ts.

Arbitrary rules that change with every swipe.

I will this body well.

Won’t give up on loving and being loved.

Am doing the best I can and don’t bother with things like resentment or regret.

Sang his soul Sailing to tears and peace.

She willed herself to stay for his successive decade of visits.

I will this life thriving beyond the insignificance of a strip of imprisoned earth.

Don’t define myself by the past but do allow humility to keep me glued to the hips of Grace.

We will survival in spite of personal and perpetual tragedies.

I told my brother in law we’re getting closer to shrinking the timelines for healing. That there’s really no need for a man to wake up screaming for twenty, thirty, sixty years over a six second explosion. We can fix that…and then we wondered about how our individual years of screaming shape us…could we grow better, still know better without them?

God lets it all happen. Lets us live, die, win, love, heal, have, hold, hear, feel, see, touch, taste, run, dance, breathe, fuck, ache, laugh, cry…scream. He also lets us think and choose. Would we have consciousness if he knew it would lead to solving problems like existential and neurobiological pain?

You invite us to rest. You make it all work. You let us try, fail, learn and try again.

You let us give meaning to things that are probably meaningless because you know it helps us stay sane. And then you do things to intentionally inspire our awe and wonder…

As we drove through the past, shadows of which dissolved in rapid succession like snowflakes on the windshield of my mind, I could not help but wonder, where do we go from here?