My Story Starts Here

November 12, 2025 - Happy Birthday, Elle.

You'd be 23 years old today. You once told me to tell my story, not yours. I can do that. It starts a couple of days after you left me 7 years ago, when I tried to fall apart.

I did. I tried to fall apart so the world would see how much you meant to me. I figured the best way to prove you mattered was to become incapable of moving forward with you you. So I left mysef fall.

And I almost did it—almost.

I reached the edge of oblivion and, for a moment, looked into a future without even a single glimmer of hope. The blackness was terrifying. This was grief in its purest form, loss with no hope of recovering, an abyss with no way out. It was the inky, suffocating, icy dark of night on the open sea. It was the inverse of existence, a coldness that turns the existing into nothing.

In a way I couldn't understand, falling apart had become an exercise in erasing myself. Grief, I was discovering too late, was not an emotion, but a place. Where I had expected to find a more intense version of depression, I had found a place of utter emptiness.

As soon as I'd let go, I instinctively tried to undo my decision. I reached for any emotion I could grasp to try to stop the fall. Happiness? Too far above me, I had no ability to smile. Apathy? I couldn't fathom it. Anger? Out of reach. Sadness was somehow too high a vibration for me, too: a sad song filled my mind and I recoiled at how uplifting it sounded!

The fall was accelerating. My mind reached for my most painful memories but I was so far down the emotional ladder that even those were somehow too high above me to reach. The grasped at the bottommost wrungs of my emotional ladder—slimy and broken memories of my most mortifying, rueful, grotesque moments—and squeezed as hard as I could. My hands couldn't hold on. Suddenly, I was past the last wrung, in free fall.

Dying would have been preferable to the feeling I had in that moment. Somehow, I knew that where I was heading, there'd be nothing left of me after I arrived. Whereas if I died, at least my soul would continue.

I couldn't help it, my mind kept reaching for a way out. What's worse that pain?, I thought. Someone I love being in pain, I answered myself. So I imagined the people I love hurting, being tortured. I didn't want these things. I just wanted to feel something, anything, to avoid the abyss.

I saw Elle's face. I imagined the pain she'd been in from her CRPS. And realized, this was the exact thing that had put me in this situation in the first place.

I'd come full circle.

I'd fallen too far, and there was no way out. I'd come full circle. So I committed to the last step and tried pushing myself over the edge.

Oblivion opened up just beneath me. I pictured myself with a hand outstretched, like Adam's in Michaelangelo's painting, but not to God. To God's antithesis.

I made contact.

And I exploded.

Suddenly, I found myself rebounding back to life, propelled by something within me but beyond my conscious mind.

Something about this place was Wrong.

A place of pure Darkness cannot absorb a soul with any light left, becasue the moment it enters, the darkness is no longer pure. Somewhere I couldn't access, I still held hope.

I could hide the courage to live another day from myself, but hiding it did not dimish the truth of its existence.

I rebounded back to a life I didn’t want. I came back to a world where I’d failed. I could tell myself all day long that there was nothing I could I have done, but in the simplest, most basic terms, my job had been to keep you safe, so your death meant my failure. Elle, I failed you in the most fundamental way one person can fail another. I rebounded to a world I didn’t feel I deserved, where I no longer had any sense of who I was.

I kept rebounding. I came back to this life and then blew right past it, continuing "up" until I found myself in a place of angels where someone who had failed as I had had no business.

An angel cradled you and as I watched, I saw how with your birth had expanded my capacity for joy. Your life unfolded before me, until I saw how your death had expanded my capacity for grief. My ability to experience life had been stretched, and I was overwhelmed with gratitude for this gift I'd been given to the point where appreciation pushed out every other feeling and filled every molecule of my being.

The laughter that came to me was genuine, healing, and entirely unexpected.

I settled back into my life filled with joy I couldn't explain. Moments ago, I'd been on the precipice of despair.

Not anyore.

As my returned from my epiphany, my humanity re-engaged, and I started trying to talk myself out of what I was feeling: "You can't be happy, you just lost a child. These emotions would make sense had you lost a grandparent or mentor. But not this!"

I shrugged at my inner critic. I couldn't help smiling. "Shut up," I told it. "It doesn't matter who she is to me. This gift is precious and I'm going to sit with it as long as I can right now before the pain returns."

I watched this internal dialog from a new perspective, no longer attached to my inner critic, but more like a witness to it. I did not identify with any of the critic's fears or shortcomings. He was not me. The realization made me laugh harder.

"OMG, you failed at parenting, and you failed at falling apart, but you think you're going to succeed at telling me how to feel? Don't you ever give up?!"

I sat for as long as I could in that state of bliss. I memorized it as best I could.

Eventually, I reintegrated with my inner critic. Not becasue I wanted to, but because that's the nature of this human experience. I accept that.

But I've retained the memory of my Moment of Joy. It's a core memory, and even more powerfully, it's become my True North.

I'm lucky to have experienced it. Allowing myself to stay in that moment and resonate with joy in the midst of all that pain unquestioningly shortened and shallowed my journey through grief. It helped me realize that falling apart would compound the tragedy of your loss by pushing the burden I was feeling onto all the people who loved me. If I fell apart, the world would, in effect, lose two people. I couldn’t do that. Especially not to your sister!

More fundamentally, the experience has made life exquisitely expansive. Certainly, there are times. (more than I care to admit, quite frankly) when I wish I still had my smaller world view and my daughter. But in those moments when my life feels more Romeo & Juliet than Micky and Minnie, I know I can pull out from being a character in the story to once again become the reader—the witness. And from that point of view, even the tragic tale of Romeo and Juliet is still a beautiful work of art worth appreciating.

One day, Elle, I’ll see you again. When I do, I’ll have stories to share from all the adventures I’ve been having since losing you. Of course, I miss like hell the chapters we shared. But a boring second act wouldn’t be right, it wouldn’t honor you. Would I limit myself on a business trip because you weren’t with me? No! I’d do my best and pay attention to everything so that when I got home and had dinner with you, I could make you laugh with all the interesting things I’d seen.

This is no different. Your life happened, and it had meaning. It changed me. so I’ll keep doing my best every day, and pay attention even when it hurts, so that when we do see each other again, wherever we are, I’ll have more stories to share.

I’m so lucky to have shared this life with you, and so grateful for the gift you gave me: more life to live.

With truth + empathy—
Jason (Dad)