The world will give you every reason to go numb. I nearly did. Here is what I’m choosing instead and what it costs to keep choosing it.
Grief came for me this year. From two directions at once.
The first kind was personal: watching my father’s mind dissolve, lose his words, then his mobility, then his life—slowly, then all at once. My mother, with Alzheimer’s, is unreachable in the same care home back in Canada.
A stepson who made it clear, through cruelty we hadn’t earned and silence we couldn’t breach, that our love, no matter how persistent, was something he’d chosen not to receive. Estrangement has a particular kind of weight—the grief of losing someone who’s still alive and well, the silence where a relationship used to be. My husband of 35 years, aging in ways that are slowly reshaping who we are to each other, and a future I’m only beginning to imagine.
The second was harder to name but impossible to ignore, a feeling I couldn’t shake all year: that something was coming apart in the world beyond my private grief. Things I’d always taken for granted—basic human decency, truth, the accountability of those in power—revealed, one by one, to be more fragile than I knew. As if the ground I’d been standing on was never as solid as I thought.
In the middle of it all, I scared myself twice.
The first was seeing my father’s name on my phone, calling from 3,000 miles away. By then, dementia had taken most of his words. I knew the call would be hard. For a moment, just a moment, I thought about not answering. But I did. I was able to comfort him, I think. It was the last conversation we ever had.
The second was almost as frightening to me: sitting alone, reading too much too late at night, about powerful people doing terrible things to vulnerable people and facing no consequences. Feeling the tears come, the way they do for a woman who has always felt everything a little too much. And then noticing something else underneath the tears—the temptation to stop caring. To look away. To let the callus form.
This wasn’t rage. It was something even more dangerous: hardening.
I know I’m not the only one.
I also know you have to decide what you stand for before the world decides for you. So I started naming them—the things I won’t surrender about being human, no matter how chaotic things become.
What I’m Protecting
There was a meeting—my brother and I on one side of a Zoom screen, the care home’s general manager and one of his directors on the other—trying to get Dad moved to a room closer to Mom. Married 67 years. This shouldn’t have been a negotiation.
But every request was met with a reason it couldn’t be done. Policy. Availability. Staffing. The word “no” dressed up in professional language and delivered with a sympathetic tilt of the head. I started to feel that slow surrender that happens when the people with the clipboard keep shaking their heads and you begin to wonder if you’re the one being unreasonable.
“Can you just stop telling us what you can’t do and start working with us here?”
It came out steady. Not loud. The voice of a woman who has learned, finally, that the feeling isn’t the problem. The silence is. Dad was counting on us. Comfort would’ve been nodding, thanking them for their time, and telling ourselves we tried.
Courage was staying in the chair and refusing to let politeness protect the people with the power at the expense of the people without it.
We moved our parents into that expensive, well-regarded home just over a year ago. It should be enough, but sometimes it isn’t. Mom’s still there without him. And what I’ve been watching is the version of dismissal that never announces itself, the kind that hides behind schedules and staffing ratios and carefully worded reassurances. The kind that treats a person as a bed to be managed rather than a life to be honored.
Dignity, I’ve learned, isn’t just a value. It’s a principle that requires someone to keep showing up and insisting.
Some mornings, when the weight of everything feels too heavy, I drive to one of the wilderness areas near my home and walk into the forest alone. The chatter in my head quiets. My breathing slows. Something in me that had been clenched begins to release.
I don’t go looking for answers out there. I go to remember that the world is still beautiful, that I belong here despite the heartache. That’s not escape. It’s how I come back to myself.
Strong Back. Soft Front. Fierce Awareness.
I found Roshi Joan Halifax in my 50s during a season of tough life quakes. A Zen teacher writing about what it takes to stay open in the presence of suffering, Roshi Joan described a posture: strong back, soft front. A spine sturdy enough to hold you upright through what you can’t control; a heart unarmored enough to keep feeling anyway. I remember those words landed in my body like a truth I’d been trying to live up to my entire life.
But this year, the inquiry deepened. It wasn’t just my resilience at risk or my tenderness. It was my willingness to see—to keep paying attention when everything in me wanted to blur.
This last one is mine: fierce awareness.
It’s the thing that forced me to answer that phone call and the thing that keeps me awake to the reality of my mother’s care home when it would be easier to trust the reassurances. It’s not selective; it refuses to let me look away from cruelty or the systems failing those who can’t fight back.
Yet, it’s also what catches the light on the water, the first hopeful invitation of spring, and the look on my husband’s face that tells me something has shifted before either of us says a word. Fierce awareness isn’t a comfort; it’s a commitment. Just like courage. Just like dignity.
This essay won’t fix what’s broken. It won’t bring my father back or reach my mother or change what’s happening in the world beyond my door. But it’s what I know, and I think you know it too.
So, when the temptation to harden comes—and it will—remember that you have a choice. You can look away, or you can stay.
Stay grounded. Stay awake. Stay fierce.
