As of Wednesday, Feb 4th 2026, we're still here.

So, my dad died a few years ago. While it was all happening, I wasn’t really taking time to think “I wonder how this will affect me going forward and how time will impact the process of grief?” but I guess now is when I have the space to.

There’s a lot to dig through, but the big one that sticks out to me is the permanence of it as a signpost on the journey of life. In the same way that I remember the exact minutes before my first child was born and I became Responsible For A Baby, I remember the moments where I Still Had A Dad. Time pulls both toward you with a crushing gravity that is visible from far enough away you’re tempted to dig your heels in, but close enough those heels will simply dig furrows in the ground.

When you’re pulled in, you find yourself next to death. Right next to it. The distance from your body to the coffin on your shoulder as you walk down the church aisle.

And maybe what no one tells you — certainly what no one told me — is that it never leaves. Death, to quote an already too-quoted play, “feels like a memory.” It is not potential energy, it is real kinetic violent energy. Energy that’s forced it way into your life in one sharp moment and thrown you past that signpost. Energy that reminds you that one day you will be the focal point of that one sharp moment, and that it won’t be fair or peaceful or beautiful, it will simply be. The gravity well will finally prevail over your decaying orbit, and you will fall in.

There is an invincibility you feel as a teenager — that nothing could ever happen to you. If you’re a millennial who read books in high school, you might describe it as “feeling infinite¹ .” If you’re a millennial, you also know that feeling of infinity was cut short by spending third period watching two planes crash into buildings and then your country send your friends to fight in a war. And for some of us, that was the moment death came close, made itself visceral, laid a finger on our shoulder.

But what that familiarity with death foments, when it’s walked enough miles with you, is a deep sense of its own banality. It is not the movies, there is not a perfect last sentence, music doesn’t swell. It just… happens. Every day.

And one day, it reminds you with a tap of a finger, it will happen to you. It doesn’t have to be when you’re old, or when you’re ready, or when it’s a peaceful story to tell your family. It will simply happen.

That is how, 20 months later, my father’s death impacts me. How to prepare for the inevitable. How to ensure, if a bus jumps the curb or I’m accidentally on 9/11: The Sequel, the arcane bureaucratic parts of death are already handled for my family. How to get healthy enough the coroner doesn’t shake his damn head when he sees my arteries² .

The thing I don’t do is worry about my dad. Because he’s fine. He’s at peace. Today - literally today, not the “today” you do in standup where each tour day the story happened “today” - I was walking past Trinity Church Graveyard in Washington Heights and my son asked me — literally asked me, not the twitter thing where a writer says their kid asked them why we still have the estate tax — “Dad, what does R.I.P. on gravestones mean?”

So we talked about it - how the Latin letters and the English letters match up, how it’s on a bunch of Halloween decorations, and how ultimately we want people who have died to be at peace. That it’s what we pray for at funerals.

[If you’re one of the few subscribers to this, you must already know I’m what sociologists call Still Catholic, so you cannot be surprised we’re treading this ground.]

My dad made sure to grease every Catholic skid he could on the way out. If you can get in, he got in — or at least made it to the Catholic-theology realm of Purgatory, which is like a safety school for heaven where you can transfer in to the big school after… I have no idea… 10,000 space years? That is all to say, I am not up at night worrying about how he’s doing. I am busy missing him here on Earth.

The fruit of death, at least for people still living, is loneliness. To keep moving through time while someone has stepped out of it. And to know that when you step out, you’ll make your own waves of loneliness that everyone has to wade through.

But for now… life continues to be life. The path continues. The orbit is good. The sidewalk conversations with my kids continue. This is how I have to live this chapter, the one that can’t shake the loneliness of My Dad Is Gone.

Because this chapter is also, for the people in my life, The One Where I’m Still Here.

-Greg

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1  For older or younger audiences, the book is The Perks of Being A Wallflower.

2  The answer to this, I’ve discovered, is not obsessively using your apple watch’s heartbeat monitor as an “imminent death alarm.”

3  This whole thing is, let me be clear, not a cry for help. I am good. I am happy. I am just a kid who listened to a lot of Dashboard as a kid and knows how to tap into the “staring out a rainy window” school of thoughts.