Honor them
with the words they deserve.

My father was a man who fixed things. Not in the convenient, able-to-retire-comfortably sense — though he was that too — but in the way that when something broke, he sat with it. He didn't curse at it or toss it. He studied it, turned it over in his hands, until he understood it well enough to make it whole again. I am only now beginning to understand that this is how he treated people too. He had a way of sitting with whoever was in front of him — fully, without distraction. When I was seventeen and convinced the world was ending because of something I no longer remember, he didn't tell me it would be fine. He sat at the kitchen table, poured two cups of coffee he knew I hadn't developed a taste for yet, and listened until I ran out of things to say. Then he said: "Let's figure it out." We always figured it out. There is a version of grief that asks us not to speak of what we've lost, as if the naming of it makes it more real. I don't believe that. I think the naming is the only way through. So let me say plainly: my father was irreplaceable. In this family, in this room, in the particular quiet of early mornings when I reach for the phone to tell him something — he is irreplaceable. What he leaves us is not absence. It is the question he would have asked next. It is the steadiness he taught by example. It is the long patience of someone who believed in fixing things. We carry that forward now. All of us. Together.