I begin this reflection without the expectation of answers. What I am carrying does not present itself as a problem to be solved, but as an emotional condition. One that ebbs and flows, sometimes quiet enough to live beside, sometimes sharpened by loss until it presses close to the heart. Recent events have not created these feelings. They have simply clarified them, bringing old contours back into focus. Grief does not invent pain; it reveals where meaning has always been stored.
My earliest fishing memories are not of catching anything. They are of watching. I remember going with my dad and my grandpa in the early mornings, riding in the truck before the day fully woke, the world still gray and hushed. The road felt longer then, stretched by anticipation and the unspoken seriousness of the ritual. When we arrived at the lake, often Stockton or Table Rock, the water held a muted green cast, dense with stillness. Bare trees protruded from its surface like bones, remnants of a submerged world. The air was cold enough to demand attention. Sound carried differently. Even conversation felt restrained.
I was content to sit quietly. I did not need to be the one holding the rod. What mattered was being there. What I felt most vividly was excitement. An excitement not about fishing itself, but about inclusion. I was allowed into a space that was not mine by right but by invitation. Looking back now, I see that this was an initiation. I was taking my place with them. I was learning how to belong to my family not through affection alone, but through shared discipline and presence. Fishing was the activity; formation was the work.
Only later did the lessons become explicit. Attention mattered. If the knot was wrong, the hook would not set. If I rushed, I would miss the fish. Waiting was not passive; it was active restraint. Skill was quiet. Competence did not announce itself. These were not instructions delivered verbally but truths learned through repetition and consequence. My grandfather did not teach me patience by naming it. He taught me patience by requiring it. He taught me how to be good at a thing, and in doing so, how to be careful with the world.
Taking a life, even a small one, was never trivial. Cleaning and cooking what we caught demanded respect. Care extended beyond the moment of success into the aftermath. These practices formed an ethical posture, one grounded in attention and responsibility rather than sentiment. Fishing, in this sense, was never recreation. It was moral apprenticeship.
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When my grandfather died just after I turned twenty, something essential was interrupted. Childhood had already ended, but adulthood had not yet fully begun. I was entering the stage of life where shared understanding replaces instruction, where guidance gives way to companionship. What I lost was not teaching, but witness. He never knew me as an adult. He never saw the versions of myself shaped by loss, responsibility, endurance, and failure. There are conversations, adult to adult, that should have happened and never did. That absence is not nostalgic. It is dialogical. It is the silence of a relationship that did not get to complete its arc.
That silence became unmistakable while cleaning my grandparents’ house after my grandmother’s death. Moving through the rooms, I became acutely aware of how a life leaves traces: not just objects, but patterns of care, habits of attention, evidence of continuity. Among these artifacts, I found a small note I had written my grandfather, asking if we could go fishing sometime. The handwriting was mine, but the voice belonged to a self who believed that time could be requested and received. Paired with photographs—him holding me, him watching me, us standing together at the water’s edge—the memory arrived with force. It did not soothe. It confronted.
These memories press harder now because they expose a generational asymmetry I can no longer avoid. My grandparents were my age when I was born. Their lives already had a visible future tense. Mine does not follow that arc. I do not have children. I do not have grandchildren. While I do not regret my life as it has unfolded, I cannot deny the ache of an unoccupied role. There is a grief in carrying something precious without a clear place for it to land.
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This absence has shaped my life in ways both obvious and subterranean. It fractured my marriage, where incompatible visions of the future could not be reconciled. It also quietly reshaped my sense of worth. In moments of vulnerability, I measure my life against a cultural metric that equates completeness with parenthood, and I come up short. Intellectually, I reject this equation. Emotionally, I still feel its weight. The gap between what I believe and what I feel is not hypocrisy; it is grief.
I have allowed teaching to carry some of this ache. There is real satisfaction in mentoring students, in watching them learn how to pay attention, how to persist, how to become capable. In this way, teaching draws directly from what my grandfather gave me. Yet education is, by necessity, provisional. Students arrive, stay briefly, and move on as they should. The relationship is meaningful but bounded. There is a professional distance that cannot, and should not, be crossed. Teaching sustains something in me, but it does not resolve the longing to be known across decades. It names the absence even as it partially fills it.
As I sat with my grandmother in her final days, another grief sharpened, one I rarely articulate. When she died, my brother and I were on either side of her, each holding a hand. She was never alone. Though she lived independently for more than twenty years, she was accompanied at the end by those she had formed. I understand what presence at the end of life looks like because I have provided it. To imagine its absence for myself is not melodrama. It is existential clarity. It is a grief I already carry, one that sits close to the heart.
This grief sometimes pulls me toward companionship with a kind of urgency that feels almost desperate. I long to be seen, to be chosen, to believe that my life counts in a way others can affirm. At the same time, I recognize my own difficulties with relationships and the discouragement that follows. This is not depression. It is an existential sadness. A recurring reckoning with finitude, continuity, and the fragile structures we build to feel less alone in time.
When I return to Forever Young by Greg Dwyer, the painting no longer feels explanatory. It feels interlocutory. The reflection in the water is not comfort alone; it is confrontation. The child beneath the surface is not simply a memory. He is the part of me that learned how to wait, how to notice, how to be careful. He carries what was given to me. What remains unresolved is where it will go.
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Perhaps this is the work of this season. Not to answer the question of legacy, but to remain honest in its ache. Some losses are not meant to be solved. They are meant to be carried, handled with care, like a line that can snap if pulled too hard.
So, I fish.
I stand at the water’s edge in the early light, the world still quiet enough to listen back. I string the line the way I was taught. I tie the knot carefully, knowing that if I rush it, it will fail me when it matters. I cast, and I watch the line stretch outward, thinning as it disappears into the surface of the water. As it sinks into depths I cannot see, into possibilities I cannot name.
I wait.
The water is still. As is the future. There is only the tension in the line, the practiced patience of my hands, and the inheritance of attention that still lives in my body. Somewhere beneath the surface, something moves. Or it doesn't. Either way, I remain present.
The line extends into the unknown. Waiting.
For now, that is where it belongs.