Howdy everyone! My apologies for the delay in posting. I’ve had a relatively busy month since I returned home from Charleston at the beginning of September.
I started writing this, as you’ll see, several weeks ago. It’s become one of those things that turns into much more than what I originally intend; I’ve had no choice but to ride the creative wave. Sometimes these things take longer than expected, and I’ve learned throughout my six years of writing that it’s best to let them unfold as they wish.
Seeing this piece is already long, I’ve had to split it up into multiple parts (not sure how many it’ll end up being). So you can expect to see sometime within the next century a part two and potentially three.
In the meantime, I expect I’ll return to posting at least once per week, though as always, it’s hard to be certain.
Enjoy!
It’s been a weird 24 hours.
Today—the day I’m typing these words—is September 11th, 2025. Yesterday, September 10th, Charlie Kirk was assassinated.
(That is a weird thing to say.)
Now, I don’t really write about politics (and this isn’t a political post, fyi), primarily because I’m not as up to speed with what’s going on as I’d need to be to share my opinion online. This event, however, hits a little closer to home.
In part because I listened to Charlie a good bit, but particularly because I lost my father last year and can’t help but feel utterly horrible for the Kirk family, especially his wife and children.
I was planning to post something the day of my father’s anniversary (August 30th), but I was on vacation at the time, and couldn’t really carve out much more than 30 minutes to write each morning.
So I suppose today is the day I reflect.
The day my father died was a weird day. Because, like yesterday and today, it didn’t feel real (though much more so for me, obviously).
Of course, it’s not like I was walking around hallucinating, but if you can understand what I’m saying, I could not process the news. As a matter of fact, I seemed to have experienced what must have been a low-grade state of shock. At the very least, figuratively speaking.
(For the record, I don’t mean to be dramatic by sharing this. It’s simply what happened.)
Nothing set in immediately. Tears—which you’d think would arrive rather quickly—took minutes, I think more than five. When my brother told me what happened, my immediate response was something like, “What are you talking about?”
After asking some more questions, I began to panic. My breathing intensified. Parts of my body became tingly. And my arms started to curl . . . I remember struggling to drive to my friend’s house, needing both hands to turn the wheel.
If you’ve ever lost someone suddenly, unexpectedly, especially someone who seemed so alive, you may relate to this state of disbelief.
There’s no way! What do you mean they’re gone??
It’s like, the way you perceive reality—that’s a very rudimentary way to put it—cannot adapt to the news as rapidly as objective reality changes. Though you fully understand the logic of what you’ve heard, it still doesn’t make sense. And there is, as a result, a sort of dissonance, this sense of surrealism often referred to in the wake of such events.
When speaking about faith, people say or infer something like you do not know, but you believe. When someone dies suddenly, however, the opposite takes place: you know, but you do not believe.
This suggests something about reality, and about life . . . which I thought for a while was that faith supercedes knowledge, meaning what we believe is more important than what we know.
But I’m not entirely sure that’s true. Not because what we believe isn’t the foundation of our reality, but because it’s not so simple a dichotomy.
If belief always supercedes knowledge, then what I am saying regarding sudden death—that we know, but do not believe—poses a problem. Because people would literally be deluded by it.
Clearly, in almost all cases, though someone who’s lost a loved one unexpectedly may experience a state of disbelief, they do not act as if the person is still alive. They act according to the logic of the news they’ve just received, or else they wouldn’t have come to such a state in the first place.
(Upon further reflection, I remember that I considered calling my father’s phone that day, just to see. But I never did, for obvious reasons.)
And I know this all seems like more of a technicality, a matter of ambiguous rhetorical specificity, but I have a feeling that it’s something else . . . I think it’s the case that faith and knowledge, which are often set on opposite ends of the same spectrum, have some sort of symbiotic relationship.
But what? And why does it matter? Am I just trying to make a mountain out of a molehill here? Why do I feel it’s so important to make a distinction?
If anything, it seems from all this that what we know is more important than what we believe and therefore that knowledge is the foundation of our reality. Because the vast majority of our behavior is clearly driven by what we know—what we are certain (or mostly certain) of.
But is that it? Is belief little more than a less certain form of knowledge?
Can’t we believe something we know? Or can we only believe something we aren’t entirely certain of, but still think is true—meaning we act as if it were true? And if we act as if it were true, despite not being certain, does that not make it, to us, at least as real as what we know?
More pertinently, if knowledge supercedes belief, how could I not believe something that I know? Is this state of disbelief I speak of not just a form of cerebral lag? Did I truly not believe my father was gone? Surely not!
Surely, I believed it. Surely, if someone had stopped me right there and asked whether or not I believed my father was dead, I would have told them yes.
So what’s going on here? Could disbelief just be a figure of speech?
I mean, normally it is. Normally, it’s a phrase with which one expresses frustration, or humorous disappointment.
But I’m telling you—and anyone else whose world has ever changed so rapidly would tell you the same—I could not believe it.
What I’m saying may not make a whole lot of sense to those who’ve never experienced such a thing, and that’s not to put you down, so let me clarify as best I can, because the sensation may be a little hazy even to those who have.
When I say “I could not believe it,” I mean quite literally that conjuring this idea—that my father was no longer alive, that his heart was no longer beating, that he was laying there, cold, in some room, unable to converse with anyone any longer, and that I not only would but could never speak to him again—felt something akin to conjuring a world in which I had wings sprouting from my back, or gills growing upon my neck.
Consider this, also: when you wake up from a nightmare, you, or your brain, must take a couple of seconds, not knowing at first that it was just a dream, to look around and realize that that awful experience was merely imaginative. But when your reality changes as rapidly as it does when you suddenly lose a loved one—a truly nightmare-ish circumstance—the same process transpires, only in reverse.
You see, until I lost my father, I thought “disbelief” was merely a figure of speech. Because to many, especially young ones who’ve never endured a tragedy, it is.
I recall—just after receiving the news from my brother—calling my mother, sobbing like a little boy who fell off his bike for the first time, her answering on the other end in a similar state . . . And I recall that the very first thing I said to her, if I remember correctly, was, “Is this real?”
I’m not sure how sincere a question it was. Looking back, it felt like more of an outcry than an honest inquiry. (Although, when we were younger, my brother did burst into our room declaring that our father was, in fact, dead, thinking in the sick way little brothers do that he was funny.)
I once heard that breakups (and, by extension, deaths, especially sudden) are painful in part because every person in our life holds a very real, very physical spot in our brain. Of course, I don’t exactly understand how it all works, but the fact is that those we know and love are stored as neuroconnections (or something like that). And so, when we lose someone—when someone leaves our life, when they are no longer a part of the world we know and believe in, so to speak—our brain, in order for it to “make sense of” the world, has to sever that connection, hence the pain.
It’s not piercing, like a brute, physical injury would be. But it is undoubtedly real.
I imagine the process that takes place as the more conscious frontal lobe attempts to communicate with another part of your brain—perhaps the part that’s got something to do with memory (someone help me out here)—that a person is no longer a part of your life in this attempt to make sense of the world . . . I think about what effort must be made in communicating that certain bonds must voluntarily be broken so that we can move forward with a more accurate worldview . . .
When my father passed, I was halfway across the country in Charleston. Throughout the week (he died on a Friday, and we held the wake the following Friday), I spoke with several people, some of whom recommended I not look at him in the casket, and some of whom recommended I do. From what I remember, the ones who recommended I not look said that when they looked at their deceased parent, it left a bad lasting memory, one they’d prefer not to have.
I took everything into account.
Come Friday, I still hadn’t decided if I wanted the casket open or closed. I remember walking into the funeral home nervous, as if someone I did not want to see, someone like my ex-wife, was in there.
I stood in one of the rooms, not the main room, trying to hold it together, greeting all the people who came in from all over to be there for us, doing my best to hide the fact that I did not want to peer around the corner.
Now that I think about it, I don’t know how the decision came to me. I think it might have been because I was the only one who didn’t want to see Dad lying there. I think that’s what it was: my mother and brother were fine with it being open—my brother had already seen him since he was at work when it happened, and so was the first one home, in time to take a look before the ambulance or coroner or whoever took him away; my mother, loving as she is, just wanted what I wanted.
I did most everything in my power not to have to see him. I procrastinated giving a verdict like it was homework. And I very easily could have said no.
But at the last second, when the decision could be delayed no longer—and mostly because I felt I’d be robbing everyone who came to see us by keeping it closed—I said yes, keep it open.
Upon deciding, I walked in there, reluctant, I think with my uncle, who’d already seen him, and took a look.
And there he was. My father.
The whole thing altogether was about as unbelievable a sight as I’ve ever seen . . . near as cinematic as an experience gets for a young man. I’m not sure how different I felt from Simba.
He was wearing the suit and tie we’d picked out for him earlier that week. I couldn’t see his feet, at least as far as I remember. What struck me most—and I think what strikes most others when they see a loved one in a casket—were his lips . . . Something about them indicated to me deep within that he was elsewhere.
I reached out and touched his hand. It was cold and hard and stiff. And his hair—it was as if he’d not showered in a week (because he hadn’t).
In total, he didn’t look exactly like what I thought he’d look like, though not so different either. Nevertheless, I had no doubt in my mind that it was my father.
And from that moment on, I was better.
It still hurt, of course. But I had ripped the band-aid off. I had now seen with my own eyes indisputable evidence of my new reality. And I was able—which I suspect I might not have been had we kept it closed—to thank all the hundreds of people there for us with an honest smile.
Thanks for reading. Stay tuned for part two.
If you enjoyed this post, please share it with your best friend. Or anyone.
Until next time,
RB
Wow. This brought me to tears. Very well-written and I’m sorry for your loss
You always put yourself out there, Ryan, when you share these intimate, raw moments from your life. Dad would be proud and even grateful that you continue to keep his memory alive. Well done. Looking forward to the next post