I hadn't written in decades. Life and other work got in the way, and somewhere along the line, I convinced myself I had nothing worth saying anyway. The pen stayed down, and that was that.

Then my dad died.

Grief does weird things to a person. For me, it made words start bubbling up again. Not great words, mind you. Just a torrent of thoughts and feelings I needed to get out of my head and onto paper. So I started writing again, after all those years.

Dad wasn't some literary genius but he was my biggest fan. He was also just my dad, who believed in me more than I did most of the time. Maybe that's why losing him kickstarted something.

This writing spree turned into my first book. It's not polished and perfected. Hell, it's probably not even good by most standards. But it's real. Short stories that came out as a coping mechanism. I wanted to edit it to near perfection. My editor said I shouldn’t and that I wouldn’t regret not doing that. So I didn't. 

I dedicated the book to Dad (and a few others). It felt right, given that these raw, unfiltered words came directly from dealing with his loss. 

I didn’t know if I'd keep writing or if this was a one-off thing. But breaking that decades-long silence? Putting those messy thoughts out there? It's done something. It's helping me process. Maybe it's just noise. Either way, it's there now, a weird little legacy born from loss.

And I sought to improve so many workshops and classes later I have many things in the works. Writing feels different now. I’m not writing out of grief, I’m writing because I want to. There isn’t much money in writing books, and I may never become a best seller, but that isn’t why I do it. I do it because I like it. And maybe others do too. 

Dad would probably get a kick out of it. Not because of the writing itself, but because I finally did something he always thought I could do - speak up, in my own way.

I went to "see" Dad, to tell him all about it. On my way back, a bunny crossed my path. If you know, you know.  Sometimes, the universe winks at you in the strangest ways.