Notes for later

On care, memory, and unfinished sense making

​​I have not written much on Substack over these last months.

It’s not because I didn’t have ideas to develop and share. Rather, my attention was elsewhere, and it needed to be. There are times when writing helps me make sense of things. And times when sense making is more difficult.

In late 2025, it often feels like my work is simply to show up, do what is in front of us, and take notes for later.

I have been moving back and forth to Chicago to care for parents, while trying to uphold responsibilities at home in LA. I have spent long days and weeks in the house I grew up in, noticing what changed and what remained the same over the last 50+ years. I have learned how memories inhabit objects, new and old. Carefully stacked mail and randomly strewn Post-It notes. Canes, walkers and even a wheelchair.

Even Luna came to know the LAX-ORD journey.

There has been grief, but not only. There have also been logistics, laughter, frustration, muscle memory, weather shifts, and the strange way tears arrive when you least expect them. Sitting at a table. Driving a familiar road. Folding laundry the right way because it matters, even now.

I am not ready to make sense of all of this. And from listening to wisdom from others that walked similar paths, I recognize that sense making doesn’t need to be the immediate goal.

Resilience has been on my mind for the better part of a year. Not as a slogan or a virtue, but as a lived practice. How we recover. How long it takes. How we gauge our own resilience against perceived resilience in others. What pulls us back toward baseline and what keeps us stuck. How purpose, faith, and attention shape that process, often quietly and without ceremony.

Some of my next posts will be formal. Some will be observational. Much of it will feel unfinished. But it’s time to resume these reflections. The next month or two will be a bit of a departure from what I published earlier in the year, and I can’t commit to a schedule. Instead, I am making space for a short sequence of pieces that belong together, even if they are different in tone and form.

An obituary will start these off. It stands on its own. It does not need commentary or interpretation. Others will come later, drawn from the week to week reality of care, loss, memory, and the ordinary work of continuing.

If you are reading this, thank you for your patience and for staying close, even at a distance. If you are new here, welcome. You are arriving in the middle of something.

More soon.