She knew

She knew. She didn’t know how, and she didn’t know when—but she knew.

On my birthday, several months prior, we were sitting outside talking one evening and she said, “I cleaned the house today and got rid of some things from my past I wouldn’t want my family to see, just so you know.”

When I asked her why, she said, “I won’t be around much longer. I don’t know how; I just know I can’t see my future anymore. It’s just blank. I used to see us, old with kids, but something has changed. It’s just black now.”

Over the next few months, she reached out to people she hadn’t talked to in a long time. She asked if I would still keep up with her family. She made me promise to cut ties with certain people because she didn’t like who I was around them. She was “cleaning the lines.”

And for the last two weeks, so was I. I dreamed about her funeral every night. Yet, when it happened, I was still so utterly, amazingly shocked. I still didn’t see it coming.

I adamantly oppose the idea of predestination. My heart says existentialism is the way—that we are the architects of our own existence. My mind, however, is a “determinism” type of guy; it sees the tracks laid out long before the train arrives. But then, I think of retrocausality.

In the quantum world, the future isn’t just a destination; it’s a participant. If two particles are entangled, an action on one instantly affects the other, regardless of distance. I wonder if lives can be entangled with their own endings—if death is a “fixed point” in the architecture of time. Perhaps the shockwave of that event didn’t just travel forward into my grief; it traveled backward into her vision. She felt the ripples before the stone even hit the water.

She knew something had changed because she had previously seen a different outcome. It wasn’t just a feeling; it was a paradigm shift. It was as if a switch had been flipped, collapsing all the beautiful possibilities into a single, inevitable point of blackness. She wasn’t guessing. She was responding to an echo from a future that had yet to happen.

I’ve spent hours turning over the concept of quantum entanglement, trying to find a name for the tether that stayed taut between us even as she began to drift. Physics says that two entities can become so inextricably linked that they can no longer be described independently—two particles vibrating at the same frequency, governed by the same wave function.

She was the primary particle, colliding with an unavoidable end. Because we were entangled, I felt the rotation of my own world shift to match hers. I didn’t see the “blackness,” but my subconscious was receiving the information nonetheless. My dreams were a reflection of a state-change that had already occurred in her.

It makes me think that “grief” is just the name we give to the violent snapping of that entanglement. Or perhaps it’s darker: perhaps we remain entangled, forever linked to the void. I am still reacting to her, still spinning in alignment with a particle that has disappeared from the visible spectrum, governed by a “knowing” that defies every law of logic I try to hide behind.

We aren’t just moving toward the future. Sometimes, the future is reaching back, grabbing us by the hand, and telling us exactly where we’re going.

Look Up, It’s Not Okay

Why does no one really talk about this? These stories have become background noise in a world too busy to be troubled by tragedy. Sure, our thoughts and prayers go out to the families—but what about the prayers of the kids who were kneeling when the shooting started? Where was their God then?

If you were an outsider looking in on a “Christian nation,” with no prior knowledge of its beliefs, you would expect the breaking point to be when someone harmed its children in a place of sanctuary. In any other story, this would be the moment where the citizens rallied to make an effective change.

Sadly, this is where we turn away. A nation of people who vehemently cling to the right to be “happy” cannot openly discuss things this raw. We keep staring at our phones, pressing the dopamine button. Make me happy! As far as I’m concerned, silence is complicity.

This can happen anywhere, but this is the only “developed” country where it happens on a regular basis. If you’ve dropped your kids off at school anytime over the past twenty years and haven’t felt a flicker of fear, I don’t know where you live. Personally, I’m tired of feeling like I’ve dropped my kids off in a war zone when they’re just excited to go play.

The Data of the “Sanctuary”:

The Frequency: Between 2013 and 2022, there were 720 incidents of gunfire on the grounds of U.S. preschools or K-12 schools.
The Human Cost: From 2000 to 2022, there were 328 casualties in active shooter incidents at U.S. elementary and secondary schools. In the 2020-21 school year alone, there were 41 school-associated violent deaths.
The Global Outlier: A 2024 report noted that the U.S. had 109 public mass shootings compared to a combined total of 35 across 35 other comparable countries between 2000 and 2022.

Be angry. Cry if you need to. But do something—speak up, do something tangible. Since Columbine in 1999, we’ve offered “thoughts and prayers.” I’m not going to tell you what to believe or argue about your faith, but wisdom says you’d better bring a shovel if you want to move a mountain.

Grace

It’s not dignified; it’s embarrassing, if I’m being honest—this business of growing old. It is one of the many reasons they say, “Growing old is not for the weak.” So, how do we do it with grace, and who is this measure of grace for?

When I was ten, maybe eleven, I came home one day and my dad was a wreck. He had just found out he was diabetic. My father was born with a physical handicap; he was missing his right hand. He was on disability due partially to injuries, but I suspect mainly to depression. He had lost a ten-month-old son twenty-five years earlier; he was divorced and, consequently, estranged from the church.

Food was my dad’s last refuge. It’s easy to look at it from the outside and see the fallacy in such a coping mechanism; it’s harder to consider that he never wanted to end up there, either. He was a kid once, one who smiled and was filled with hope and optimism—just like we all were.

He was already overweight and had high blood pressure, among other medical issues, and this diagnosis of diabetes seemed the cruelest cut of all. He was being told he had to give up his last bit of nostalgia and comfort in this world: the thing that reminded him of being that kid again—a candy bar.

He was distraught. He was angry and yelling—something my dad never did before or after that around me. I told him it was okay; I told him I would help him learn how to cook better meals and we could get through this. He yelled at me and said, “There’s no point. I’m dying. Just let me die.” I left and stayed gone the rest of the day, by myself, and just cried. At ten years old, I thought my dad was dying tomorrow. I had no idea how slow it would actually be.

He apologized to me when I came home. He wasn’t a monster; he was just a man trying to understand something that he couldn’t grasp. He couldn’t understand that his body was failing—that even if it would be slow, there was a finality to this thing. No matter how many people you bury along the way, you still can’t imagine that you’ll join them one day.

So, who is grace for?

Grace is for everyone. My dad needed grace in that moment and for years to come: grace to be human and to be afraid; grace to be slow to ask for help; grace to not have all the answers. I needed grace to be a kid, to be afraid of losing my dad, and to not have the answers, either. We both worked most of that out over the next seventeen years before he died.

It’s easy to analyze something from thirty-five years ago, but none of that really matters now; it’s over and done. The lesson it contains is valuable, however. Am I extending grace to those around me today? Am I letting them be where they are? Am I offering to help even when they are defiant about needing it? Am I accepting help when it’s offered to me?

I dreamed about my dad in his final days last night. I haven’t dreamed about that ever, but he was on my mind when I woke up. As I was getting ready for work, I mentioned to my wife that I still had a splinter in my finger. I didn’t say it was because I couldn’t see well enough to remove it, and she didn’t ask. She gave me the grace of not talking about it at all; she just offered to remove it, and I didn’t argue.

As she was digging it out, all I could think was that I’m grateful for her and that I hope to treat her and others the same way. I don’t need to know or point out why you need help. I just need to offer it.