Note: I’m trying something new here. The essay originally appeared in the Medium publication Summit on January 6, 2026. Today, Substack writer Paul Dotta read and commented on it there. I have so much work on Medium because I’ve been writing there a lot longer. I don’t know how to choose what to share here. How about this? When an older essay on Medium gets attention, I’ll reshare it here. I hope you enjoy it.
In middle school, I broke my hand shortly after baseball season started. It was my first time on a team, and it meant the world to me.
I worked hard — made it all the way from the bottom to the top — from a kid who had never picked up a ball to the starting lineup. That injury, it was the end of the world. I cried, alone, in despair, too afraid to let anyone see my tears. My weakness.
The following season, I played again and did alright, but by the time I got to high school and didn’t make the team, my dream was over. I’d be better off dead.
Luckily, a dirty blonde with a magnetic smile brought me back to life. I had a new interest, a new life passion. There was something to live for. Girls! Oh, how I loved girls.
I was a serious kinda guy, and so it took me a long time to get a girlfriend. But when I did, oh, was it magnificent. We were lovers and best friends. Everything in the world was new and fresh. Every experience. Passionate. I can still see a picture in my mind, an actual photograph of us together. My smile, it was pure joy in the presence of that girl.
But alas, I became an ass. I blew it. How foolish could I be to take such a lovely girl for granted? How awful was I to be so cruel? Rightfully so, she dumped me.
I lost everything, including my mind.
My ego was crushed. Snuffed out.
Just short of suicidal, I slipped into a deep depression that lasted years.
Until another shiny object caught my attention. A motorcycle. Riding it was always a near-death experience. But it didn’t matter. I was alive. The machine defined me as I went all in on the tattoos, black tees, and leather chaps.
I rode my Harley from New Jersey to Maine. From Maine to the Mississippi River. From Dubuque, Iowa, to Charlotte, North Carolina. I rode it to Myrtle Beach, to Daytona, and to Key West.
Losing that motorcycle was a bit of a slow death, however.
Harley riding Andrew sorta faded away silently as life turned to wife, then children.
You might say I was in this vague haze of dad delirium for a solid thirteen years when, out of nowhere, all was lost. The marriage, the family, and the motorcycles, too. All gone.
There I was again, a crying fool. At one point, in the fetal position on the floor of my bathroom. I was mourning a death. My own death. The happily married man who would one day walk his daughter down the aisle, host Christmas Eve for all the family, sit in a rocking chair reflecting on a perfect life — He was dead.
I sat at the edge of a lake in Umstead Park and contemplated taking my life.
But that was not the example I wanted to leave for my children. Yet there I was, once again, ego destroyed. Better off dead. Everything I thought life was going to be, gone.
For the first time, I welcomed therapy. It was something I previously made fun of.
What happened in there, I can hardly do justice. All I can say is, I began to discover the real me. I started to uncover the innocent boy who hadn’t yet played baseball.
Today, I’m remarried, and my wife is the most incredible woman on the planet. From my daughter, I’m estranged. I haven’t had a relationship with her since the divorce from her mother. That’s going on well over a decade now. And my son, thank God, he’s healthy and independent.
Despite the estrangement from my daughter, I can’t help but think, these are good times. It’s odd, in a way, that the darkest corner of my life is a finger on the pulse of reality. I’ve said to my wife, “If it weren’t for being estranged, I might have to pinch myself, to wonder. Am I dead already? Is this heaven?”
Yesterday, my wife and I cycled up to Longleaf Swine. It’s one of our Raleigh “Cheers.” The owner and bartenders are like family. Friends roll in at any given time. And in my current iteration of life, here comes my son, strolling in looking healthy, bright-eyed, with a beautiful woman at his side.
We happy-hour together. Abby smiles at me. She whispers, “It’s good to be at this part of life, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it is. It sure is.”
All of us at this bar. Every one of us, on both sides of it. We’ve been through the muck. My son included. Parents splitting. Sports injuries. Losing half of high school to COVID.
And here we are, smiling, laughing, enjoying life.
There’s a tiny part of me that creeps up with a sort of hard-to-describe, sentimental kind of fear. It’s extreme happiness to see my son in love. It’s projecting future sadness for the unknown struggles that lie before him in this oftentimes cruel world.
I want to reach out to him. Hold him. Tell him, “Son, relish in these moments. Please know, when the darkest days fall upon you, there is light on the other side.”
This is all in my head. Here I am, casting my life onto his. When there at that bar, he looked at me and said, “Hey dad, I heard this quote. You only die once.”
I smiled and responded. “I like that.” My son’s sage advice landed. It’s such a lovely flip from the old adage: you only live once. I’m grateful to be alive over and over again. Every day the sun rises is a gift. Whenever I’ve experienced an ego-crushing loss, it wasn’t the end of the world; it was a chance to be reborn.
Here I sit with extreme gratitude in the midst of a really, really good run. Everyone is healthy. Everyone has jobs. These are prosperous times.
I’d prefer not to have these happy thoughts bothered with a sprinkle of dread — no matter how light a sprinkle. But I can’t help it. These thoughts, they come, time to time. It’s a conjunction of gratitude and grief — of past, present, and future.
“Yes, son. I agree. We only die once. Cherish the highs. Survive the lows. There’s a whole new life on the other side.”
I wrote this in response to a prompt from Wordsmiths’ Weekly, a group of talented writers who get together on Zoom every Saturday.
The prompt was, “You have a child, and you have written one piece of advice that will be carried in his/her pocket for life. What is that advice?”
Thank you for reading.
Health, happiness, kindness, respect
for every being and all things.
— Andrew
Brother, there’s a lot of life in this. The bathroom floor, the lake, your estrangement from your daughter, and years later sitting at a bar watching your son walk in healthy and in love. You didn’t tidy any of it up to make the lesson work.
I keep coming back to how many times we confuse the death of a life we imagined with the death of ourselves. Then years pass and we discover there was another life waiting for us, one we couldn’t have pictured from inside the loss.
And I love that after everything you’ve lived, the line that gives the piece its meaning came from your son.
Love you, sage brother.