Tag Archives: poetic grief

The Doctor Was My Father ©️

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Good morning, Cicely.

This morning’s not about the moose trotting through Main Street or Ruth-Anne’s weather report. This morning’s about something quieter. Heavier. More sacred.

This morning’s about my dad.

He was a doctor. Not the kind you see in movies, with perfect answers and heroic music swelling in the background. No, my dad was the kind who stitched you up with fingers that shook slightly from exhaustion, the kind who worked long shifts and sometimes came home with the weight of other people’s pain still clinging to him like a second coat. The kind who carried more than he ever let on.

He made mistakes. Lord knows he did. Dads aren’t gods, and sometimes they don’t know how to say sorry. But he was there. Not always in the way I wanted, but in the way I needed. Solid. Present. And when the chips were down, when the world came crashing in, he never turned his back on me. Ever.

He was my biggest fan, even when I was fumbling my way through life like a blindfolded man in a glass shop. He never laughed at my dreams—even the crazy ones like coming up to Alaska and whispering poetry through a mic to a bunch of insomniacs and ice fishermen. He didn’t always understand it. But he never stopped believing in me.

And now he’s gone.

And I’d give just about anything for one more cup of coffee with him. One more walk around the block. One more quiet moment where I could say, “Hey, Dad. I know now. I understand. Thank you.”

But there’s no rewind button. No encore performance.

All I’ve got now are echoes.

The way I clear my throat before I speak—that was his. The way I place my hand on someone’s shoulder when they’re going through it—that was his too. His presence shows up in the most unexpected ways, like a scent on the wind, or the sound of a song I didn’t know I needed until I heard it.

And maybe that’s the secret. Maybe the people we lose never really leave us. Maybe they just become part of the air we breathe. Part of the way we live.

So if you’re listening this morning, and you miss your dad too… I’m with you.

And I think they’re with us.

In the quiet strength we carry. In the love we give. In the lives we build from the scaffolding they left behind.

This is Chris in the Morning, son of a flawed and beautiful man who did his best—and loved me the best way he knew how.

You Beautiful Bastard ©️

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I hate Bozeman.

I hate it like you hate the street corner you bled on, like you hate the room where she said she never loved you, like you hate the silence that followed. I hate it because Bozeman holds the ghost of who I was when I broke—utterly, completely, and publicly. You don’t forget pain like that. You don’t forgive a skyline that watched you fall apart.

I remember heartbreak so vivid it twisted the seasons. Betrayal so sharp it slit the hours in half. I was younger, dumber, and I believed in people too much. And in Bozeman, those people let me bleed. I hate the way the wind still smells like her hair in winter, and how the mountains seem to echo my worst mistakes. I hate the way every café and alleyway is haunted with flashbacks I didn’t invite.

But.

Even in the rubble, I found something sacred.

Each disaster became a badge. Every failure, a kind of scarred-over victory. When people saw a man falling apart, I was really being carved out into something newer. I learned to laugh again—darkly, crookedly—but genuinely. I learned what it means to survive, not in the poetic sense, but in the “get up and keep breathing even when you don’t want to” sense.

And Bozeman—damn Bozeman—gave me back my brother. Somewhere in the mess, through smoke and frost and silence, we found each other again. Maybe we were both ruined, maybe we were both trying to pretend we weren’t. But something about that city pulled us into the same room at the same time and said, Talk. And we did.

So yeah, I hate Bozeman. But hate is too simple a word.

It’s a wound that grew teeth. It’s pain that taught me how to rebuild. It’s a love letter I’d never write, but I keep tucked in my coat pocket anyway.

Bozeman didn’t kill me. It crowned me.