Meeting Trouble Halfway
This week I found out I’m about to have my sixth great-grandchild. This week I also learned that a young member of my immediate family died suddenly, a nephew. I’ve spent most of my life preparing for moments like this. It turns out that was a mistake. If you’re anything like me, you don’t just worry — you rehearse disaster. You meet trouble halfway. You run the scene in advance. You tell yourself it will help when the real thing comes. It feels like control. It isn’t. I thought worry was a form of preparation. That if I imagined loss often enough, I wouldn’t be blindsided by it. What I actually did was carry grief in advance — for years at a time. Noir is built on this idea. The detective expects the worst. He walks into every room like something’s already broken. He’s not naive. He’s not soft. And still — he gets hit. That’s the part no one tells you. Bracing doesn’t protect you. It just makes you tired before the impact. When the news came this week...
