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, all those years of worrying didn’t step in. They didn’t soften anything. They didn’t prepare me.

They just stood there, useless, beside the real thing.

I wasn’t preventing pain. I was practicing it.

I’m not suddenly free of the habit. A reflex that deep doesn’t dissolve overnight. But I can see it now — that old pull to lean into the worst, to get there early, to meet trouble halfway.

And maybe that’s the shift.

Not some grand decision to stop worrying forever.

Just: notice it sooner. Put it down sooner.

There’s a new child coming into this family.

Life keeps doing that — arriving and leaving without asking what we’re ready for. Without asking what we deserve, or don’t. It just comes. A death and a birth in the same breath, the same week, the same chest.

You can’t prepare for either one.

I’ve spent years trying to stay ready.

I think now I’d rather stay here.