The Water

May 25 – December 2025

On May 25, 2025, the life I knew ended.

Nina died after 31 years of marriage.

For more than three decades, there had been a we. We built a home. Raised our children. Made plans. Fought battles. Laughed. Traveled. Grew older together.

And then there was just me.

I didn’t know yet what that meant.

Honor Her

In those first weeks, my world was still entirely about Nina.

On June 7, we gathered to celebrate her life.

I wanted people to remember her—not simply how she died, but how she lived. Her relationships. Her family. Her generosity. Her laughter. The lives she touched.

And alongside those sacred moments came the strange bureaucracy of death.

Death certificates. Accounts. Banks. Property. Paperwork.

One moment I was remembering thirty-one years with the woman I loved.

The next, I was explaining to a stranger that my wife had died.

Grief was teaching me very quickly that the sacred and the ordinary don’t take turns.

They arrive together.

Your Job Here Is Not Done

Then came July 9.

At ISKCON DC, during Sankirtan, I had an experience I still struggle to put completely into words.

There was light.

There was Nina.

There was my Master.

And there was a message that landed inside me with extraordinary clarity:

You’re back.

Your job here is not done.

You need to stay back.

I wasn’t being asked to follow Nina.

I was being asked to live.

I didn’t yet know how.

I certainly didn’t know why.

But something had shifted.

Water

Looking back, water is how I understand those months.

I couldn’t control what had happened.

I couldn’t negotiate with it.

I couldn’t work harder and fix it.

For someone accustomed to acting, solving and pushing forward, grief presented an entirely different demand:

Surrender.

So I began learning to float in something much larger than me.

Some days I sank.

Some days I swam.

Some days I simply let the water carry me.

And slowly I discovered something surprising.

I was still here.

Two Truths

There was another discovery I wasn’t expecting.

I was still alive.

Not merely breathing.

Alive.

I could grieve Nina and laugh.

I could miss her and travel.

I could remember yesterday and become curious about tomorrow.

I could love someone who was gone and still feel the human desire for companionship, connection and intimacy.

At first those truths seemed contradictory.

Eventually I began understanding that they weren’t.

Grief and life could occupy the same heart.

Living did not diminish the love that came before it.

Six Months

November 25 marked six months without Nina.

I wasn’t healed.

I wasn’t finished grieving.

I hadn’t “moved on.”

Those words no longer seemed particularly useful.

Something quieter had happened.

I was learning to carry her.

There is a difference between surviving a loss and incorporating it into your life.

Nina was becoming part of the architecture of who I was rather than only the source of what I had lost.

Something Was Returning

By December, seven months had passed.

Nina was still everywhere.

But slowly, almost imperceptibly, something else had begun appearing beside the grief.

Me.

Not the man who existed before May 25.

I could never become him again.

Someone else was beginning to emerge.

I didn’t have a name for him yet.

I didn’t know where he was going.

I only knew the words I had heard months earlier:

Your job here is not done.

And for the first time, I began wondering what that job might be.

I didn’t know it then, but the water was preparing me for something else.

Fire.