"I lost a significant figure in my life in the fall of 2024. The process of losing them felt both unmercifully slow and yet too fast to fully reckon with. His importance in my life was shaped by examples of a life well lived. He opened more doors in my small world than I ever had the chance to thank him for. Simultaneously, I welcomed my first child this fall. Having been intimately immersed in seemingly both ends of this circle of life so simultaneously, I can’t say I gleaned much more than an iota of a realization of the staggering simplicity of it all. At times the simplicity has been hard to square. For me, one tiny bit of comfort amongst all this has been an adoption of a piece of the first law of thermodynamics as a sort of mantra: energy does not disappear it only changes form."