HeyJaredThe School of Grief: Notes from the Unmaking
Author • Academic • Dad • Writing about grief as a way of seeing. Essays on loss, spirituality, ecology, and democracy.
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 7
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- Sep 30, 2026
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- Jul 12, 2026
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Remembering Was Sacred (opens the original)
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My mother once told me that she never knew anyone who doubted themselves as much as I did. But one thing I never questioned was that she knew she was my mother and that I was her son. This was a clear and distinct truth for me. To stretch Descartes, mater habeo, ergo sum: I have a mother, therefore I am.Memory had been everything for her. She wanted everything to last, nothing to be forgotten. An archivist of the ordinary, she strove to document and preserve the feeling of every occasion, from t
Are they there or not? (opens the original)
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People who care for people who care for someone in the late stages of Alzheimer’s sometimes say things like, “They’re still in there somewhere,” or “They’re not there anymore, so they’re not suffering.”I’ve always believed that both statements are meant in kindness. But it’s taken me longer to realize that, though they’re tilted in opposite directions, both rest on the same underlying assumption, one that I’ve begun to question.After the phone call I wrote about in my last essay, I realized that
Someone Just Like You (opens the original)
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About a year before she died, my mother wanted to introduce me to myself.We were catching up on our weekly Sunday afternoon phone call, just as we’d done for thirty years, except the choreography had changed. My mother had always been the one asking the questions, bordering on invasive. Now my father asked them, spare and to the point. How’s Kincade’s new job? How do Kamryn and Mikaela like high school? My mother listened quietly in the background, the way my father used to.Then, out of the quie
Confessions of a Drunk Theologian, Part 4 (opens the original)
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There I was, downstairs silently burning out my legs and lungs on the spin bike for the second workout of the day while my wife was in a meeting in her office upstairs. It was Monday afternoon of this past week, the first day back to teaching after summer break.I didn’t want anyone to know.Why? Shame.I should be writing chapter three. I should be reading the Wynter article. I should be recording my lecture on Dorothy Sӧlle. I should not have a buzzing brain that won’t stop, a body that needs to
Confessions of a Drunk Theologian, Part 3 (opens the original)
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I happened to be teaching William James days after doing my 5th step on that bench in the empty park.Along with Carl Jung (“spiritus contra spiritum,” spirit against spirits), James is a primary source for understanding the role of spirituality in addiction recovery. But we were reading James in a course on structural grief and mysticism.It was an evening class. My students are adult graduate students in theology who live all around the country, so most class sessions are on Zoom. I was in my ba
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