Time is a slippery thing. One minute you think you have heaps of it, then on a Tuesday, you look back and wonder where it all went. Or, in my case, tragedy struck, and I was left dizzy with grief, wondering how I made the most of the ten years I had with my son.

At this moment, we were rushing Mitch to the ER. About an hour earlier, his stomach was writhing so much Mitch nearly passed out. I had never seen a child in so much pain.

Mitch rolled the window down a bit and hung his hand on the glass. He had a look on his face that was so very far away. I wondered what he was thinking. When I asked him, Mitch said softly, “Not now. I’m thinking.” To this day and forever, I’ll wonder what he was thinking.

A deep fog was rolling across the valley, and by the time we reached the hospital, we couldn’t see much of anything – which felt like a living metaphor. This photo nearly marked the beginning of Mitchell’s end.

“While we wait for life, life passes.” Lucius Seneca, a Stoic philosopher, said that about 2,000 years ago. Two thousand years ago. It would have been neat to know that 20 years ago, when I was a young father trying to find my place in the universe.

However much I tried to be in the moment as a husband and father, I failed more than I succeeded. Sometimes my heart is heavy over my countless moments of inattention, distraction, and procrastination; in my own deep work with grief and healing, I’ve learned how to turn regret into resolve. I can’t fix the past, but I can be in the present – and that will heal an otherwise painful future.

I don’t mean to sound so dramatic – as though everything is monumental. At least for me, being present has taken on a more hopeful meaning. How many of us have thought to record the voice of our little ones and said to ourselves, “Great idea, but I’ll do it later,” only to realize four years have passed and that tiny, helium-filled voice is deeper and more mature? It seems that even when we recognize THAT, we put it off. Then suddenly, our kids become adults, and those opportunities are irretrievable.

Whether we’re losing our loved ones to death or time, it’s the same. You will never have now again. We only have this moment – and what we do with it matters. This isn’t an original idea – but the realization (the awakening to it) is a revelation we’ll all have – hopefully sooner than later. At the deepest level, it seems like only the dying are the ones that awaken to how precious time is – and for the rest of us, we draw from an invisible bank account, never knowing the balance.

Time is a fast-moving river. We don’t often realize how fast it’s moving because we exist in the river of time – in the same way, you can be sitting in a car going 85 mph and not sense that you’re moving. In the same way, we don’t realize we live on a planet that’s spinning about 1,000 per hour, and when we lay our head down to sleep, we’re orbiting the sun at an average speed of 67,000 miles per hour (that 18.5 miles per second). Even still, our solar system is orbiting the galaxy at about 490,000 miles per hour, and the galaxy in which you now live is moving at about 1.3 million miles per hour into the immensity of space. Mitch loved stuff like this, and we talked about it often.

The point is we have no real sense of how fast things are moving … including time. For that reason, I’ve found it helpful to remember that it’s always later than you think. That invisible bank account from which you draw your minutes and hours is finite. One day your account will be empty. You’ll marvel at how fast it went, wonder where you spent it, treasure where you invested it, wince where you squandered it, and wish you had more of it. The prayer of the dying is almost always, “I wish I had more time.”

So, just a few weeks after I took this photo, I found myself kneeling by Mitchell’s side – the candle of life flickering out before my eyes. I’ll never forget how I was awakened by a force unseen. I was sleeping on the floor next to him. I was so tired. Then, suddenly I was wide awake as though someone shook me. I had an impression that felt like an emergency. I knew at that moment I needed to tuck Mitch in. I placed my hand gently on his chest, his heart barely fluttering. I told him I was so proud of him and wanted to be like him when I grew up. I still do. I told Mitch he could go when he was ready and that his mother and I would miss him, but that we would be okay. I whispered other sacred words, father to son. I kissed his face pulled his blanket around his shoulders just how he liked it. Although his body and senses were all but shut down, and what I did and set probably felt like a distant dream, I think he was hanging on for permission to go. I believe he heard me and felt my love for him. That was my last act of love.

Thirty minutes later, he was gone.

That thing you need to do. The words you need to say. That love you need to show.

Do the thing. It’s later than you think.

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I took this photo nine years and a few hours ago, today.

It was the most tender of times. Little Mitch was denied a heart transplant, and just days earlier, his cardiac MRI revealed his heart was profoundly damaged. Hanging by a thread, really.

At the time of this photo, Mitch had come to my office. “Hey, Dad,” he said softly. “Can I just sit by you?”  I smiled and said, “Of course, Mitch. I love it when you’re near me.”  With that, I pulled a chair close to me, chair arms touching, and Mitch watched as I tried to wind down the day. Occasionally he’d put his hand on my arm and squeeze it as if to hug me. I would do anything to hear his voice and to feel his hand again. Not long after he sat down, Natalie came into the room to tell us dinner was ready. With her came a delicious-smelling waft of dinner waiting upstairs. Mitch looked at me and smiled, then stood and started talking to Natalie in front of my window. She did what she does so naturally: love. She grabbed his face, looked Mitch in the eyes, and told him just how much she loved him. I wanted to freeze time – and I suppose with this photo, I did.

You know the saying, “It’s later than you think”? It was late. Very late. In just a few weeks, we’d go to the hospital and learn death was not only coming, it was gashing at our door. The summer of our lives was ending, and we would soon feel grief like a winter wind to our souls.

When this photo came up in my memories today, I began to think of the paradoxes of light and darkness and what I can learn from them. For years I used to think of grief as only darkness. Lately, I’m beginning to think of suffering and grief as a different kind of light. It’s not that grief and sorrow aren’t dark and awful. They are. But I’ve discovered when I close my eyes and quiet my soul, a different set of eyes begin to open. Kind of like the saying, “It’s not what you look at; it’s what you see.”  So, when I stepped into the darkness and allowed my spiritual eyes to adjust, it was as though a door opened from within the prison of grief, and I walked into vast corridors of learning and deep meaning – hidden only by the shadows of sorrow.

My deepest learning, I’ve discovered, happens in the paradox. 

A few years ago, I wrote an essay examining the duality of grief entitled, “I’m okay, but I’m not okay, and that’s okay.”  It was a tender reflection on a conversation I had with my oldest son, who barged into my office while I was in a moment of deep grief over losing Mitch. I quickly wiped my tears and tried to seem normal – but, as with most things, humans aren’t very good at hiding. Ethan said, “Dad, are you okay?”  I did what most men do: I blamed the tears on a rock in my eye – as though it happened while eating boulders, dirt, and tree logs for breakfast.   I rolled up my proverbial lumberjack shirt, thumped my chest, and pretended to be strong and okay. That’s what men do, right? Well, that wasn’t exactly me – but it was kind of me. My impulse as a grieving father was to shield him from my truth. I wanted to let my son know he could come to me with his troubles – and I was worried if I was an emotional wreck, he may be afraid to talk to me.

But then I thought to myself, “How is this teaching my son to live an authentic life?”  “How will he feel safe if I’m pretending to be something I’m not?”  On the heels of pretending to be strong, I told my son I was okay, but I wasn’t okay ... and that was okay. He nodded to me with a sigh of relief – because he knew I was being honest and in honesty there is safety.

That essay “I’m Okay, But I’m Not Okay, And That’s Okay” has been read by millions. Why do those stats matter? They do, and they don’t. They don’t matter concerning me; they only matter because of what it signals. It signals that people want to make sense of the paradox of life. How can someone be okay and not okay at the same time? And is that okay? People were drawn to that story because they realized they weren’t wrong, broken, or abnormal to be two (or more) things at once.

You see, we’re never just one thing. We’re many things at once. We are both harmony and contradiction, love and anger, faith and doubt, grief and joy, fear and courage … the list of dualities is infinite. If you are one thing, you also possess its shadow. 

The trouble is because we’re human; we seek symmetry and safety. Oppositely, paradox feels a lot like brokenness and danger. As far as I can tell, it seems that running from unavoidable pain and discomfort is where we miss out on life’s deepest discoveries. 

Learning to sit in the paradox is where we discover profound truths about ourselves and others.

At the surface of things, learnings from the paradox look a lot like this:

• The more we learn, the more we realize we know nothing.

• If you want to learn deep patience, spend time with someone that deeply annoys you.

• If you want to understand forgiveness, look to the person who most hurt you.

• Empathy and suffering are symbiotic soulmates.

• You cannot have courage without fear.

• Healing hurts.

So, when I look at this tender photo of my wife and son, I’m awash in a curious potpourri of grief and gratitude. As Rumi wisely wrote, “What hurts you, blesses you.”  And in that paradox, I sit. I pray. I listen. I learn.