We thought we knew what was coming. My dad had multiple sclerosis for years, and MS teaches a family to brace, to watch for the slow decline, to make a quiet peace with the long road ahead.
It was meningitis that took him. Not years, days. He was gone before I understood he was leaving. And it happened just as I was settling into a new life in Nashville, the city where Martori is built now.
Grief never asked whether I was ready. It moved in. And it stayed.
No one warns you that the hardest part isn't the day it happens. It's the long middle: the months and years after, when everyone's life has resumed and yours is still standing in the doorway.
For a long time I could not find peace. There is no trick to it. But here is the true thing, the one I needed someone to tell me. It does come back. Not as forgetting. As a life that can hold the loss and still be a life.
There is a light at the end of this. Not the end of grief, but you, still here, learning to carry it.
What losing him taught me is that love does not end when a person does. It keeps looking for somewhere to go. Mine went into this.
My dad was my hero. He is the reason Martori exists, and the reason behind everything it makes: Vigil, Sanctuary, Meadow. Each one holds a person through something hard. Vigil holds grief, with no streaks, no guilt, nothing measured. Just a house you can return to, to write the letters and tend what remains, at whatever pace grief actually moves.
I built Vigil because grief is not a problem to be solved. It is a person to be kept. And no one should have to keep them alone.