My uncle’s favorite book was Tao Te Ching. "It’s full of wisdom," he once told a friend. "It has helped me out a lot." His taste in literature was nurtured by a childhood spent in Asia, and he grew this connection to Taoism like one might grow a beard—profundity smoothed the sharp contours of his face, imbued each wink with meaning.

 

But it wasn’t just nostalgia that drove his love for Tao. He loved Tao because he loved Big Thoughts, Important Questions, the ones that stick in your head and refuse to let go. Dave wandered through pages of philosophy to find some overarching purpose, some Truth, some coherence within his absurdity. (We aren’t a religious family, but in the end he invoked God, maybe for this reason.)

 

It makes sense, then, that in the last months of his life, my uncle turned to poetry. tell me a poem, he typed in a 3 a.m. email—no greeting, no context. The ultimate search for Big Thoughts.

 

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After Dave jumped, and his body was discovered, and we scattered his ashes at the foot of this gnarly California Bay tree, I googled the stages of grief. I did this out of impulse mostly, out of an urge to find something that might make sense of the senseless. Stages imply a neat progression—a linear trek from Denial to Acceptance with pit stops at Bargaining and Anger—and I hoped this neatness would order the overwhelming messiness of loss.

 

But tracking the stages of grief felt misdirected. I didn't need clarity; the facts were there. I didn't need solace; this wasn't a matter of "feeling better." I needed to adapt. And so it makes sense that, two years after Dave died by suicide, I turned to poetry.

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When Dave died, I was given his copy of Tao Te Ching. For those first few months, I tried to read it. I searched those pages for the reason he did what he did, a sentence I could point to and "get it"—as though it were a mere question of comprehension.

 

I failed. I began reading Tao Te Ching as a remedy for insomnia. Lao Tzu’s words beckoned sleep, and I’d wake up the next morning with a guilty-nauseous feeling at the base of my stomach. In falling asleep to my uncle’s favorite words, I felt like I had failed him, somehow. I hadn’t properly grieved, properly forgiven, properly paid homage to his memory.

 

And now I look at these poems, the ones I told two years too late, and it all feels incomplete. There are gaps, places my uncle slipped through and I couldn’t retrieve him, or his memory, or his laugh. I don’t capture the quirky Dave, the uncle with sideburns and crow’s feet and a monkey tattoo, who had an arm span so wide you’d think he could hug the earth, who ran into the Pacific fully clothed.

 

* * *

 

Maybe my poems feel incomplete because memory’s incomplete. Like San Francisco fog it lifts, slips, sinks; devious, it never reveals its own intangibility. Clouds seem sturdy until you fly right through them. People seem sturdy until we lose them.

 

Maybe we give people a coherence that doesn’t exist. When someone’s in the room, we don’t have to remember—we hug a body and feel its warmth and think we know a whole person, forgetting that we experience people as fragments. Moments remembered, moments unremembered, moments never experienced. And in loss, we recognize the incoherence that always was.

 

Maybe healing is not—and can never be—a heartfelt filling of potholed memory. Poetry was never made to fill gaps. In the stony face of loss, poetry compels and reveals. It gives us permission to transgress rules of grammar, prescriptive Google searches, guilted insomnia. It encourages us to fracture language—to dislocate words from their linguistic zip ties and repurpose them as truths. Poetry lets me break something other than myself—to break something to unbreak myself.

 

And maybe my uncle searched for poetry because he also wanted to break something, because he wanted to find meaning in that brokenness and share it with us.

 

Maybe this is what it is to adapt.

 

* * *

 

Breaking to heal feels violent at worst, oxymoronic at best. But this poetry gives me something that the stages of grief couldn’t: solace in shards, meaning in fragment, lifetimes in moments. Maybe grief, healing, memory, poetry—all are about accepting the gaps, living in the gaps, acknowledging that space lets us breathe.

 

And so it makes sense that this collection feels always already incomplete: it’s an homage to improper memory. It’s nonlinear, disjointed, full of holes. It aches in some places, heals in others, angers occasionally, forgives tentatively.

 

Which is to say: I believe, fundamentally, in the power of words. But I understand that words, like memories, like people, contain gaps. And it is in those gaps—between letters and punctuation, between unremembered memories, between lives lived and lives ended and lives recalled—that acceptance grows.