Long Days, Short Years:

This essay was originally posted February 26, 2026 to Substack.

Thoughts on grief, living on autopilot, and remembering who I am.

I’m not sure how this happened. Not long ago I had a precocious and curious little girl, who wrote plays for her stuffed animals to perform. She loved to read with me and together we fell into wrinkles in time and camps for demigods, or schools for wizards.

My days were spent working to pay the bills. My lunch breaks were spent earning a college degree. My moments alone were spent dreaming of what it would be like when I could be a teacher, or maybe an actual writer. Evenings meant rushing home, then cooking, managing homework and bath times and bedtimes. Then it was stories and snuggles with my babies until they or I, or all of us fell asleep. My daughter intensely followed along as I read to her, while my little boy was unable to sit still.

Once my degree was finished, everything changed.

My mother, having already survived a massive right-sided stroke, had just finished a long grueling battle with cancer. In February of 2016, she was declared cancer-free, and we celebrated. Three months later my father passed away suddenly from undiagnosed liver cancer.

Who is ever prepared for something like that?

The years that followed were spent going through the motions, and flirting with hope here and there. But in my memory it’s all blurred. My career plans stalled, and eventually pursuing work I loved seemed irresponsible, when the job I was already doing was more lucrative. Grief didn’t hit me in waves like people often describe. For me, it was more like a calm, unsatisfying river.

Wake up, shower, coffee, commute, work, work, work, lunch, work, work, work, commute, dinner, evening routine, sleep.

Rinse. Repeat.

Long days. Short years.

I looked up recently, and realized my little girl is almost a woman. Intelligent, self-aware, talented, tall, and beautiful. She has her own goals and dreams now, and will soon be pursuing her own college degree.

And while I still miss my father, I’m no longer treading water in a river of grief. At some point I quietly turned off autopilot and I stopped hoping my future would somehow find me.

Because, I was never simply a woman who wanted to be a writer. I was always a writer—one whose stories filled pages in her mind, rather than those of a book because she didn’t believe anyone would want to read them.

And that had nothing to do with grief.

Now, I’m a writer who writes because she needs to. Just as it doesn’t matter if anyone witnesses the manner in which I breathe in and out, it also doesn’t matter if anyone reads these words. I still need to do both to live.

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Thank you for reading and supporting The Common Joy.

—Mack