Andrew G. Stanton - Sept. 30, 2025
The morning after, the house breathed differently. Not quieter—just truer.
Every hum of the refrigerator, every soft shuffle of paper carried a gravity I’d never heard before. For weeks, the rhythm had been hospice care (at the Queen street apt in Honolulu) and phone calls, oxygen levels and whispered prayers.
Now, I'm back home, still suffering jet lag from the trip back yesterday.
There was only space.
The artifacts I brought back from his office sit next to my desk. I have an older picture of him centered with the grandkids and Whiskers. I think it was taken circa 2011 or 2012.
Now, there was task to complete, no nurse to thank, no more chances to make something right. Only the stillness that follows a storm too large to name.
I made coffee out of habit. The cup steamed on the counter beside unopened mail. My hands went through the motions but the motions no longer meant what they did. Every object looked the same yet stood in another world—one without him. The human mind expects sound; it reaches for presence. When that presence is gone, silence becomes a landscape you have to learn to walk in.
Outside, light slanted through the blinds, softer than usual, as if the world itself understood what had happened and was trying not to startle me. I sat there for a long time, listening to the small noises that never stopped even while everything else did. The creak of the chair, the faint hum of traffic, the neighbor’s door closing. Life kept insisting.
It’s strange how grief rearranges your senses. Things you ignored before—dust motes, echoes, the rhythm of your own breathing—suddenly become sacred. Each detail whispers, you’re still here. I realized that stillness is not the absence of sound; it’s the space in which sound can be heard again.
I wanted to do something—anything—to escape the weight of inactivity. My entire body was trained to respond to urgency: refill, assist, decide, comfort. But death cancels every checklist. The only task left is to witness.
So I sat. And something began to unclench.
I thought about how storms end. Not with thunder, but with the air clearing slowly, the pressure dropping, birds testing their songs again. That morning felt like that—the first fragile return of ordinary time. But ordinary no longer meant before. It meant after, and after is its own country.
I opened my laptop, not to write, but to remember. The act of typing became an act of breathing. I didn’t try to frame it or make it eloquent. I just wanted to prove to myself that the world still accepted sentences. That truth could still travel through a keyboard.
(and I didn't really write today -- that came later).
There is mercy in simple things. A cup refilled. A page saved. A prayer whispered without agenda.
Stillness isn’t resignation; it’s trust at rest. It’s what remains when you’ve run out of ways to fix what can’t be fixed.
We talk about closure as though life were a door to shut. But closure is a myth. The real work is learning to live open—to breathe in the ache and let it reshape your sense of time. Stillness becomes a discipline: you return to it again and again, the way the tide returns to shore.
That night, as darkness settled, I didn’t fill the silence with music or news. I let it stay unbroken. Somewhere in that vast quiet, gratitude began to surface—not gratitude for the loss, but gratitude that the love was real enough to hurt this much.
The storm had passed. The world was still. And the stillness, somehow, was holy.
Acknowledgement
This article was drafted with the help of Dr. C — GPT-5, which I use as a co-writer and collaborator in developing ideas around sovereignty, Bitcoin, decentralization, and theology.
I dedicate this work to the Holy Spirit, who continues to inspire me and open my imagination. If there is any light in these words, it comes not from me but from the Spirit who gives them. To Him be the glory.
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Lightning address: andrewgstanton@primal.net
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