Something in me has been loosening lately, a quiet shift I can’t quite name. I think what’s changing is that I’ve started to see my helplessness as part of the story, not my failure within it. Does that even make sense?

What’s shifting in me isn’t just how I think about control; it’s how I live with helplessness.

A few months after Dad passed, my sister said something that gutted me. At the time, it sounded cruel, as if she’d stopped believing he could’ve been saved. I snapped at her. But when the topic came up again recently, I realized how differently I heard her words this time.

She wasn’t cruel; she was right, and I just couldn’t bear it yet.

Both she and Mom have said I put Dad on a pedestal. And I did do that when I was younger. The definition of a Daddy’s girl. But when I blame myself for his undoing, I don’t pretend he’s better than he was. It’s more like I’m putting myself down by trying to hold up his wreckage.

Libby could already see that his pain was separate from ours. But long ago I’d merged with it, convinced I could patch every crack if I studied them closely enough.

Back then I was still trying to solve Dad. If I could map every receipt, every phone call, every relapse, maybe I could find the moment where I should have stopped it—the hinge, the missed cue. But there’s no hinge. No version of me who could have said the perfect thing or yanked him back from the abyss.

I couldn’t pull him back, yet I keep trying anyway.

That’s the muscle memory of love: reaching even after the fall, as if human hands could change gravity.

Part of me still believes I should have tried harder, been louder, stayed longer. That wanting is old. It’s wired into my DNA. But I’m learning not to exile that part of myself anymore.

Helplessness doesn’t mean I didn’t love him enough. It means I loved him so much I kept trying, even when it stopped being possible.

Grief still tricks me sometimes, offering the illusion of an emergency I can still answer. But this isn’t rescue work anymore. It’s witness work. Maybe that’s what mercy really is—staying with the ache long enough to tell the truth about it.

Maybe staying with the ache is what love looks like when there’s nothing left to save.

inspo: a #dailyprompt question (I forget what it was) that’s already disappeared, naturally // another mini-revelation // memoir musings // spending so long outlining the year 2020 // realizing the pattern isn’t solvable, only “witnessable” // mostly, thinking about a recent conversation with my super smart little sister

Kinsey Keys

aspiring memoirist rummaging through my noggin, stubbornly clutching the past to my chest like it’s a newborn babe starved for mother's milk.

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