What I'm Afraid to Forget

I told myself I wouldn't say anything today. Grief doesn't need an audience, I thought. It can do its work quietly, the way water moves underground — you don't see it, but even when the land above it is as dry as ours is now, it’s still there, moving through the Triassic siltstone and into the aquifer below.

Then today came and, regardless of how hard I’ve tried, how hard I want to forget that today is the day, I can’t. A year ago today, Jordan Bryce left this world for the one beyond the stars.

What I've noticed this past year is this: grief doesn't just make you miss a person. It makes you into something you didn't expect. A digger. An archaeologist of your own life, on your knees in the dirt of your own memory, sifting. Hoping. Afraid of what you might not find, all the while trying to remember more.  The brain is a funny thing.  It never crossed my mind until last year that you could have a million different thoughts and yet never actually stop thinking about something, someone, not even for a second. 

I remember his hands and how delicate he was with a root ball and the soil we were putting back around it.  I remember specific mornings here — the light, the cold, the two of us talking about what this place could become — those mornings feel solid, like I could step back into them. Man, I wish I could.  I remember being too hard on him about not putting some shelves together correctly and as fast as I thought he should have.  I’d love to rewind time and make some things right, be a better teacher, a better uncle.   

Then there are other things. Things I reach for and find the outline of, not the thing itself. A laugh. The exact words of a conversation.  Weird talks we had on burn days or days here at the nursery when everything went right. The way he said something that made me stop and think. I can feel the shape of it. I cannot always find the substance.  I wish I could.  Every. Last. Word. 

That's the grief nobody warned me about. Not the missing — I expected the missing. It's the forgetting. The slow, involuntary forgetting. The way time keeps moving even when you've asked it, quietly, desperately, to please just stop.

I’ve mentioned many times how Jordan helped get the nursery started, some of the work he helped with.  What I haven’t mentioned was how his belief in me made me stronger, more relentless, more tenacious.  There were days when this place was more idea than ground, more hope than inventory.  His faith in me, even on my worst days — that’s not something I’ll forget. Some fires burn too deep.

What I'm learning — and I use that word carefully, because I don't think grief ever fully teaches, it mostly just shows — is that love and loss are not opposites. They are the same country. You cannot grieve what you did not love, and every act of remembrance, even the desperate late-night digging through the mind trying to recover what's fading, is itself an act of love.

The searching is love. The fear of forgetting is love. The writing of this, the breaking of the silence I promised myself I'd keep — that is love too.

A year.  A long, hard year. The farm is still here. The nursery Jordan believed in is in its first full spring. Most of the trees we planted together are still growing towards the sky.

I miss him in ways I don't always have words for.

But I remember him. And on the days when the memory goes soft at the edges and I can't find the detail I'm reaching for — I remember that too. The reaching itself. The unwillingness to let go.

That unwillingness is the truest thing I know how to offer him today.

The last day we spent together. March 18th, 2025. Jordan snapped this photo from top of the excavator boom. Things sure have changed since then.