Yesterday after work I was wandering through Publix grabbing Dad’s groceries and was just about to check out when I heard a rather quiet voice behind me say “Mr. Roger?”. I turned around to see Jessica, one of T.J.’s former girlfriends, and a close friend of the family …

I’m sitting here in my younger son’s dining room, catching up on some time and attendance entries from the past week, that I put off ‘til it was almost too late, by the light of the full-size Christmas tree and the toddler-sized tree beside it.

December 23rd was a reminder for me. It was a reminder that there are still wounds covered with bandages that I’ve ignored too long. Bandages that, when removed unexpectedly, reopen the painful wounds of memories buried just below the surface. My emotional bandage was ripped off unexpectedly by an unsuspecting innocent bystander asking a simple […]

My professional life has been spent fixing things or helping other people figure out how to fix things. I’m a machinist, tooling designer and occasional interpreter between mechanics and engineers. My job is to lead a small team taking theoretical repair schemes and making them reality. I thought I had a pretty good handle on processing grief after losing my mom in 2003. I was wrong. Suddenly losing my son in 2020 rocked my reality in ways I never could have imagined.

Trent Harden, better known to most of us as T.J., was the most naturally-gifted mechanic I’ve ever known. He had a gift for solving the puzzle and putting stuff together and making it work better than it had before (most of the time anyway). He was deeply-feeling and constantly sought acceptance from everyone around him, often to a fault.