After my father died, I stopped reading.
That is the sentence that surprises people most when I say it especially people who know me, who know that books have been the great constant of my life, that my father himself was the one who pointed me toward words and stories and the particular kind of thinking that comes from spending time inside other people’s lives on a page. Reading was not just a habit for me. It was closer to breathing. And then, for a while, I simply could not do it.
I would pick up a book and open it and read the same paragraph four times without a single word landing. My mind kept slipping away from the sentence, away from the story, back to the same place it always went in those months. I put the book down. I picked up another one. Same thing. Eventually I stopped trying and told myself it would come back when it was ready, and I sat in the quiet and waited.
Grief does that. It takes things from you that you did not expect to lose. Not just the person though that is the center of everything, the wound that everything else radiates out from but the smaller things too. The ability to concentrate. The interest in food. The capacity to find something funny. The desire to begin anything new. These losses inside the loss are rarely talked about, but they are real, and they can be frightening if you don’t know they are a normal part of what you are going through.
Then, one night I cannot tell you exactly when, because grief does not keep a neat calendar I picked up a book again. I don’t remember which one. What I remember is a single paragraph somewhere in the middle of it, a handful of sentences in which a writer described a feeling I had been carrying alone and had no name for. And something in me that had been clenched very tightly for a very long time loosened, just slightly, just enough.
That was when I understood what reading actually is.
It is not an escape, though people call it that. It is not a distraction, though it can feel like one. What it actually is, what I believe it is at its deepest level is the discovery that you are not alone. That someone else, somewhere, in some other time and place and life entirely, has been where you are standing. Has felt what you are feeling. Has sat in the same dark and found a way to put it into words. And in putting it into words, he extended a hand across every distance and said: I was here too. You are not the first. You will not be the last. And there is a way through.
Books did not fix my grief. I want to be honest about that, the way I try to be honest about everything connected to this subject. Nothing fixes grief. There is no book, no therapy, no amount of time that makes the loss not real. My father is no less gone because I read the right paragraph at the right moment. But reading gave me something I desperately needed in those months. Witness. The sense that what I was feeling had been felt before and survived before and even, eventually, transformed before into something that could be shared.
There is also something specific about the act of reading that I think is uniquely useful in grief. It requires just enough attention to pull you out of your own spiral, but not so much that it becomes exhausting. It is quiet. It is private. It asks nothing of you except that you show up and follow the words. In a time when every social interaction felt like a performance when being around people meant managing their worry about me on top of my own grief books were the one place I did not have to perform anything. I could be as broken as I actually was and the book would not flinch.
I read differently now than I did before. I read more slowly. I will underline more. I stop at sentences that move me and sit with them instead of hurrying past. Loss has a way of changing your relationship with time by making you less interested in rushing through things and more interested in staying inside the moments that matter. That has carried over into how I read. I am less interested in finishing and more interested in feeling.
My father was the one who gave me books. He was the one who believed, long before I did, that words would be the thing I was made for. He did not live to read this one. That is a grief I carry separately, quietly, in a place I return to often. But I like to think that in writing it in filling pages with the truest things I know I am doing the thing he always believed I would do. And somewhere in that, there is a kind of conversation still continuing.
If you are going through something hard right now, I hope you find the book that finds you. The one with the paragraph that reaches through and touches the part of you that has gone quiet. They exist. They are out there. And sometimes, in the right moment, a few sentences from a stranger who has never met you can do what nothing else quite can.
They can make you feel, in the middle of everything, a little less alone.