GAME QUEST

Video games are important to me (duh). They’re a core part of who I am and how I like to spend my time. They’ve given me countless hours of enjoyment, and they mean even more since I met my wife and have someone to share all these wonderful moments with together.

However this year I looked at my list of games I played and realized that most of what inspired and excited me came from other sources. Video games are just one part of a holistic world of experience, and the more I thought about the past year, the more I enjoyed pairing these categories with other life events that had meaning to me. So I’d say excuse the overlong side-views into my personal life I paired with each category, but also you’re on my blog and I’m writing this for me. So enjoy!

Hindsight is 20/24

The first time I tried to play Hyper Light Drifter, I bounced off pretty hard. I couldn’t figure out where I was going or how to stay alive longer than five seconds. This time, my wife offered a single piece of advice that changed my entire gameplay experience: “You should go East first.”

My Hyper Light Drifter experience was corrected. I did not go that direction the first time I tried the game and quickly found myself in a world of hurt. I was finally able to find a ramp into the game and enjoyed its hack-and-slash and movement based mechanics much more. It’s a great little game that I’m glad I finally got to experience.

Florida. That place sucks huh? I was just as surprised as anyone that when we decided to take a vacation that would get us as close to lounging on a nice resort as cheaply as possible that we ended up going to Florida.

It was fantastic. We found the perfect tucked away hotel right on the beach. The water was warm. The cocktails were tasty. We didn’t have to go anywhere or do anything other than read books on the beach and go for walks along the moonlit shore at night. We ran into someone who was checking turtle nests and had a nice conversation about local preservation. I felt myself unwind. Bliss.

Multiplayer Game of the Year

I have no idea what the hell is going on with Destiny 2. It’s the messiest game I’ve ever played. The story is intentionally unintelligible because you can’t play cut content and the UI is the most atrocious UX experience I’ve ever had.

It’s also fun as hell. It’s been so long since I’ve played a PC shooter like this. The guns feels great, the levels are really interesting to traverse, and the lore is just silly enough that you get the “oh shit” moments when they happen.

But the peak Destiny 2 experience was when a friend came over for a LAN party. We set up in our living room, my wife on the PS5, him on his gaming laptop, and me at ad-hoc gaming station with my new desktop computer on the dining room table. We ran a few difficult missions and it was the most fun multiplayer experience I’ve had in a long time. The difficulty of the game makes team tactics something you need and want to employ, and finally felling a boss on your tenth try as you each sharpen your skills to the point of perfection is satisfying in a way I haven’t experienced with an MMO.

It’s a shame the game is so obtuse to get into, because once you do, there’s nothing better than lootin’ and shootin’ with your friends. I can’t wait to play more.

Every once in a while, we get a hankering to learn Mahjong. This year we bought our own set, complete with a felt top for the table that makes the tiles slide nice and easy. It’s been a lot of fun having groups of friends over to play a simplified version of the game (one day we’ll master Riichi Mahjong, I swear). It strikes a nice balance of being fun, but chill, and I’m so thankful we have so many friends that are down to play.

Waiting for Game-dot

I’m currently rounding out my playthrough of every mainline Final Fantasy game with Final Fantasy V, and now I finally have an appetite to see what the sequel to one of my favorite entries has in store. I avoided it for the longest time because I used to think I hated X when I was a stupid child, and then when I finally played it and loved it I thought the experience was so complete I didn’t want to touch it again.

But now Final Fantasy V has poisoned me with its class system so I simply must see what the dress sphere is all about.

I’m not really one for New Year’s resolutions, but last year I had an itch to read more, so I made a concerted effort to read more books. My vague goal was to read at least twelve books – roughly one a month. I not only did this by reading a variety of nature books, manga, and fiction outside my usual genre wheel house, but I found some of the most moving and important works to me in Ursula K. LeGuin’s Left Hand of Darkness and Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses. Both books have become part of my psyche in a way I can’t imagine being without.

For 2025, I simply want to eat better. I want to eat less and finally let my brain catch up with the fact that I’m not in my early 20’s anymore and don’t need a second full helping of every meal. I also want to eat less meat and eat more veggies and fish, expanding my palette further outside my wheelhouse. Watch this space in 2026!

Game That Made You Think

Perhaps the most literal entry on the list, Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is a genre of puzzle game that is usually outside of my comfort zone. Past puzzle and mystery games that I’ve loved have had a keen narrative focus, like stitching together the last voyage of a doomed ship or unearthing the history of a relic passed from secret order to secret order. I lean towards puzzle games that are more archeology than logic puzzle.

Lorelei has that narrative unearthing too, but the bulk of its brain benders are logic puzzles. When the game starts, I found myself frozen in place, unsure what to do or where to go next or where to even begin deciphering the symbols, locked doors and secret codes it threw at me. Slowly but surely, and with the help of pen and paper, my wife and I methodically uncovered the clues on our own, having only looked up one hint.

It was a very satisfying solve, a different kind of game than I usually enjoy, but the rush of unlocking the door or shouting at the screen when a pattern clicked into place was a high rarely matched.

I’m a software engineer by trade, and it’s a career that always felt like more of a job to me than a passion that I enjoyed. That is until I changed teams this year and had the opportunity to work as a full stack developer. Finally, I felt like I had enough of a foundational base that I went from getting tripped up on syntax to understanding computer science and software engineering as a trade.

It mirrors perfectly how I felt about Lorelei. Each new project felt like an indecipherable behemoth, something so dense and requiring a vast amount of knowledge I didn’t have that I’d get overwhelmed and want to give up. Now, each new challenge is an opportunity to learn and explore. I’ve started to enjoy my work and relish the rush that comes with unlocking each new proverbial door (which usually just reveals more puzzles…)

Glad I Stuck With It

It took me 26 years to finish Pokemon: Yellow. It was the first Pokemon game I received as a gift as a child and it spawned an on-again-off-again obsession with the series ever since. But I’ve never finished a game. I get too bogged down, lost, and bored by the two-thirds mark in most playthroughs.

I won’t lie, it took me forever to get through this playthrough as well. It took me over a year to see through the Elite Four, and each time I picked the game up after a hiatus I had to remember where I was and what I was doing. But I’m an adult now, with access to two Game Boy related devices and I was able to figure out how to break the game on my own by trading myself for more powerful Pokemon and learning how to get the most broken moves. See ya, Lance.

This entry stands on its own as one of the most intense gaming memories of the year for me – when completing the game, you’re put back in Pallet Town, the most primal kernel of my gaming memory. The sign in the middle of town reads: “PALLET TOWN: Shades of your journey await!” Who knew I’d come back here after so long, where my gaming journey really did begin?

Best Music

After playing Persona 4 and 5, I had thought I heard it all when it came to Persona music. But of course I was wrong! Persona 3 surprised me with its hip-hop influences and recurring motifs that are given different context as you progress through the game. I can’t listen to some tracks without turning into a blubbering mess. Even when the songs come up in a mix, they have a weight to them that other Persona tracks lack.

Since Covid, I’ve been to a lot of live music shows, but most of them were either outdoor venues or gigantic arenas. These shows were fine, and I got to check off some more artists on my bucket list, but they all felt perfunctory and too distant. The gigantic price tag that comes with these tickets is also a turn off, and I’ve become cynical about live music and the music industry.

That is until my wife and I drove an hour and a half to Connecticut to see Kishi Bashi. The venue was small and intimate. We were four feet from the stage and you could see the beads of sweat on the performers. There were no jumbo-trons or laser lights or elaborate dance routines (there were outfit changes though). It was just the crowd and music. The band was incredible. I hadn’t been this close to such raw musical talent in years. His energy with the crowd was palpable. It was, hands down, the best live show I’d been to since the pandemic and a good reminder of how life changing live music can be. You don’t need much to put on an intense live show, and I hope we can go to more small, local venues this year.

Unexpected Joy

At the beginning of 2024, I wanted to play smaller games and decided to dip my toe into the Playdate, the square, canary yellow portable game console with the crank. I have mixed feelings about the device itself, but each week was a new chance for the console to surprise me with its two-games-a-week drip of seasonal releases.

My favorite came within the first week. Casual Birder is a game about taking pictures of birds. It wasn’t a hard sell for me, but what was unexpected was how good it felt to grab a photo of each bird. Like real birding, you had to do some light-puzzle solving to complete your life list. It took research to figure out where each bird lived, how to draw it out, and when to snap the shot. It was a brief celebration of what it’s like to fall in love with birds yourself, and I found the bite sized 2D Pokemon Snap a charming experience that’s stayed with me.

Birding could very well be the Unexpected Joy of my thirties. This year, my favorite birding memory occurred during migration season. My wife and I went to a local trail and saw the usual fare of titmice, chickadees and a pileated woodpecker. It wasn’t until we climbed to the top of the park’s small mountain that we heard a very unfamiliar trill. Merlin quickly ID’d the bird as a Prairie Warbler! It was such a rare find, and we only caught glimpses of it as it flitted from bush to bush before flying off. On our way down, we came across a black-and-white warbler just sitting in a tree, singing loudly. Another great find!

It was a wonderful treat to be able to come across those birds, no matter how brief the encounter. It proved that going out with the intention of birding could indeed show us something we hadn’t seen before. We love all of our backyard birds, but to see something unique and special you have to make a special effort to go out and be in the world.

Favorite Encounter

As we were approaching the end of Crow Country, my wife turned to me and said “You know the problem with games like this is after all the setup and mystery, the reveal is always disappointing.”

We’ve never been so happy to eat crow as we were when we finished Crow Country. The horror at the core of the game is undoubtedly earned, a novel experience that, like all good horror, feels appropriate for our day and age. It disturbed us to our core because the terror is, like the shambling half formed blobs that haunt the titular amusement park, half recognizable as something very real. Finally, a game that leans on the PlayStation 1 era nostalgia to tell me something new. What a nightmare. Bravo.

I don’t want to relive the 2024 election, but the aftermath in the days that followed triggered a lot of soul searching for everyone. We decided to venture out and make a concerted effort to attend a local Democratic Socialist of America meeting with some local community members at an arcade bar the night after. We met lots of local townies, people new to the community, queer and marginalized folks, and passers-by who were just curious about what was going on.

We can’t always change what the future has in store for us, but attending that meeting was an important reminder that looking near your own home and helping your neighbors is the best place to counter political cynicism. You can have a tangible impact, or you can simply bring joy, and it felt good to be reminded how powerful a physical, local community can be.

Vicarious Gamer Award

I’m nervous whenever I revisit something I consider foundational. What if it isn’t as I remembered? What if the mechanics are dated, or the themes juvenile, or the music too well worn to have an impact?

I shouldn’t have worried. My wife played Chrono Trigger for the first time this year and I am happy to report that this game has got it. I think it is the best 2D JRPG of all time. The pacing is impeccable. The characters are characters. The ATB based gameplay is taut and the music is a classic for a reason.

Chrono Trigger is one of my favorite games of all time. Its message is timeless and the story packs more of a wallop as we feel our own planet crying out in fear of its destruction. The famous campfire scene is every bit as moving as I had remembered it being. There has never been another game like Chrono Trigger, and I’m thankful to have shared my first revisit as an adult with the person I love the most.

This summer, a pair of Eastern Phoebes decided to make a nest under our deck. The adults were impossibly cute. We enjoyed watching them hang around our backyard with their tails tick-tocking back and forth before they’d jump out into the field to catch a bug. Their trill phoebe! call was often the first song we heard in the morning all summer.

When the female laid her eggs, we would check with anticipation every day, keeping distance, but not being able to resist having a first hand look. After they hatched, we kept an eye on the nest until one morning they all flew from the nest in a flurry and went off into the world. It was a beautiful experience and we missed them terribly when they left. I hope they come back next year!

(In)famous Award

Code Veronica X isn’t just the worst Resident Evil game I’ve played, it’s one of the worst games I’ve played period. Enemies can hit you from across big rooms, even if they’re off screen. There are respawning poison bugs that are impossible to hit in the middle of an important hallway you have to traverse often. Enemies respawned at all, which ruined the precious classic Resident Evil resource economy. There’s Steve. Oh, and one hit KO boss fights. Also playable character switches that happen without warning that can completely fuck your inventory…

It’s like Capcom decided to take everything about the Resident Evil franchise and tweak it ever so slightly so that it was annoying as hell. It really goes to show how a handful of micro-decisions can make or break a game. I can’t wait to play Resident Evil 6.

I agreed to go to midnight mass during Christmas with my family because I thought maybe coming at church from an anthropological point of view, I’d get some kind of cozy/spooky Christmas vibe from the mass. Turns out I didn’t. It sucked through and through.

What I did get out of it was the freedom from pretending like I still had one foot in the faith. This was the year I finally, explicitly told my family that I wasn’t Catholic. When we went to the mass, I didn’t pretend to say the prayers. I didn’t receive communion. I didn’t even enjoy the aesthetics or the vibe. It was weird, but it was refreshing. My family didn’t bat and eye and nobody said anything about it after. It was an immense relief and I feel like we’ve all been able to turn a page here.

“Oh yeah, I did play that, didn’t I?”

I had never played the original Quake. I decided to rectify that this year since I’ve been an Unreal boy for so long. It was…fine! It didn’t really stick with me. I think the areas and enemies get a bit repetitive, but at least the game doesn’t overstay its welcome. I just prefer the varied landscapes and more ambient atmosphere of Unreal. As a history lesson, I’m glad I played it, but I’m not compelled to play more.

Trent Reznor’s soundtrack did unnerve me though. There are moments of the game I felt my anxiety mounting through sheer audio design alone.

I love baseball. I don’t watch it all the time, but when I do it’s when the Yankees completely blow the World Series by playing little league baseball against a team that actually deserves to be there.

Backlog Game of the Year

Finally, I got to my Waiting for Game-dot entry from last year.

Mass Effect is great. Both 1 and 2 have jelled together in my brain to make one cohesive experience. The combat experience of both games have left me wanting, but the narrative decision making and character based writing is so impressive it makes you wonder how they ever released Veilguard with this pedigree.

I played a Renegade Femshep and the ways in which I got to fuck with people and cause friction with everyone on the Normandy never failed to bring a smile to my face. The game let me be an asshole and also let me revel in it. Impressively, Mass Effect manages to tell its story regardless of the personal character choices I made. Bioware managed to walk the tightrope of letting you play a character however you want while telling a coherent plot that involves galactic federations and characters with their own agendas across the span of two games.

It’s an impressive piece of gaming history that I’m glad still holds up. I can’t wait for what is surely going to be the satisfying conclusion to the trilogy when I get to Mass Effect 3 this year.

I know I’m not alone in having an aversion to watching, reading, or playing something that is hyped up by literally everyone you know for years on end. I don’t know how one develops this aversion, but whatever the case I finally got over it and watched Avatar: The Last Airbender.

I am now one of those people that will breathlessly tell you that you should watch Avatar: The Last Airbender.

I’m not mad it took me this long to watch. Cracking the series open at 32, watching along with my wife who was re-watching it for the first time in years, let me see and understand both the childhood swagger of Aang and friends as well as the melancholic and very adult Uncle Iroh who wants the best for the next generation. It hit me at just the right time, and there were many episodes in a row that left us sobbing on the couch.

In an era where animators can’t get jobs and stories are being sanded down by both corporate greed and AI, if not by newer generations not wanting to engage with anything morally complicated at all, Avatar is a reminder that the stars can align and we deserve stories and art of this caliber more often than they come around. Truly timeless.

Didn’t Click for Me

This one hurts. Final Fantasy VII: Remake was my favorite game of the last decade, and Rebirth was the only game I had allowed myself to be hyped for since I begged my parents for Jak II for Christmas.

What a disappointment.

To be concise, the game seems to have forgotten how to tell a character-centric story. Big plot events unfolded and I yelled at the screen for anyone to say anything that indicated it mattered to them. Moments that should have weight and gravitas are quickly resolved and moved on from, if they weren’t being interrupted by Yuffie screaming about materia. There is no forward momentum for our cast of characters, nor was there any indication that the game knew we knew what was in store by the end, something Remake gleefully played with to heart-wrenching effect.

The open world areas suck. The side quests are monotonous and dull. There are too many distracting mini games that bog the momentum down. Relegating character moments to specific side quests made everyone feel emotionally detached from everything else and one another. I could never get into the flow of combat because each character played so differently and they were constantly shaking up your party composition.

The thing that hurts the most is feeling like I was going to be experiencing something special by the end of Remake. The ending of Rebirth made me realize Square-Enix has no idea what they’re doing. It’s a bitter disappointment that overwhelms the moments of the game I did enjoy.

Cooking. I joke that I am cursed when it comes to ovens. When we attempted to cook premade meat pies, the oven just broke. The first time we used our broiler with the new stove, it simply didn’t heat up. When I tried to bake simple chocolate chip cookies, they never came out correctly despite me following the precise instructions. There were a handful of other frustrating culinary mishaps this year and they always get me down.

I’m determined not to give up. I hate not being confident in the kitchen and feeling that wave of dread when we have to bring a dish to a party. There are some things I’m okay at making, but I want to continue to find new and delicious dishes that I can truly master and be proud to make. I made some improvements in the grilling department, but 2024 definitely wasn’t the year I call myself a good cook. Oh well, one dish at a time and maybe 2025 will be the year.

Best Mechanic

Play by mail isn’t anything new. My father has told me stories about the time he played Dungeons and Dragons by mail in the eighties. Civilization IV had a “play by email” feature where you’d receive an email when it was your turn, no need to stay in the game.

Solium Infernum takes this idea and internalizes it, creating a strategy game experience more akin to a game of Diplomacy than Risk. Turns are long by design. You’re all supposed to mull over your moves, schemes, and plots, making agonizing choices about how to fill your precious two actions. There’s an in-game notebook you can use to keep tabs and observations on your fellow archfiends (my friend used this to hilarious effect and showed us his superbly keen stash of intel after our game was over).

A lot of the game didn’t click for me, but the thrill of logging in each day to see what moves my friends had made was a novel experience that I cherished over the summer. Our group chat appropriately created anticipation when someone began complaining or gloating before anyone else had logged in to see what happened. Getting a group of people together to play any game, especially remotely, is a difficult task, and I wish more games would play with async mechanics.

This year, we were very lucky that New York was in the path of the total solar eclipse. While we didn’t get full totality, we fell more than enough in the shadow for things to get spooky. I couldn’t believe that when we looked through the solar eclipse glasses that you could see the moon blotting out the sun. It’s just there, a big sphere blocking out another one, yet somehow the moon was small enough that only a tiny portion of the world experienced night time for a few minutes in the middle of the day.

What a bizarre world we live in. I felt myself reverting back to primal wonder. It’s no mystery why we used to assign grave omens to this celestial event. It’s even crazier when you realize we can experience a solar eclipse in such spectacular fashion because of the unique geometry of the Earth. Best mechanic indeed.

Dubious Essay Award

Shadow Hearts: Covenant

Shadow Hearts: Covenant isn’t afraid of sex. Gay sex, especially. It’s the only game of its kind that I’ve played, and certainly of its generation, that feels like it acknowledges the male body is something that can be admired and ogled. Years before The Witcher introduced miss-me-with-that-shit sex cards, Shadow Hearts: Covenant was having you find “stud cards” depicting men in various states of undress, complete with steamy bio, that you trade in to a pair of gay men for weapon upgrades.

I thought you could use a visual aid here.

Is it a bit cheeky and campy? Sure. But at no point did this feel like hostile representation played purely for derisive laughs. Shadow Hearts: Covenant treats people as human beings with attractive bodies who fuck. Characters explicitly draw attention to other character’s S&M fashion sense. A teenage Anastasia Romanov has a very innocent crush on Yoshiko Kawashima’s family bodyguard Kurando (a real sentence I just wrote). Another party member has an entire side quest that involves men wrestling and, I quote, feeling each other’s rippling muscles, which culminates in a 100-floor gauntlet fight where you fight next-to-naked man after next-to-naked man, the screen hanging around their swaying asses during the pre-battle camera pan.

It’s so refreshingly gay. How rare is it for any piece of media nowadays to acknowledge sexuality exists at all? Even modern titles like Baldur’s Gate III feel sanitized and perfunctory when it comes to sex. The sex in Shadow Hearts: Covenant is sweaty. You know everyone smells. Each character definitely has their own little freak kink which makes them human and real, not just wink-at-the-camera red meat for the fandom.

As of January 2025, Pornhub is now, for all intents and purposes, banned in sixteen U.S states. We know members of the incoming administration would love to overturn gay marriage as a legal right. Trans folks are subject to even more legislation that attempts to erase their existence. TikToker’s get the “ick” when shows have sex scenes. These are all real threats to our sexuality as human beings.

Take it from a once repressed Catholic: all that suppression gets you nowhere. I’ve spent a lot of my late 20’s and early 30’s exploring and thinking about my sexuality. Last year I started a blog explicitly to talk about my own personal sex life, serving as both a place to record and remember the very hot activities my wife and I do together, but also as a beacon for sexual expression. I don’t blame younger generations for not liking sex scenes in shows – they’re usually very unsexy. But where is the good sexual representation? Where are we talking about sex that makes us feel hot, inspired, and comfortable with ourselves? We’ve let governments and corporations determine what we’re allowed to consume as consenting humans and we’re losing the sexual freedom the generations before us fought so long to gain.

You want good sexual representation? We have to demand it and we have to make it. Creating a site that I control is an attempt to gain ground against the onslaught of sanitization gripping the web at large. I can post about all the freak sex I want on my own terms. I hope that if some lost soul trying to discover themselves stumbles across my blog on the ass-end of the internet that they find some comfort and inspiration from it.

Sexiest Game of the Year

Speaking of sex, Soh is the sexiest video game character ever created. Look at them. The way they dance with the blade. The way they flip stances during their idle animation. The way they silently and efficiently defend their charge by whipping demonic ass. Sexy, sexy, sexy.

Look at the mesh shirt, my god.

But Kunitsu-gami’s sexiness doesn’t end there. Each villager makes me bite my lip in their own way. They each wear a mask (sexy) that signifies a competent specialty (sexy) that has an important role to play as part of your monster-defending RTS squad (sexy). If a sniper covering you by one-shotting demons from half a map away while you sword dance under their hail of bullets doesn’t make you wet, I can’t help you.

Sexiness is more than just the aesthetics and the vibe. Everything about Kunitsu-gami compelled us to keep playing. My wife and I spent many late nights 100%-ing the game because everything was so competently put together. Each gameplay system is a unique cog that works together to create one impressive gameplay loop. The attention to detail floored us and we spent hours admiring all the 3D models we unlocked, each one a perfectly composed scene that displayed the artists’ understanding about what makes physical bodies so beautiful.

Kunitsu-gami is a really special game.

I am married to the best writer I know. Everything I get to read by her is a wonderful treat, from her long form prose to little love notes in cards and journals to each other.

This year, she shared with me the first chapter of a novel she has been working on. When I finished reading it I ran upstairs and ranted at her like a babbling fanatic. Her writing had formed new neural pathways in my brain. Every sentence was a hand crafted gift and the brushstrokes of her world have burned vivid imagery in my mind. A few days later, I was looking for a metaphor to describe something and started referencing a story I had once read only to realize I was referring to that first chapter.

Is there anything sexier than good writing? It’s hard to think so. I am stupidly lucky to be married to such a wonderful wordsmith and I can’t wait to read more of her work in 2025.

Game of the Year

When I am told a story, I am looking to hear something true. I want to be told something about the world, or hear what someone thinks about their world. I want it to be human and to relate to my own experience navigating my place in the cosmos. This doesn’t mean it has to take a swing at existentialism or grapple with why we’re here. I just want to know what someone else finds beautiful. What matters to them.

Persona 3 is as true and honest a game as there is. There is no sugar coating its perceptions of death or what it’s trying to say about how we spend our time on this Earth. It goes to big anime end-of-the-world places, sure, but it also has you walk a dog. You help an elderly couple run a bookstore. You listen to a school friend work through a sports-career ending injury.

Everything you do in Persona 3 matters. The people you meet and the time you spend with them are the point. It’s a simple truth. It’s a small truth. It’s a real truth.

It’s true to me because it saw my crippling anxiety about death and told me that was okay and normal. It helped me figure out where to put that anxiety and how to see the world for what it was – a beautiful place with beautiful people. It reminded me that no moment of our lives is wasted if we spend it with the people we love and seek to form bonds that help us see each other as we really are.

Game of the Year undersells the impact Persona 3 had on me. The game industry has a problem with trying to justify its existence as art and in doing so, often overshoots the point. Just tell me something true in whatever way is honest to you.

Two days after Christmas, my grandmother passed away. It wasn’t sudden, but we knew it was coming. After my grandfather passed three years ago, she just let herself go. First she didn’t leave the house, then she didn’t leave the chair, then she didn’t leave her bed. It was a graceful exit, and she passed while being surrounded by family.

I never had much of a relationship with my grandmother. She could be a prickly person, and I didn’t really know how to connect with her. It felt like we were worlds apart. This last year, I made it a point to visit her as often as we could. We wouldn’t always spend a long time there, just an hour or two, just to be with her and show love by presence.

In those last months, from talking with family and reading old journals, it was clear that my grandmother loved her family very much. She just wanted to know everyone was safe and happy, that she had raised a family with goodness and love. Not all branches of the family tree have been as happy and comfortable as ours. There is a lot of pain and hurt that is not my role as a single grandchild to fix. But I wanted to take the opportunity, before it was too late, to tell her how happy I was and what she meant to me.

I told her I was thankful for all the Christmases she hosted. The large family gathering was her trademark holiday and I don’t think it’s a coincidence she passed on Christmas week. I told her all my favorite recipes of hers that I wanted to learn. She insisted, barely managing to get the words out, that I take the potato salad recipe from the box in her kitchen. I talked about the life I was building with my wife and the house we were making a home. My last conversation with her was about how we put a heated toilet seat in our bathroom and I told her that’s how we knew we made it. “Somebody had to do it!” were the last words I heard her speak – a joyous victory cry that her mission was accomplished, a grandchild had a heated toilet seat. Hallelujah.

My grandmother’s death was healing for me. It was quiet, and beautiful, and she was surrounded by the people she loved most. It’s the kind of peaceful ending that we all hope for, and it gave me the time and space to reflect on death as a natural part of life. There is pain, but there was no dread. I’m thankful I got to spend as much time with her as I did before she passed. I learned it’s never to late to form a connection, to tell the people we love what matters most, and to see the truth in each other. We just have to try.