95 Piccadilly
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There’s an old saying that life can turn on a dime, and over the last year, I’ve learned just how true that can be. Since losing my sister in April 2025, it has felt as though my life has been caught in a constant spiral. As many will know, grief has a way of moving into every corner of your existence. It follows you into rooms, keeps you up at night, haunts you, and settles heavily in your chest where it can impact your very breath. For someone already living with a heart condition, the stress of loss carried its own particular kind of fear. My cardiologist – likely tired of hearing from me – says the paranoia is understandable. After all, stress is not exactly healthy for a heart already prone to galloping with the come-from-behind speed of Golden Tempo.
The truth is, I’ve never been particularly good with radical change. I prefer familiarity, routine, knowing where a road leads before I start down it. Ask anyone who’s ever travelled with me – I like a start and a finish – and over the last year, the predictability of that road seemed to completely vanish. The question “Why me?” certainly crossed my mind more than once, but come lately, another question all together has taken its place: “Why not me?” And, truthfully, why not? Why not any of us? I look around and see people struggling everywhere I turn – it’s part of the culture these days. Everybody is carrying something heavy. Some just learn to carry it quieter than others, but even in the middle of hardships, there are still strange and unexpected mercies if you are willing to notice them. Silver linings, if you will.
Mine arrived in the form of two babies. A few months after my sister passed away, two of my three daughters announced they were expecting. Unexpectedly expecting, to be precise. I couldn’t believe it. I would love to tell you I handled that news with calm wisdom and fatherly composure, but I did not. My emotions ran the gamut. Already overwhelmed and emotionally battered, I suddenly felt like I was drowning. Nothing was going right or as planned. Even knowing I was hardly the first parent to face such news did little to steady me. I tried to lean hard on my faith and had breakdowns on my priest. As a devout Catholic, ending the crisis in any one of the ways society would suggest was never an option – at least not for me. Despite my conviction, faith did not always silence the fear and late night anxieties. So I handled it in typical Shane fashion – I shoved it under the rug, tried to ignore what was happening, that I was not in control of my own life (a feeling that I hate), and waited for reality to arrive at my doorstep. And then it did. Lyla and Gracelynn were born six weeks apart earlier this year. If I’m honest, in the middle of all that chaos, I had a complete breakdown on a friend who was not even in the country at the time. She tried her best to validate my feelings without using that dreaded “g” word. Worldly and with two decades of knowing Shane, maybe she understood something I had yet to grasp – time has a way of settling things. Silver linings can be born of many things – but they are born. Those two little girls – innocent, tiny, and completely unaware of the healing they were bringing – managed to soften something in my entire family. They brought laughter back into rooms where grief and silence had haunted. They filled spaces heartbreak had hollowed out. Lyla, in particular, sometimes tilts her head in a way so uncannily like my late sister that it stops me cold every single time. Maybe that is life’s reminder that even after terrible loss, love still finds its way back, even through dismay and anger, fog and uncertainty.