In this deeply personal episode of The Musings of a Fool, Arnold Watson reflects on what it truly means to survive.

After a murder-suicide took the lives of his mother and father and nearly took his own, Arnold entered adulthood carrying grief, trauma, displacement, and questions he did not yet know how to answer. His journey would include homelessness, heavy alcohol use, marriage, fatherhood, divorce, and periods when simply remaining alive was the only form of survival he could manage.

Still Here is not a story of easy triumph, nor an attempt to make suffering appear noble or necessary. It is an honest reflection on dignity, the misleading strength of the word “survivor,” and the possibility that healing may not mean erasing our wounds—but learning to carry them differently.

Arnold considers why grief cannot  ...