Just in time.

Taking a moment to register extraordinary loss.

Jan 23, 2026

Woof. Everything hurts.

There’s a deep pressure hanging out at the top of my lungs. I keep blaming the unmasked sniffler who sat to my right on the flight back home, but it’s probably not fair to use her as a scapegoat. There’s also the immoral and illegal and irresponsible administration of this country. And then there’s the hyper specificity of today’s milestone in my timeline: the 10th anniversary of my dad’s death.

I expected to spend all of January thinking about 2016 and the night everything shifted. I did not prepare for the entire internet to engulf me with synchronized nostalgia for that very same period. To abuse (modernize?) the old ani difranco line, every post in every feed was suddenly speaking to me with #Bring Back2016 and “2016 me…” Ugh.

The debate of our times: how to title the shockingly in depth Wikipedia entry, 2026 is the new 2016.

2016 me was the most lost I’ve ever been—drowning in grief over losing my father only five months into my own fatherhood. I will spend the rest of my life trying to metabolize this chronological injustice.

I think about my Dad all the time. He was a technooptimist who would be awed (and horrified) by how the internet and supercomputing has reshaped our world. He was a historian who would be calling me now daily, with a shattered heart, to share context for current events. He was an entrepreneur and a professor who would be so proud of how my career has unfolded. He was an attentive Dad, who would have loved FaceTiming his granddaughter to make her laugh. And he was a sensitive, romantic, gay man who came out later in life and also, always, spoke of his love for my mother. (He would have both lusted and sobbed all the way through Heated Rivalry!)

It’s taken me a full ten years to articulate that I need a shared ritual around his remembrance. So with guidance from the most spiritual person I know, and permission to weave in some Jewish tradition, we lit a candle last night for my Dad and talked about his passing.

The candle took the center of the dinner table. The candle illuminated the dessert art jam. The candle cast a warm glow bedside as I slept. The candle joined us for cereal and coffee before school. The candle flickers now as I write.

Tonight, when the candle is out, my daughter and I will head to the city to see Jonathan Groff (my Franklin Shepard, my daughter’s Kristoff) strut, sing, and seduce the entire audience “in the basement of Wicked.” It couldn’t be more my father. Just in time.

xx Kyle

I painted this fedora my father bought for me before I made the connection.

📚️🏳️‍⚧️✨ Being Alive Book Club

It’s book club time! Come hang with me and historian Kit Heyam this Sun Jan 25th at 2p ET 11a PT on Zoom. (RSVP here) Before We Were Trans: A New History of Gender