The two coffins, seven days apart

There is a chapter in Born Broke, Built Loud that took longer to write than any other, not because the words were hard to find, but because I kept finding reasons to work on other chapters first. It is about losing two people I loved within seven days of each other.

Grief does not organize itself into tidy paragraphs. It arrives out of order, returns when you think you have moved past it, and refuses to be summarized neatly for a reader. I had to accept that the chapter would not feel resolved by the end of it, because that loss has never fully resolved itself in me either.

What made it into the book is not a tidy lesson about resilience. It is closer to an honest account of what it costs to keep showing up, on air, in a newsroom, in front of a camera, while carrying something that heavy.

I almost cut it. It felt too private for a memoir that is otherwise about ambition and climbing. But a book that only shows the climb and none of what it cost is not honest, and I did not want to publish something dishonest with my name on the cover.

So it stayed in, seven days and two coffins, exactly as hard to read as it was to write.