May God Grant You Always

08/27/2026

07/29/2026

"Tax-deferred" doesn't mean tax-free.

"Tax-deferred" doesn't mean tax-free. It means not yet.

And "not yet" has a start date. For most retirees, it's age 73.

That's when Required Minimum Distributions kick in. The IRS makes you pull a set amount out of your traditional IRA or 401(k) every year, and tax it as ordinary income, whether you need the money or not.

Here's the actual math, not a scary round number.

The first-year amount is your December 31 balance divided by an IRS life-expectancy factor. At 73 that factor is 26.5. So a $500,000 IRA gives you $500,000 ÷ 26.5, which is about $18,868. That's 3.77% of the balance in year one.

Now the part people miss.

That factor shrinks every year you age, so the percentage they force out keeps climbing. And a bigger withdrawal can quietly raise the taxable share of your Social Security and push up your Medicare premiums.

None of this is a penalty. It's a bill that was always coming, just deferred.

Every dollar you didn't pay tax on going in, you pay on coming out. The only thing age 73 changes is that the choice of when stops being yours.

Roth accounts skip this entirely for the original owner.

Save this for the retirement math nobody explains until it's due.

07/05/2026

Yes, I am still grieving.
I have stopped apologizing for that.
The bare tree in the amber field does not apologize
for still being bare when the light turns golden around it.
https://bit.ly/4fj8jUm
— May God Grant You Always

06/28/2026

There is a drooping flower beside him on the ground

that nobody planted and nobody is tending.

It bent that way on its own, toward the water,

the way grief bends a person — not breaking, just redirecting.
The lights across the water belong to people

who have no idea he is sitting here tonight.

That used to feel like the loneliest part of grief —

how invisible it is from the other side.
He has his knees pulled up against the cold.

The cardinal is somewhere above him in the dark,

moving through the starred sky with a direction

he doesn't share with the person sitting below.
I have sat like this. I know the knees, the cold,

the lights across the water that mean nothing to you,

the sense that something red and alive is passing overhead

and not stopping, not staying, not slowing for your particular sorrow.
And still. The cardinal is there.

The stars are more than I can count.

Someone, somewhere in the lit houses across the water,

is probably also sitting in the dark with their knees pulled up.
That is not comfort exactly.

But it is something — the knowledge that the night

holds more than one person sitting alone inside it,

each one praying into the same unreachable sky.
— May God Grant You Always

06/28/2026

The broken heart in the snow

is not where someone dropped it.

It is where it landed

when you left and didn't tell it where to go.
The path curves forward through the white-armed trees

and there is no instruction on it,

no marker, no footprint going ahead of mine,

just the curve disappearing into fog I cannot see past.
My heart did not receive the memo.

That is the plainest way I know to say it.

It keeps turning left when I should go right,

keeps reaching for the version of every morning that had you in it.
I have prayed to know which way the path goes.

No answer has arrived in any form I recognize.

I have started walking it anyway —

not because I know the direction, but because standing still was worse.
The trees on either side are stripped of everything.

They do not apologize for how bare they are this season.

I am learning something from that —

how to stand in my own bare state without covering it.
The broken heart in the snow stays where it is.

I step around it the way I've learned to step around

certain hours of the day, certain songs,

certain doorways that still hold the shape of you coming through.
— May God Grant You Always

06/27/2026

The fog hasn't lifted this morning

and he hasn't moved from where he's standing.

A bird crosses the amber above him —

the only thing in this entire field that knows where it's going.
Every moment of every day. He knows.

He doesn't need the reminder written in the air above him —

the wishing is already there, occupying the space

between whatever he is looking at and wherever you are.
I have stood in fields like this one.

Not looking for anything specific,

just needing to be somewhere with enough room

to hold what doesn't fit inside a house.
The fog is the thing I keep returning to.

Not because it lifts. It doesn't, not reliably.

But because it makes everything uncertain in the same way —

the tree line, the sky, the distance between where I am and where you went.
That equality of uncertainty is something.

I don't know what to call it. Not comfort.

Maybe just the closest that the visible world

has come to matching what is happening inside me.
Every moment. Every day.

He stands in the gold of what's left of the morning.

The bird is already past the frame.

He is still watching where it was.
— May God Grant You Always

06/27/2026

These hands have reached for you so many times

that the muscles still know the motion without being asked.

Two open palms lifted into the blue between the clouds —

that is the whole shape of what I have left to offer.
The dove is already far above where hands can go.

I watch it get smaller the way I have watched

every version of you get smaller and smaller

until the sky just keeps the place where you were.
I used to fold my hands to pray.

Now I lift them open like this —

not because it changes anything,

but because folding them felt like I was holding something I no longer have.
An open hand is honest in a way a closed one isn't.

It says: I have nothing. I am not pretending.

Whatever comes now will have to place itself here —

I cannot grip, I cannot pull, I cannot reach that far.
The clouds do not part for the asking.

The dove does not return to the hands below it.

I have made my peace with the direction of things —

upward, always upward, and never back down to me.
I keep the hands open anyway.

Not waiting for something to land.

Just open.

Just still.
— May God Grant You Always

06/26/2026

Someone left a bear on the windowsill

facing the rain, and nobody has moved it.

The rain keeps streaking down the glass

the way grief keeps finding new lines to run.
I have run out of words for how much I miss you.

That is the truest thing I have said in months —

not that I miss you, everyone says that,

but that the language for it has given out.
I have tried praying it.

I have sat in the early morning and opened my mouth

and what came out was not words exactly —

more like the shape a word leaves when the sound is gone.
That is where I live now, in the shape of the words.

The bear keeps its face to the window.

It does not need language for what it is doing —

just presence, just the turned back, just the rain.
I used to think faith required sentences.

Now I think it might only require showing up —

sitting at the window of whatever this is,

facing out into it without flinching, or at least flinching quietly.
The rain does not let up today.

The bear does not turn around.

I have nothing left to say that is big enough.

I say it anyway.
— May God Grant You Always