FOCUS: MEN’S THRIVABILITY


“Life is short, dude.” Letters from dad


My father talked about death a lot, but perhaps it was his way of nourishing the notion of impermanence and propel him to live a richer, fuller life.


by Dustin Grinnell A


t 33 years old, I realised I had become too clinical, too practical. I needed a quest, a


time for exploration. So, I quit my office job and withdrew $18,000 from savings to support a year off for thinking and writing. I spent the first six weeks in my hometown, cleaning out the closet. My first stop was a grave. It was


a chilly October morning when I passed the wooden sign for Kearsarge Cemetery in North Conway, New Hampshire. I walked the damp, narrow


24 SEPTEMBER | OCTOBER 2017


paths, brushing snow from headstones in search of my grandmother’s name: Martha Anne Burke. After a half-hour, I turned toward the exit and texted my mom that I had come up empty.


DAD’S EMPTY NEST Talking to her from my dad’s house an hour before, I had asked where her mother had been buried a decade ago. She gave me vague directions, unable to remember the exact location. While we were talking, I heard a loud thwack.


A bird had flown into a window beside me. It died instantly, the third one in as many weeks. My dad’s chalet is his own monastery.


It’s buried in the woods, tucked alongside a stream overlooking a pond. It’s the third house my dad, Greg, has built on the unpaved road in Eaton Village, New Hampshire, a picturesque town in the White Mountains with a population of roughly 400 people. It’s his empty nest, now that my brother and I are grown and living in Boston. He


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