I did not originally intend to write a collection like this.
The pieces began separately, usually after something had stayed with me longer than expected. A difficult shift. A quiet drive home. A conversation I mishandled. A memory that returned without being invited. Sometimes I needed somewhere to place the thoughts that followed me through work, classrooms, relationships, and the hours when everything had finally become quiet.
Writing gave me somewhere to put them down.
These are personal essays about paramedicine, teaching, burnout, alcohol, love, grief, attention, and the ordinary ways people try to continue while parts of their lives remain unresolved.
They are not instructions for fixing yourself.
Most of them were written before I knew what the experience meant, and some were written because I still did not know. They are attempts to describe things honestly while they are still complicated: caring for people when you are tired, loving them without always knowing how to show it, carrying old calls, making the same mistakes, and occasionally noticing that something in you has changed.
Some pieces take place in ambulances and classrooms. Others happen in kitchens, bars, parking lots, fishing boats, or entirely inside my own head.
The settings change, but the questions tend to remain close to one another.
What do we carry after the moment has passed?
What reaches other people, and what remains trapped inside us?
How do we live with what we cannot repair?
What helps us return when we have drifted too far away?
I do not claim to have answered those questions. I am a paramedic and educator who spends much of his life helping other people make sense of difficult situations. Outside of that, I read, write, fish, play the piano and banjo with varying levels of success, and continue trying to understand my own life without turning every experience into a lesson.
These pieces are part of that attempt.
Thank you for reading them.
Ghosts of the Navigator 