“Sir, can you pretend to be my daddy?” The six words from a stranger’s child in a wheelchair that shattered my afternoon, forced me to confront the grief I’d buried for two years, and led to a confrontation I never saw coming. I was just a single dad at the park. I almost called the cops. The truth was so much more heartbreaking.
The park was loud. Too loud. The screams of happy kids, the bright, saturated colors of the swing sets—it all felt like an assault. It had been two years since Sarah’s car was hit, two years since my world went from stereo to mono. My life was now just a series of motions, performed for…