Hello, 2026.

Happy New Year, all. Me and mine started 2026 with a nice, heavy, bash over the head from our dear friend, Covid. And we’re currently attempting to avoid contact with all living beings in our vicinity, because according to maps from the CDC, every one of them has the flu.

Meanwhile, between coughs and sniffles, I’ve emptied the Notre Dame library of its books on death, and I’ve found a particle physicist willing to sip coffee across the table from me while I spew at him (not germs, I’ll be keeping those to myself) extremely elementary questions about superposition, entanglement, Schrodinger’s cat, and all things quantum. Because, why not take up a completely new-to-me field of inquiry just as I’ve established some level of competency in the one I’ve been pursuing for the previous decade?

Speaking of sexual violence, readers of this newsletter are in for some major whiplash of topic, genre, and style this year. I suspect you’ll be getting one part summaries of sexual violence basics as I’ve come to think of them, and one part extremely preliminary thoughts-in-process about what death is, where the dead go when they die, and how quantum mechanics might influence conceptualization of these and related matters that we are doomed to never fully know.

I’m continuing to write down sexual violence basics to make the information more accessible and as a form of prewriting for an eventual book on the subject. Those posts will likely feel like didactic snapshots with some food for thought swirled through. I’m experimenting with what it could mean to ground a full-bodied, foundational ethic (appropriate for guiding human action and relation broadly speaking) in wisdom gained from survivor-centered applied ethics (what we do in situations of acute harm). You will have to tell me how it’s going as you follow along.

I’m writing about death, materiality, and quanta, because the subject has gripped me, and I’ve not been able to let it go. I have lists of reasons why I have no business turning this direction. In fact, I read them to my therapist yesterday morning. She was unconvinced, and apparently neither am I, because when I tried to reason with the one inside me setting the course ahead, here’s what she said back to me and the crowd of naysayers I’ve imagined standing at my back:

"You say it’s foolishness to grasp for knowledge of that which is beyond this life. But I say, which of you would not cut a path through the thicket of a dark forest or march into a wall of flames if your beloved had been taken away from you, across the threshold? Imagine your child on the other side of a concrete wall extending infinitely up, down, right, and left. Would you not scrape your fingers bloody to the bone and grind your teeth to your gums, intent on gnawing a way through? And if someone who did not love your child told you that your effort was futile, would you think, “Oh yes, of course, what was I thinking?” Or would you brush their idiocy off your shoulders, along with the blood and dust accruing there, and stay focused? 

If the person in whom you have come alive was snatched away to some uninhabited and miniscule plot of land in the middle of the sea, would you stare into the waves from the shoreline, day after day, dejected because you do not know how to swim? Or would you spend every waking moment developing the skills of a sailor, a navigator, and a survivalist, resolved to step out one day into the wild, wet unknown, compass pointing home?

What is foolishness when the part of yourself you love most—the part of yourself that wasn’t you to start—is cut out of your flesh and dematerialized while you scream? Is it foolish to look for what was really there just a moment before? Or, is the fool the one who raises no rational qualms about a sudden replacement of the most exquisite something with an abrupt nothing-at-all?

Go on, girl. Don't just stand there. Move."

So there we have it. Matter resolved (pun welcome but not intended). We’re setting out on a mission that, to me, feels utterly futile, because love says so. And—it is so sickly trite to say (I’m already shaking my head at myself)—but I trust her more than fear. (Gag.)

Hugs to you and yours. Happy 2026.