Standing in the Wreckage Without Rebuilding Yet

By Rowan Hale

Grief does not always announce itself loudly. Sometimes it arrives as exhaustion. Sometimes as irritation. Sometimes as an almost clinical clarity that makes the world feel suddenly stripped of its pretense.

In the months following the death of his wife, Cliff Potts did not collapse in the way popular narratives expect. There was no dramatic withdrawal from life, no theatrical despair. Instead, there was motion—writing, scheduling, publishing, organizing. Work continued, even intensified, not as denial but as structure. The systems remained upright long after the person at the center of them had been removed.

This is a common survival pattern among people who have spent a lifetime building frameworks—intellectual, editorial, moral. When loss occurs, the instinct is not to stop, but to hold the line. To keep things from unraveling further. To prevent chaos from becoming contagious.

What eventually emerges, however, is not failure but saturation.

At a certain point, effort stops functioning as ballast and begins to bleed energy without return. The work no longer stabilizes the grief; it simply drains the person doing it. This is not burnout in the fashionable sense. It is something quieter and more final: the recognition that continuing at the same pace does not honor what was lost.

What is notable here is not withdrawal, but discernment.

Rather than declaring everything meaningless, Potts made a more precise choice: he stopped pretending broken tools could do intact work. He paused systems that required constant output and provided little in return. He named the limits honestly. He documented the pause publicly instead of vanishing without explanation.

This matters.

Grief often demands either spectacle or silence. What it rarely allows is truthful middle ground—the ability to say, “I am still here, but I am not continuing this particular performance.” That statement preserves agency without posturing and dignity without denial.

There is also a deeper shift underway. The questions surfacing now are not procedural but theological, existential, historical. They do not seek comfort. They seek coherence. They ask whether the narratives inherited in youth still hold when examined across decades of lived experience. They ask whether faith systems designed for shorter lives can sustain longer ones. They ask whether endurance itself has been mistaken for belief.

These questions are not symptoms of collapse. They are signs of reorientation.

Grief, when allowed to do its work, does not always soften a person. Sometimes it sharpens them. It removes the tolerance for inefficiency, for performative hope, for institutions that demand output without offering refuge. It insists on fewer words, fewer platforms, fewer false reconciliations.

Standing in the wreckage without rebuilding is not resignation. It is a refusal to reconstruct illusions simply to regain momentum. It is the decision to wait until what is rebuilt can actually carry weight.

Nothing here suggests an ending. But it does mark a threshold.

And thresholds, once crossed honestly, do not permit return to the old shape of things.