I typed the last word sometime in the spring. I closed the laptop and sat there for a minute.

That was it. Twelve years. Fifty-nine chapters. Done.

I didn’t know what to do next.

This blog started in 2015 because I needed somewhere to put it. The appointments and the medications and the nights listening for the sounds of a seizure. I wasn’t writing for anyone. I was writing to get it out of my head and onto a page where it couldn’t follow me around quite as much.

Then people started responding. Parents who were a few years ahead of us on the same road. Parents who were just starting out and recognized something in what I was writing. I wasn’t writing for an audience exactly, but I was writing for them. The ones who needed to know someone else had been in that waiting room.

The memoir came from a different impulse. I wanted to look at the whole thing from the beginning. My son is sixteen now. Two surgeries. Still seizing. Still going. I didn’t think we’d get here. I didn’t think here would look like this: baseball and hockey games and a service dog and a school that finally understood him and a boy who walked into a doctor’s office a few months ago and asked a question he’d been holding onto for weeks. A hard question. The kind that doesn’t have a good answer.

But here we are.

There are other books about epilepsy. Memoirs written by people who have it, and by parents who watched their children fight it. Those books matter. Those voices matter.

This one is different. Not better. Just different.

It’s written by a father. From the doorway, from the parking lot, from the chair beside the hospital bed, from behind the camera. The one who watched.

It’s not a story about winning or overcoming. My son still has seizures. He probably always will. The book doesn’t end with a cure. It ends with him down the hall, the camera pointed at the corner of the room, the same distance between us it’s always been.

I don’t know if it’s any good. I sent it to an editor last week and I’m waiting to hear back.

What I know is that I wrote it for the parent who is sitting in the exam room right now, waiting for the doctor, not knowing what comes next. The one who needs to know that twelve years from now they will still be sitting in exam rooms and not knowing what comes next. And that they will also have found arcades in airports, and watched their kid pitch in a baseball game, and stood in the rain at a cemetery singing a song.

It’s all of it at once. That’s what the book is about.

I’ll let you know what the editor says. If you want to hear when it’s ready, the email list is the best place to be.