Inevitable: What My Dad, My Dog, and Death Taught Me About Living with Loss (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780989139557)

"He died, and I kept standing, waiting for someone else to show up for me. In every room. For thirty-five years."

Evan Doyle was eight years old when his father died on Christmas Eve. He was in the hospital waiting room when he heard his grandmother's wail - and understood what had happened before anyone said a word. What followed were thirty-five years of moving forward: boarding school, bad decisions, a cross-country church plant that ended with his family returning home, eighteen years as a pastor, and a restlessness he couldn't explain.

Then he got a dog.

For thirteen years, Quicksilver - QS - walked alongside Evan through the season when he finally started to figure things out. Together they logged 4,745 miles in their little Ohio town. She was with him when he stepped away from his role as a pastor, when he started asking the questions he had avoided for years, and when grief stopped being something to outrun and became something to sit with.

After QS died, Evan sat down to write something to honor her memory - and found himself writing his way back to his father. Back to the boy in the waiting room. Back to thirty-five years of grief he had never once called what it was.

Written as essays, each one begins with a memory of QS and follows that thread through grief, faith, identity, and the losses her absence brings to the surface.

Inevitable is a confession, a reckoning, and the story of how writing through the loss of QS helped Evan make sense of the grief he had carried since his father's death.

For anyone still learning that loss, though inevitable, does not have the final word.