Month: June 2025

Overdue Update & What Is to Come

Tyler & Tiffany

This is a long post, so…The Quick Version for Those Short on Time:

• Legal guardianship granted – We became Claire’s official guardians in early 2025 after an 18-month process

• Claire graduated high school with honors – May 24th, 2025, third name called after Valedictorian and Salutatorian, captain of state championship Unified basketball team

• Major life transition – These milestones closed a 15-year chapter and opened space for what we’ve been building the last six years

• Launching Goodpain Company – Moving from this blog to a broader platform for conversations about life’s intensities (goodpainco.com)

• New content launching 2025:

  • Goodpain Podcast (flagship show featuring our family’s story)
  • Sparks + Embers (weekly 10-minute companion episodes)
  • The Kindling Newsletter (weekly thoughts for conversation)

• This isn’t abandonment – it’s evolution – We want everyone who has walked with us these 15 years to continue the journey around a different fire

• Join the conversation: Newsletter signup at goodpainco.com/kindling (we hope many of you will be the first to sign up!)

The Story Continues Below – Read on for the full account of guardianship lessons, graduation emotions, and why we’re building Goodpain Company as a space for the conversations our culture needs but seemingly, has forgotten how to have well.

In early 2025, Tiffany and I signed papers that made official what had been true for years – we became Claire’s legal guardians. Three months later, we watched her graduate high school with honors. Between those signatures and that diploma lies a story about intensity, apprenticeship, and what we discover when we stop running from life’s deepest currents.

Legal Appointment for What was Already True

The guardianship process took eighteen months. Eighteen months of regulatory code trying to capture what the heart understood in an instant. We live in a world where Claire, her classmates, and peers exist, and we have processes to ensure they can continue receiving support to address their basic needs. Guardianship becomes the nomination process for who gets tasked with supplying and meeting those needs.

But the problems arise from our definitions of what it means to be an adult and the variability for meeting those requirements. We recognize that even in the general population, there’s no such thing as non-impairment. Our definition of health is an imperfect threshold that reflects even with varying levels of cognitive, behavioral, or physical impairment, we still expect most individuals to meet the same bar of accountability. We expect this, despite knowing we all bear some form of handicap.

Lake Tahoe: When Intensity Becomes Shared

We drove from Denver to Lake Tahoe in June 2023 so Claire could experience putting her feet into lapping waves and sandy beaches. We drove because transporting medical supplies, a wheelchair, a dog, and five people was easier than flying. We stayed in handicap accessible rooms along the way.

The day we visited the beach, multiple people offered to help carry wagons, help push Claire’s wheelchair through the sand. An audience gathered the moment we carried her to a small log where gentle waves created tame splashes.

I carried her to the log, and we sat down when the waves decided to become more aggressive. Tahoe is a mountain lake. It was June, early summer, not late summer having benefited from consistent months of solar warming. There was about ten seconds of quiet and calm before Claire let us know what she thought. The sound she let loose betrays the breath she was gathering during those ten seconds. And we loved it. Every minute of it.

We spoke softly to her, encouraging her to relax, and though she tried, another minute was all she could take before she let us know she was done. I carried her back to her wheelchair and held her with her feet in the warm sand while she calmed down. We told her that we loved how she expressed her opinion. We told her that we were honored to witness her experiencing something new, being surprised within herself that she had a strong opinion she needed to share with the world.

Another family from Texas ventured to offer their gratitude and thanks for being able to watch what Claire experienced. They were surprised by what it evoked within them, something they did not know they would experience that day.

The Apprenticeship We Never Expected

As guardians we have been recognized as mastering the ability to care for someone, to regard them, to champion them by the power of the state. But we did not need the state to anoint us with that title to know it was a mantle we carried with honor. It is something we understand was chosen for us when we could not choose it for ourselves.

While we are masters at caring for Claire, we were apprenticed by her. We were apprenticed by the parts of ourselves she coaxed within us, the parts we did not know existed. We would never have known those parts, or it would have taken much longer for us to become acquainted with them, without the shared intensity we have with Claire.

This is what gets left on the table by continuing to overemphasize an isolationist, unidirectional model of community. It’s a false community because it neglects shared intensity. The age of eighteen is arbitrary, yet by being arbitrary in selecting that line for adulthood – that point where intensity must be born alone – the discovery and surprise available from sharing all of life’s intensities gets stolen away.

I need safeguards from my limited imagination. I need the shared intensity of community and bi-directional apprenticeship to break out of the comfort of known safeguards. I need something that connects me to the wisdom of what came before having seen much more of life than what I saw at ten, twenty, thirty, and forty years old. I need those things to be upheld by a shape and structure that transcends the immediacy of now and will exist beyond the tempest of today.

The apprenticeship model addressed those aims. It crafted ceremony, ritual, and infrastructure for movement through time. The mechanisms were institutions. The risk was institutions could be co-opted into a unidirectional, transactional model, undermining the apprenticeship model itself.

I could see this had happened in the world around me. But it had also happened within me. I had rebuilt the world around me and granted the institutions within my life the task of removing and escaping intensity.

I had forgotten one immutable truth: there is no escape.

Graduation: With Honors

Saturday, May 24th, Claire graduated from high school. She was part of the Unified team at school and captain of the Unified basketball team. Claire’s name was the third name called, after the Valedictorian and Salutatorian. Her name was read with honors – a surprise to all of us, and a kindness we recognized and appreciated.

We expected to be emotional during the ceremony and leading up to it, but we were surprised by the depth and frequency. I am surprised by how much we have to hold two competing experiences at once: we celebrate the accomplishment and also sit with the “what could have been.”

The school administration was wonderful in preparation for the graduation ceremony. They were accommodating, sensitive, and supportive of making sure Claire could participate as much as she was able. Claire’s nurse who attended all four years with her was four days away from her due date on graduation day, so we had the primary plan and the contingency plan. The baby was kind enough to hold off joining the world, so our nurse was able to walk with Claire.

These small details for Claire and us were peppered throughout the lead-up to graduation: we are grateful and humbled by the compassion the administration has shown Claire and our family the last four years.

Earlier in the ceremony, they announced that Claire’s Unified basketball team took the state championship in their division. It was an eventful year for Claire.

Special Olympics Unified Sports brings together people with and without intellectual disabilities on the same team. It was inspired by a simple principle: training together and playing together is a quick path to friendship and understanding. Teams are made up of people of similar age and ability, making practices more fun and games more challenging for all. Over 19.5 million young people are taking part in these experiences, increasing acceptance while reducing stigma and bullying.

When Chapters Close and Callings Emerge

Guardianship and Claire’s graduation demarcated a closing chapter for the last fifteen years. They are significant events of moving from one stage of life to another, for Claire and for us as a family. We knew this was coming, and something that has been planning over the last six years was also on the horizon.

This blog, though it has gone quiet for the most part, played a significant role in what is now on our doorstep. When I started this blog, it was utilitarian and pragmatic. I needed a means to communicate updates to friends and family without having to provide them verbally. This was important in the early days following Claire’s accident.

As the followers to the blog grew and evolved, I also evolved along with it. There were requests for a book, and for a long time, I did not see the need. The blog existed and I did not have anything else to say on the topic.

Six years ago that started to change. I started writing a book. Then I stopped. And then I started again. And then I stopped.

Two years ago, a close friend and I decided we were going to produce a podcast and the first season would be a discussion about loss, grief, and healing with Claire’s accident as the centerpiece. Recording the podcast was easy: I had no problem discussing the events. Editing the podcast was a nightmare: listening to myself talk about the story and the last decade was tortuous. It caused emotional distress I was not anticipating.

That changed at the end of 2024 when I sat down to take another swing at the book. A number of other things fell into place and by the end of May, I had a full manuscript. And ten hours of unedited podcast recordings.

Goodpain Company: Where Rigorous Thinking Meets Raw Experience

While it has been six years in the making, the book became part of a broader calling to help facilitate conversations. The metaphor I keep coming back to is the conversations we have at the end of a long day of strenuous activity, around a campfire where we do not have the energy for pretense, so we share and connect.

So we launched a company called Goodpain. Here is our description:

Goodpain Company is where rigorous thinking meets raw human experience, creating space for the conversations our culture needs but rarely has. Through podcasts that explore life’s true intensities, newsletters that honor complexity over quick fixes, and stories that reveal wisdom in unexpected places, we gather like ancient tribes around a digital fire – sharing hard-won insights from the crucible of real life. Whether examining profound themes through beloved films, exploring AI as contemplative practice, or creating room to say “I don’t have this figured out either,” every piece of content serves the same purpose: proving that our struggles, uncertainties, and deepest questions are not problems to solve but doorways to becoming human. Because sometimes the most meaningful wisdom emerges not from having answers, but from the courage to endure the questions together.

What We’re Building

Launching in 2025:

  • Goodpain Podcast – our flagship show which will feature our family’s story in the first season, and expand to many other stories in future seasons
  • Sparks + Embers – weekly, ten-minute companion episodes released with our newsletter
  • The Kindling Newsletter – our weekly newsletter where we offer thoughts for reaction and conversation

Coming 2026:

  • Goodpain Book – which I am hoping will release in 2026 (I am in discussions for securing representation **and if you know someone, or are someone who can help, please reach out!**)
  • The Tell Show – Heidi and I will explore similar themes through movies, but much lighter than some of the topics we cover, because we love movies

The Campfire Still Burns

I am hoping many of you will sign up for the newsletter if you are interested in joining the conversation, an extension of what this blog served for the last fifteen years. This is not abandonment – it’s evolution. The fifteen years we have shared here, the way you have walked with us through trauma and healing, through the mundane Tuesday afternoons and the profound Saturday mornings – that matters. That shapes everything we are building.

I decreased my frequency of posting about my family’s story in the last eight years because my family needed privacy and to not be an open book. Now that I am posting again, this time with an announcement, I want to make sure people feel valued, appreciated, and invited to continue with me on the Goodpain journey.

The conversations we have been having around this digital space have prepared us for what comes next. We are not leaving you behind; we are asking you to come with us around a different fire, one that burns with the same intensity but serves a larger conversation about what it means to be human.

Join us:

  • Newsletter signup: goodpainco.com/kindling
  • Company website: goodpainco.com
  • Subscribe to our podcasts on Apple Podcasts and Spotify which has two announcements already uploaded and the first Sparks + Embers episode will drop next week (the first Goodpain Podcast series will drop in mid-July)

There Is No Escape

I had forgotten one immutable truth: there is no escape from intensity. The apprenticeship model knew this. It crafted ceremony and infrastructure for moving through time with intensity as teacher, not enemy.

We are not running from what Claire taught us, or from what the last fifteen years revealed. We are leaning into it. We are creating space for others to lean into their own intensities, their own apprenticeships, their own discoveries about what gets revealed when we stop trying to escape and start learning to endure questions together.

The campfire has been burning here for fifteen years. We are not putting it out – we are moving it to where more people can gather around its warmth, where the conversations can go deeper, where the shared intensity of being human can continue to apprentice us all.

We hope you continue to sit with us.

This represents the bridge between what this blog has been and what Goodpain Company will become. We are grateful for every person who has read these updates, sent encouragement, and walked with our family through the last fifteen years. The story continues – just around a different fire.