The bankruptcy papers arrived on a Tuesday. My wife left on a Friday. By the following Monday I was alone in an apartment with a $400 security deposit and a bottle of Jack Daniels that I told myself was for guests.
I was 34. I had run a construction business for nine years. I had a house, two trucks, a dog named Hank. And in the span of six weeks, the 2008 financial collapse took almost all of it — and then my grief did the rest.
I don't want to glamorize the bottom, because there's nothing glamorous about sleeping in clothes for a week because you can't bring yourself to change. But I do want to be honest about it: I was gone. I was a body with no fire in it.
The thing that broke me open wasn't a motivational video or a book or a therapist (though the therapist came later and she was essential). It was my neighbor, an old man named Carlos, who knocked on my door one morning with a plate of eggs and said, "You look like you haven't eaten." He didn't ask wh