Back in 2012, when I was really just getting started as a writer, I wrote a long piece for Grantland about my late father, my young son, and a history of Preakness Stakes past. It was about family, and the sport of horse racing, and the strange way sports can carry forward ghosts of the past well into the future. It was about life and death and all kinds of lofty ideas I rarely have the courage to write about anymore. At the time I wrote it, it was not all that hard to write. Trying to go back and read it today, it is nearly impossible for me to look at.
