This man with a thousand stories from a lifetime of traveling the country, a vibrant mind with a yawning loneliness at its core. The world would never understand all his flailing attempts to reclaim some meaning in his life after everything he’d cared about had been placed in a box and lowered into the ground, or the tenderness he felt toward his daughter after decades of estrangement, Sundae having come back home with her own long list of unbelievable tales. This frail old man who waited on his dying little girl hand and foot, convinced until the last that she would recover, certain that fathers did not bury their own daughters next to their own wives. One human soul could surely not be asked to swallow that much sorrow.

— Ether in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, Ch. Day 4, p. 268