Last year, the TBI anniversary had a national podium. The American Bar Association invited me to Portsmouth, Virginia, to give the closing keynote at its national conference for lawyer assistance programs, and I used the ten years since the accident to make a larger point: no one can be themselves by themselves.

Ten years gives you a reason to look back. It is a nice round number, the kind we build anniversaries and speeches around.

Eleven is different.

It does not get the same treatment.

And I think that is wonderful. There is no speech to write today, no presentation to give, no crowd to please, and no need to wonder what comes next.

A few months after that tenth anniversary, I tried to make sense of the decade in an essay called Him Continuing Me. I had spent years telling the story as though the accident divided my life into a before and an after, until I began to see something different: calling, interruption, restoration, continuation.

The accident did not create a new person so much as it failed to erase the one God had already begun. Year ten was about explaining what became of that life after the TBI. Year eleven is about something quieter: living out the continuation instead of narrating it.

I get to enjoy the simple fact that I am here and spend the eleventh anniversary of God’s grace actually being present for the day—and for the people—in front of me.

Our family will spend the weekend at our home in West Virginia, where the next chapter of our life will begin in the summer of 2027. There is something fitting about spending this anniversary in a place that still belongs mostly to our future.

Eleven years ago, “being present” meant that my heart was still beating.

Today, presence has many names. It has a wife named Chelsea; daughters named Scarlett, Charlee, and Frankii; a son named Albert; a friend and employer named Matt; and clients, friends, and family who have become part of the life I nearly lost. It has tables and laughter, work worth doing, and a God who remained when no one knew what remained of me.