I don’t tell strangers that at airport gates.

I don’t carry my past around like a medal.

Most days I’m just the tired father in a flannel shirt trying to keep up with a second-grader who still asks whether her mother can see her from heaven.

That morning, Nia and I were flying to the Carolina coast.

It wasn’t a vacation.

We were going to the beach where Ayana and I had fallen in love — the same beach she had asked me to take Nia to, before the cancer took her from us two years ago.