The moment Zackary was born changed everything.
Zackary entered the world in May of 2002 in Celebration, Florida, at a hospital once owned by Disney. I used to tease him that being one of only a few thousand “Disney babies” made him extra special. But the truth is, Zackary never needed Disney magic to be extraordinary. He had something entirely his own.
I still remember holding him as he took his first breath. He looked up at me with that tiny, squishy face, and every fear I had about becoming a father disappeared. All I could think about was how much I wanted to show him the world.
I had no idea how much he would teach me about seeing it.
Five days later, I took him to his first movie, Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones. He never cried once, sleeping peacefully or quietly listening while the theater erupted when Yoda appeared on screen. Looking back, it seems fitting that his introduction to the movies was Star Wars.
Even as a baby, Zackary noticed everything. As he grew, I came to call his remarkable way of seeing things “experiencing the micros.” He recognized subtle expressions, changes in someone's voice, emotions beneath their words, and details the rest of us never noticed.
He could even tell identical twins apart when their own parents occasionally couldn't. When asked how, he would explain the tiny differences he saw. Even after he pointed them out, most of us still couldn't see them.
But Zackary could. He saw an extraordinary amount in a world that often struggled to understand him.
As a little boy, he was funny, curious, impatient, and wonderfully himself. We nicknamed him “Mr. Ducky” because of the way he waddled around the house. His habit of resting his bare feet on the dinner table gave us the unforgettable family phrase “Toes on the Table.” When something excited him, whether it was a game, a movie, or a new idea, he wanted to experience everything about it immediately.
He loved Star Wars, Marvel, DC, anime, mysteries, and video games. But what fascinated him most was never simply the hero or the adventure. It was the person underneath. He understood characters like Spider-Man and Doctor Fate, people carrying enormous burdens while trying to hold on to their humanity. I think he recognized parts of himself in their struggles.
Zackary also had an astonishing ability to recognize patterns. I remember one Halloween party when he was only five or six, playing Star Wars Battlefront II against a room full of older kids. They thought teaming up against him would be funny.
He defeated every single one of them. Repeatedly. Without dying once.
At first, he thought they were picking on him. When I explained that they kept challenging him because they couldn't believe how good he was, his whole perspective changed.
That was one of the most remarkable things about Zackary. He could do things that amazed everyone around him, yet he rarely recognized how extraordinary he truly was. To him, he was just Zackary.
His imagination was just as remarkable. He created entire universes filled with heroes, villains, histories, and generations of characters. They weren't stories about perfect people. They were about complicated, wounded individuals trying to find their place in the world. Zackary gave them depth because he understood that nobody is as simple as they appear.
And for all that depth, he could also be wonderfully silly and joyful.
He loved swimming, disc golf, bowling, conventions, pizza, ramen, video games, and blasting “Animal” by Neon Trees while we sang at the top of our lungs in the car.
And he loved coffee.
Some of my happiest memories are of our coffee runs. When he was little, we'd stop for breakfast before school and work. As he grew older, those trips became our opportunity to talk about everything. Work, life, the latest Marvel movie, Star Wars, anime, and our never-ending argument about why Doctor Strange was obviously better than Doctor Fate.
We could spend an entire morning debating imaginary superheroes, and I wouldn't have traded those conversations for anything.
As he got older, life became more complicated. There were struggles he carried that even those closest to him couldn't always see. Like many fathers and sons, we had moments when we weren't as close as I wished we were.
But I always believed there would be more time.
More mornings. More coffee runs. More ridiculous debates. More stories he couldn't wait to tell me.
In December of 2025, Zackary lost his battle with mental illness and depression.
I miss him in ways I never knew it was possible to miss someone. I miss hearing about the worlds he was creating. I miss his laughter, our conversations, and the excitement in his voice when he discovered something new. Most of all, I miss the ordinary moments I never thought to hold on to because I believed there would always be more.
Zackary spent his life noticing the smallest details that everyone else passed by.
The micros.
I find myself noticing them now, too. A song playing in the car. A cup of coffee. A character in a movie I know he'd have something to say about. Tiny moments that bring him back to me, if only for a moment.
I wish he could have seen himself the way I saw him. I wish he had understood just how remarkable he was, how much he mattered, and how much there was to love about him.
He was intelligent, compassionate, imaginative, funny, curious, and capable of seeing a depth in people that many of us spend our entire lives trying to understand.
And if there is one thing I want people to know about my son, it is this:
He was not one-dimensional. He was not just his struggles. He was not just his pain.
He was my son — someone who was, above all else, profoundly human in every way that mattered.
