Originally published 2019-09-19.
In the summer of 2019, J.R. Storment, a co-founder of the Portland, Oregon cloud-cost company Cloudability, lost his eight-year-old son Wiley, who died in his sleep. A few weeks later Storment published a long, raw essay on LinkedIn titled "It's later than you think". Its message to other parents was simple: work less, be present more, and stop postponing time with your children. The post was shared and liked tens of thousands of times and was widely covered in the media.
This page retells what Storment wrote, in our own words, explains what is known about the kind of sudden death his family described, and looks at what his letter can and cannot teach the rest of us about work and family life.
The day everything changed
Storment opened with a coincidence of timing. Eight years earlier, in the same month, he had become the father of twin boys, Wiley and Oliver, and had co-founded Cloudability. About three months before Wiley's death the company had been acquired by Apptio. Professionally, it was the best season of his life.
When the call came, he was in a meeting with a dozen colleagues at the Portland office, discussing paid time off. He had just admitted to the room that in eight years he had never taken more than a single week off in a row. He and his wife had a rule that they always picked up each other's calls, so he stepped out at once. Her words were short and devastating: Wiley was dead, and she had to call emergency services.
He described running out of the building in shock, realising he could not get his car out of the garage, and begging colleagues for a ride; one of them drove him home. Because the cause of death was not yet known, the police treated the house as a possible crime scene, and it was roughly two and a half hours before the parents were allowed into Wiley's room. Storment lay down beside his son, held his hand and stroked his hair before the medical examiner's team took him away.
Who Wiley was
Much of the letter is a portrait of a funny, ambitious little boy. Wiley was always launching imaginary businesses: a smoothie stand one day, an art gallery the next, then a virtual-reality headset firm, a coding outfit and a spaceship factory. He was always the boss. His twin brother Oliver, and sometimes his parents, were hired to work for him, never with him; in the gallery version, Oliver was put in charge of the till.
He had also decided, at about five, that he would get married one day. By six he had chosen the girl, a classmate whose hand he held at recess on their first day of kindergarten. When the family moved from Portland to London and then to Hawaii, the two children kept writing to each other by hand, and before the move back to Portland they agreed, by letter, to marry. She did the proposing. Happily, Wiley saw her twice after the family returned.
The handwritten page above, from Wiley's own diary, introduces himself to whoever is reading, mentions his age and his home in the forest, and predicts that he will work in technology when he grows up.
That detail makes one moment in the letter especially hard to read. Signing the death certificate, Storment saw two fields that undid him. The occupation field said his son had never worked, and the marital status field said he had never married. His son had wanted both things badly, and Storment said he felt both lucky and guilty to have had them himself.
Regret, and what Wiley did get to do
In the weeks after Wiley died, Storment wrote, his regrets kept coming. Some were about things he wished he had done differently; others were about everything he would now never see his son do. His wife kept reminding him of how much Wiley had lived. By eight he had visited ten countries, hiked in Greece, snorkelled in Fiji, driven a car on a Hawaiian farm road, worn a suit to a British prep school for two years, been rescued from a shark on a jet ski, beaten his father at chess twice in a row, and filled notebooks with stories and comics.
The regret he returned to most was the last morning. He got up before six for a run of back-to-back meetings, exercised, took calls at home and in the car, and headed into the office. He left without saying goodbye or looking in on the boys. None of those meetings, he wrote, seemed important any more.
His message to parents
When people asked how they could help, Storment's answer was short. Probably the most quoted line of the whole essay was: "Hug your kids. Don't work too late." He went on to point out that many managers hold regular one-to-one meetings with colleagues, and asked readers whether they had anything similar scheduled with their own children.
He was candid that he had thought about not going back to work at all. In the end he did not reject work itself. He quoted the poet Kahlil Gibran, "Work is love made visible", and said he still believed in what people give through their jobs. The problem was balance, which he admitted he had rarely achieved: a way of offering your talents to the world without sacrificing yourself and your family.
What is known about sudden death in epilepsy
Storment said Wiley had a mild form of epilepsy and that his death was linked to it. When a person with epilepsy dies suddenly with no other cause found, doctors call it SUDEP, short for sudden unexpected death in epilepsy. It often happens during sleep and is usually unwitnessed.
SUDEP is rare in children. Estimates suggest about 1 in 4,500 children with epilepsy die of it each year, compared with about 1 in 1,000 adults. The biggest known risk factor is frequent, uncontrolled tonic-clonic seizures, the kind once called grand mal. Neurology guidelines recommend that doctors talk openly with families about SUDEP, because many parents, like the Storments, only learn the word after a death.
If your child has epilepsy, the most useful step is to talk to their doctor about their specific risk and about seizure control. Every child's situation is different, and Wiley's story should not be used to frighten families whose children are well managed.
Reading the letter without blame
It is important to say clearly what the letter does not mean. Storment's long hours did not cause his son's death, and his grief-stricken regrets are not a verdict on working parents. Many families have no choice about shifts, commutes or second jobs.
What the letter offers is a prompt rather than a rule. It asks readers to notice where their time actually goes, and to protect a few small, repeatable moments: saying goodbye in the morning, reading together at night, a regular one-to-one with each child. Those habits cost little and are easy to keep, which is exactly why they are easy to postpone.
There is a quiet irony in where the essay appeared. LinkedIn is a platform built for careers, and this post resonated there precisely because it questioned how much of our lives careers should take.
Sources: J.R. Storment, "It's later than you think" (LinkedIn, 2019); Wikipedia: Apptio (acquisition of Cloudability, 2019); Wikipedia: Sudden unexpected death in epilepsy. Family photos via J.R. Storment's LinkedIn and Facebook.
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