Grief Zoo

You’re a tourist in the land of grief. 

What are you doing here? 

Does it make you feel big, to peer at us through the glass, to see us keen and mope and rage? Does it make you feel solid to be on the right side of the exhibit? 

I’ve got bad news for you: everyone ends up on the inside at some point. 

There’s no right action, step-by-step plan, influencer-style tips and tricks that can keep you safe on the outside. There’s no level of money, privilege, power, access that will shield you from the feelings of being here. 

I wouldn’t recommend adding it to your bucket list, but it’s on there all the same. 

It’s a secret stop, an unwanted passport stamp, a surprise pin in the bulletin board that shows the places you’ve been. And why? Why is it so hard for all of us to believe that we’re here? It’s the one true thing about life. You can’t count on anyone or anything else, but you can count on this: everyone you love will die within the next hundred years or so. Including you. 

In college, one of my most formative leadership experiences was with Alternative Spring Break. We would talk about the concept of “poverty porn,” of rich white girls changing their Facebook profile photo to feature a tiny African baby with a big distended belly to make themselves look like A Good Person. 

This feels similar: grief porn. 

Stop peering in, trying to see what it’s like here. We’re doing fine, not really, but we’re doing better when we can keep to ourselves and not have to entertain you with our stories, our tears, our brave faces, our pretending that things are getting better when they never will. 

Does it make you feel awed, or grateful? Does it make you remember that life is short and hug your loved ones closer? Does it make you feel lucky, that you’ve avoided our fates? Does it make you feel sorry for us, or hungry for the sordid details? 

Well, I think if the gorilla in the cage could speak, he’d say what we’re all thinking: do us all a favor and fuck right off. We didn’t sign up to be in the grief zoo, we just landed here. If it’s all the same to you, we’ll go hide out in our little cave of solitude to lick our wounds and be alone without your prying eyes. 

The craziest thing is, I didn’t even realize I felt this way. 90% of the people in my life who are even still talking to me about my grief are the ones who also live in the grief zoo, who’ve dealt with their own fair share of grief tourists. The other 10%, honestly? Thank you. 

And at the same time, who cares. 

I would seven billion times rather have Colin back than any Lessons, any Newly Deepened Relationships, any empathy or connection or tiny “positive” thing that has surfaced since we lost him. 

I’d rather be on the outside of the grief enclosure, looking in, whispering to other well-meaning friends about how well it looks like YOU’RE doing. 

And that’s that on that.

Miss you, brother.

That’s all.

Gates of Hell

What do you know of other people’s suffering, of their grief, of hell as you see it from the gates of their experience? 

I have often heard people use the word “hell” to describe something hard, distasteful: that exam was hell, that was the date from hell, the line at Trader Joe’s was absolutely hellish. Go to hell, she’s hell in high heels (that may be an Arkansas-specific turn of phrase), I am hungover as hell. Hell is other people, someone famously said. 

Reading this week’s prompt, in conjunction with a recent experience where a very dear friend recounted her grandmother’s dying, death, and funeral have made me realize that the experience of Colin’s dying and death are the closest I’ve ever felt to hell. 

This friend was talking about the week her family spent saying gentle goodbyes to her grandmother: with tears and laughter, with stories and songs, with the entire extended family gathered at her bedside and a celebration of life that combined the cathedral of her white church with the gospel choir of her black church. It sounded… amazing. “I’d like to die like that,” was what I told her (I think she was unnerved, but do you disagree?). 

That’s not how it was for us. 

It was panic, fear, an unknown land. Strangers around us, eating muffins and sandwiches for every meal because it felt hard to navigate finding and ordering the right food. Existing on a timeline 13 hours different from everyone else we knew, so long stretches of time with no response, no one to call or text or even email. It was a hamster wheel of neverending doctors’ updates and then google searches to interpret and make meaning of those updates. It was counting: 5 things you can see, 4 things you can hear, 3 things you can touch, 2 things you can smell, 1 thing you can taste. It was almost blacking out in the Singaporean mall and buying a Sprite because it’s what Mom always got us when we were sick, and I felt really ill. It was telling my therapist over the phone that I’d been trying to read Harry Potter to comfort and distract myself and her calmly telling me that my brain wasn’t capable of reading or listening to podcasts because my prefrontal cortex was completely offline in my state of shock. It was the disbelief, the huge gaping hole of unfairness, the sobering realization that it could have been any of us, and that it eventually will be. 

It was the gates of hell. 

Today, I feel… okay. I still have the feeling that although I cognitively know he’s gone, I’ve forgotten somehow – it’s the feeling of waiting for the other shoe to drop, knowing that I’ll eventually feel the feeling of remembering, like waking up the next day already in tears. 

It’s a different kind of hell. 

Wherever you are or aren’t though, brother, I know it’s not hell – I know it’s wind and birdsong and outer space and a lot of other heavenly things. Miss you every day.

Possibly there are also kittens and puca shell necklaces

If This Isn’t Patriotic, I Don’t Know What Is

Reverse direction

When you return

You’ll smile, knowingly 

Understanding

It must have been hard

Because it would’ve been hard for you, too 

But you assure us 

It’s not been hard

You’ve watched us

Cry

Blinding tears

You’ve watched us

Laugh 

Til our bellies hurt 

You’ve watched us 

Love

Each other so 

You’ve watched us 

Hurt and grow and mend 

Around the forever gaping hole 

Of you not here. 

And every day

And every night 

You try, 

In your own way 

To tell us: 

It’s okay, it’s okay 

I’m okay 

And I’m here 

And it’s okay. 

It’s what you tell me in dreams, 

Monthly 

Or so 

It’s okay, I’m okay, 

Don’t cry. Don’t cry

At least, not for me 

Sometimes in dreams 

You wake up 

A little embarrassed 

At such a large show of emotion 

It’s okay, I’m okay 

C’mon guys 

Should we go get something to eat? 

I know a place… 

We can leave the hospital 

Leave the log chapel 

Leave the GoFundMe

Leave the scholarship fund 

Leave the little ways 

We’ve worked to hold you 

Leave the tattoo ideas

Leave the baby names 

(Or maybe keep those) 

Leave the poems

Leave the playlists

Leave the worry and the fear and the longing 

And go back to boring, normal, Before 

Go back 

To the couch 

To the bar 

To the rooftop 

To the group chat 

To the scooters

To the hikes 

To the flights 

To the adventures 

To the ideas

To the five-year plan 

Instead of just

Getting through another day, 

Another week 

Another year, 

Even. 

When you return 

We’ll all become ten years younger 

Wrinkles erased from our faces 

And hands 

We’ll all grow a few inches taller 

No longer holding the heavy weight 

Of wondering what’s next 

Or who 

We’ll all become a bit more boring, again 

Like having a new president

And vice president

Who are Handling It 

So we don’t have to 

Politics has become a little boring, again 

And I wish I could say the same 

For life

Just got back from a little mini getaway to Detroit, and remembering one of the times – or maybe the first? Or maybe the only? – I went to Detroit in childhood, with Colin and Dad. We went to a Tigers game and walked around Greektown and learned something about the history of Greektown and Mexicantown and other ethnic neighborhoods that I’ve since forgotten. It was during that weird in-between time, after Colin finished high school when we were Not Really Friends, but before I got midway through college and we were Actually Friends, so we were just bonding over how extra Dad was being (though we wouldn’t have used that word back then), we just wanted to eat a hot dog at the baseball game without learning all this dumb history. I wish I remembered more; Colin would. Where did we eat, what streets did we walk down, how long did we stay? How does Detroit today compare to Detroit back then? Did we go to the John K King Used & Rare Bookstore, home of over a million books? How could we not? But I don’t think we did, I think I just discovered that with Jimmy yesterday, but it’s hard to be sure. 

Miss you brother. 

Photo from a time of being Actually Friends, on the train trip in 2008 when I drunkenly asked if it was weird that I had always assumed Mr. Peanut was a black man. (Colin’s caption on this post says, “If this isn’t patriotic, then I don’t know what is.”)

New Life & Go Bacchus

The person you can no longer be

No, no, there is no going back.

Less and less you are

that possibility you were.

More and more you have become

those lives and deaths

that have belonged to you.

Inspired by Wendell Berry poem, “I”

I just finished reading Sasha Sagan’s book, For Small Creatures Such as We. She is the daughter of astronomer Carl Sagan, discoverer of galaxies, he who has a whole-ass asteroid named after him. It was a Christmas gift from my mom, and I thought it was about rituals and traditions, sort of a Happiness Project through another lens. I thought completely wrong: it’s actually meditations on how to make meaning as an atheistic Jew living in a religious world, and how her father raised her to feel a true sense of awe at the grandeur of the world, not because we have no idea how it all works but actually because of precisely how much we do understand. 

Her last chapter is all about death, and her second to last chapter is all about the rituals surrounding the winter solstice, which is also Colin’s birthday, and also happens to be the day Carl Sagan died. I really appreciated having whole chapters dedicated to that, whole reams of paper and hours of brainspace dedicated to the day one of the people who has most influenced my life came into the world. Her interpretation is that throughout human history, it’s always been a mystical, mythical, meaningful day: that prior to Christianity, it was a massive pagan holiday, and that the only reason Christmas even falls on December 25th is because early Christian leaders decided it would be easier to transition the masses to Christianity if they still had a feast to look forward to in the dead of winter.

Our elementary school music teacher, Mrs. Berryman, snarkily informed Colin that he was born on the biggest pagan holiday of the year – in my memory, to shame him or make him feel bad. He loved it, thought it was cool and hilarious (which was very confusing to my tiny rule-following self). “Did you guys know my birthday is a huge pagan holiday? Go Bacchus, am I right?” God I miss him and those stupid jokes and far-flung references. 

More and more you have become those lives and deaths that have belonged to you. 

That feels true to me, with every passing day I become less and less Old Hannah and more and more Hannah Who Has a Dead Brother, Hannah Who Has a Niece!!!!!, Hannah Who Is Connected to Certain People and Not to Others. 

I also started a new book this morning called Like a Love Story, which arrived from Kat in the mail and is a story about queerness and teenagerdom in New York City in the late 1980s. There’s a lot of AIDS activism currently, and one of the characters has an uncle who has AIDS who keeps a jar next to his bed where he places a jelly bean every time someone he loves dies. He has something like 96 beans in the jar. He says he plans to eat all the jelly beans before he dies, so that he can take his loved ones with him when he dies. I like this idea. 

Also, new life coming into the world certainly does not replace or make up for the life we lost – but goddamn if it doesn’t help! (I am purposefully not writing too much about this new baby human out of respect for her parents, but she is on my mind 24/7 and I cannot wait to squeeze her chubby cheeks and hug her and read her thousands of books.) While everything is bittersweet now, she is a tangible, concrete reminder of the good things in life, of forward progress, of the way our ancestors and our past and the people who have come before us still live on in future generations. And, she carries part of his name – what a gift. I can’t wait to find out if she will also have his eyes, or his bad knees, or his smirk, or his stupid jokes and far-flung reference and impeccable and almost photographic memory. 

A new life that belongs to us.

Some photos of #BigBacchusEnergy (I feel like he’d appreciate that), and Grandpa Charlie too.

Luminous Merging

Y que tus pies transitan

Abriendo huellas indelebles

Donde puede leerse la historia del mundo

Y el porvenir del universo

Y ese ligarse luminoso de mi vida

A tu existencia

//

Which your feet travel

Leaving indelible traces

Where we read the history of the world

And the future of the universe

And the luminous merging of my life

To your existence

//

Indelible traces. 

Where we read the history of the world. 

And the future of the universe. 

And the luminous merging of my life. 

To your existence. 

Last week was hard. Really, uniquely, surprisingly hard. I think it’s because of the inauguration — any big world event like that demarcates the passage of time and serves as a reminder that He’s Not Here. 

Also, as I realized in talking with Kate yesterday, it’s because so many of my happy adult memories with Colin were in DC, and though it’s somewhat unlikely he actually would’ve been there for this Inauguration Day, it’s not outside the realm of possibility. So I thought about him being there, and then not being there, and then I thought about being there with him: on his apartment rooftop, drinking cocktails with homemade bitters; at Red Hen, trying squid ink pasta and talking about our childhood wounds over a fourth bottle of wine; at Codmother, which he pretended to disdain but then danced his face off with a bunch of my TFA friends drinking Red Bull vodkas and Jager shots while blink-182 and Third Eye Blind played in the background. Such a shithole, and it’s defunct now. Probably for the best, except it’s another demarcation of time gone by. 

So I wore my Chucks and my “I’m speaking” Kamala Harris sweatshirt and had the inauguration playing on TV in the background of me and Jimmy’s work day and then watched the entire Tom Hanks-hosted feel-good, hope-filled variety show that night and then texted with friends all over the country about how Happy everything was. And then I made my fatal mistake: I posted an old photo of me with Colin at the Lincoln Memorial from long ago, after a bike tour through the monuments and museums with Charlotte, on my Instagram story. And then I checked my account every 4 minutes for the next 24 hours until the story disappeared, and became increasingly agitated, then disappointed, then depressed, and then full of hot rage that I didn’t get Enough of a response. I don’t know what I was expecting; I don’t know why this suddenly became the barometer by which I measured my friendships and acquaintanceships, but it took on a really gross and sort of embarrassing life of its own, so that by Thursday night I was ready to burn the houses down of the 95% of people who had viewed my story, seen that image, been witness to my tiny attempt to reach out and not feel so alone, and had said nothing. 

It’s dramatic, I know. It’s not a milestone or anniversary I should expect anyone to think about or proactively honor; I didn’t even see it coming. Plus, many of my actual real friends who are part of my life on a real, non-social media basis, did respond in kind and thoughtful ways. And yet. I felt so alone, heartbroken all over again, like I was swirling down into the bottom of a whirlpool and everyone I’d ever met was sitting at the top drinking martinis and talking about the weather. 

And there’s nothing else to say about that, other than: that’s part of the luminous merging of my life to his existence. Sometimes luminosity is really beautiful and sparkly and grand, like the fireworks going off by the White House while Joe danced with his grandbaby and looked on, and other times it’s so bright you have to look away because it might actually be too dangerous to look at head-on.

The Library

Each time someone dies, a library burns. I’m watching it burn right to the ground.

I’m back. It’s been a while. 

I’ve actually felt trepidation about coming back here (“here” meaning this specific Google Doc, with a 15-minute timer on my phone and a writing prompt open in my inbox): being part of this course last spring was really, really cathartic – which means it was also really, really hard. But I’ve missed writing this way, and have been trying to get myself to start again. Finally, last week, a family member asked me to send one of my writings (the one called “The Wind”) because it was their favorite and they couldn’t find it again. The idea that there’s a sliver of possibility that writing like this is helping someone else, and knowing that it helps me, albeit in a taking-my-medicine way, was the catalyst I needed. 

So: the library has burned. Right to the ground. Specifically, it burned one year, six days, and probably about 9 hours ago, and its remains are still smoldering. 

I have spent a lot of time over the past couple weeks going through the photos I took in 2020, organizing them to make a 2021 calendar for Jimmy and a book for myself. The book is a tradition I started back in 2017 and has become surprisingly reflective in each new year. This year, I was steeling myself to look back at 2020 photos and think: no Colin, no Colin, no Colin. Or, if I were to include him, it would be in ways that are fairly macabre: a photo of the ofrenda we set up on Dia de los Muertos, or images of letters and posts we received from friends and colleagues last year, or a screenshot of his scholarship going live. And I did find all those things. I also found some things that were much harder to look back at: really poor attempts to capture “the wind” in photo or video form, too many crappy photos of mallards at various parks and ponds, screengrabs of stupid memes that I know he’d love, saved versions of photos, posts, WhatsApps, emails, and texts from him that I wanted to have on hand. And, new family photos where we’re smiling but missing him, or pictures of the grotto or Lake Michigan where I’ve cried missing him, or images of Waffles or Luna or Astra that sometimes hit me with a seemingly random pang of grief: he never got to have a dog of his own. 

So it’s interesting, feeling like the library of his knowledge and personality and interests and humor and presence is still on fire, but like I’m trying to rebuild a new, far inferior library from the rubble that’s been left behind. 

There’s so much he’d be proud of, would’ve bought us drinks to celebrate: all three of us moving, new jobs for Em and me, his niece on the way, our trips to Tennessee and London, our religious commitment to family Zooms even when they feel tedious or silly or involve someone not knowing where the camera is or someone else not tilting their screen appropriately to where we can actually see them… and so much he’d be horrified by along with us, like the state of our political system and the insurrection in DC that I’m sure was within a stone’s throw of many of his buddies who are still there. Even things that don’t really matter at all, like our Bachelor commentary or the fact that my BFF got a teaching job in Cairo or that the batshit acquaintance of his who hosted us in San Francisco in 2008 is now married with not one but three children, it’s all part of the library. 

I’m watching it burn right to the ground.

• 

• 

• 

Icarus Also Flew

Context: finished my 30-day writing course, now I get weekly prompts and am pushing myself to keep writing even when it feels really hard. The below is an excerpt from this week’s prompt.

---

Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew. 

…I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell, 

but just coming to the end of his triumph.

---

I don’t think that Colin “flew too close to the sun” – of course not. That would imply that I believe he had agency over his sickness and death, that he somehow chose to contract cerebral malaria and thus put all of us through the last seven (!) months. 

But I do love the imagery of seeing his death not as a failure, but as a triumph. 

I don’t know; my gut did not like me writing that just now. Death as triumphant? It makes me used-to-be-Catholic-pretty-atheist-now sensors go off. Too Jesus-y, maybe. Sometimes shitty things just happen. 

Still. I don’t believe that Colin was daily as he died, but just coming to the end of his triumph. 

I recently had my first formal meeting of The Dinner Party, an organization for 20- and 30-somethings to have a space to process death, loss, and grief. I skipped out on the first one because it sounded… horrible, to be honest. I pushed myself to join this second meeting, and I’m so glad I did. 

My group was nine women around my age who had all lost siblings, mostly brothers. Someone’s brother fell off the roof at a frat party and died instantly; someone’s cousin/best friend battled cancer for a year before she died. Someone else got meningitis in college; another person was a homicide victim. Truly deeply sad stories, many of which had the strange effect of making me feel glad that Colin died in the way he did: it felt noble, almost heroic, to get malaria from doing world-changing work in a foreign country. That felt uncomfortable, because obviously, I’m anything but fucking glad that he’s not here. And yet. 

Some of the women had lost their person just last year, and some were coming upon the 10-year anniversary. We talked about everything from how universally terrible our dads were at handling their own and our grief, to the really dumbass inside jokes we miss having with our siblings, to the tattoos we got or are thinking of getting. We talked about how incomprehensible that it’s been 10 years, five years, one year, seven months, anything but five minutes since our sibling left this planet. It was both comforting and deeply horrifying to realize that one day I will be 10 years out, then 25, and eventually 50 or even more. 

Meanwhile, my family is working to plan where we’ll house Colin’s scholarship and foundation. I’m leafing through tattoo ideas. We just had the memorial service for my grandma’s husband Ed, who died at age 90 and in circumstances that couldn’t be more different from Colin’s. All of these different and disparate things reminding me that we have to remember him now, because we can’t WhatsApp him or call him or eat Barnaby’s with him or go on a hike with him or plan a trip with him or complain about COVID with him or get advice from him or laugh with him or make grand plans with him. Such bullshit. 

So I think the line about people forgetting that Icarus also flew is resonating with me because I don’t want me, or my family, or anyone else to just remember about Colin the simple fact that he died, as we all will: I want them to remember about him how much he lived, that he also flew. 

My therapist tells me that my ongoing desire to do stuff, to learn and grow and take classes and get new hobbies and make the most of the unknown quantity of days and hours and minutes that I have left on Earth, is an anxiety response – that I need to also be still, do nothing, move less, just exist and know that that’s enough. I get it… kind of. I always think about Colin’s statement about being more interesting, scroll less, less games and Instagram and want to live up to that, to aspire. I also considered him someone who would be pretty content anywhere, especially when we were together as a family – that it didn’t matter much what we were doing as long as we could hang out, talk, and ideally have some bomb food and wine. 

I guess what I mean is that I want people to look back on my life too and say that I also flew.

Grief Personified

Disclaimer: this is a weird one. I just read the prompt (about personifying your grief), set a timer for 20 minutes, and started typing. But I’m posting it anyway because I want to come back to it later, hopefully to see how my perception has changed.

---

Grief is a man, definitely. A man, for sure. It is one of the most masculine things about me, especially now that I’ve ended my not-shaving-my-legs streak. 

Grief is a man with righteous anger, righteous rage. He dresses well, a little too well, to distract from his thinning hair, his slightly uncool – though expensive – attire. He laughs too hard at things that are cruel, and he feels entitled to everything. 

He’s the kind of person about whom others say, judgmentally, “He’s never worked a day in his life.” But in addition to judgment, people are begrudgingly a little jealous, because grief always gets what he wants, even without working for it. 

He unbuttons one too many buttons on his collared shirts. 

He has one too many drinks at the post-work happy hour, leans in one inch too close, laughs one decibel too loud, stays out one hour too long. 

From far away, he looks happy – he pulls you in with false promises, like “it gets better” and “lean into me” and “if you stick with me and never leave, then maybe you’ll never experience a new tragedy, a new loss.” 

Lies. 

He’s been hurt, too. He’s damaged, capital D. That’s why some of the ladies like him – they think they can change him, with their thoughts and prayers, casseroles and cards. They’re wrong. They can’t. He is who he is, and the sooner everyone learns to accept that, the better. 

He’s featured in children’s stories, ghost stories meant to scare them into behaving or making their beds or being kind to their brothers and sisters. They hope he’s not real but they’re not really sure what to believe, because their parents seem scared of him in a way they’re not scared of the headless horseman or the monster under the bed. 

He has Instas and Finstas galore, to do A/B testing on different profiles, different ways of being, see which messages land and with whom. 

He drives a Tesla, because of fucking course he does. 

He’s all show and glamour, but in a way that makes you worry about something sinister going on behind his eyes. If he can’t even be honest with himself, why would he be honest with you? 

He drinks constantly but doesn’t get fat. He golfs. He does things like take long walks on the beach but only to lull you into a false sense of safety. He is not to be trusted. 

He seems strangely ageless, like he could at once be a college frat bro, a midlife tech startup CEO, and a spry 80-year-old figuring out where to make his next investment. He is definitely not a child. 

He’s the kind of person other people open up to, spill their guts, tell their life stories, and then realize two hours later that he hasn’t said a thing, at least not anything that matters. You don’t even know where he’s from or what he does for a living. There’s a lot of mystery there, and not the good kind, but enough to be intrigued. 

He just installed solar panels. He’s a less-attractive Christian Grey. He still listens to the Beastie Boys for some reason. He doesn’t know you and doesn’t care to, just wants to take and take and take. 

You think when you first see him, “Now there’s a tall drink of water,” but you soon realize he’s more like a mirage in the desert. 

You want to get away from him, want him to leave – how did he get the keys to your house? He changed the passcode, now it feels more like his house than yours. He gaslights you, makes you feel crazy – is he really there? Is it just you? Or is he actually shapeshifting, in every room in the house, in your car, on your work Zoom calls, in your inbox? Can he not go get a fucking life? 

Oh. 

After a while you think you might start to feel less defensive, more wary. Then wary might start moving towards neutral, neutral towards okay, okay towards curious, curious towards compassionate. But right now you’re too tired to give a fuck. The one thing you know for sure is that he’s not going anywhere, won’t leave. If you try to make him, he’ll change the locks again and just tsk-tsk at you thinking you could ever escape. 

If you squint really hard he might be the love of your life. That would sure make things easier, wouldn’t it? 

You want to find his weakness. Does he swoon over banana bread, or maybe have flat feet? And so what if he does? 

But if feels like if you know, you might be able to use it to your advantage. To figure out something about him for a change. What makes him tick. What could make him… stop ticking. 

He’s reading this over your shoulder, making edits, pointing out things that are wrong. He’s SO ANNOYING. But only because you know he’s always right. 

He makes you scroll back in the blog to where you copied that Rumi poem, The Guest House, and he smirks. Here it is: let it in. 

He’s so smart. It’s unbelievably irritating. 

And so heavy. He makes “elephant in the room” jokes that aren’t really jokes constantly. 

You wish you could see him as a companion, a lovable sidekick, a partner in crime. 

Maybe someday.

Tiny Moments

Moments that have the effect of centering. Moments where you don’t feel all right, but righted. What are some of those moments? 

It’s funny – I had one of those moments just last night. 

I had a phone date with an old college friend who also happened to live in Arkansas for two years post-college; her husband is in the Air Force and he was stationed at the base in Jacksonville, just a few miles from Little Rock. She’s only a year older than me, and we met on a spring break service trip during my second year, her third, but during the time we spent together in Arkansas she seemed way older and way cooler than me: she had a very cool apartment, and a husband, and a whole bunch of friends and acquaintances who weren’t from TFA. She was the first person to take me to The Root, which is now one of my favorite places (and one of the reasons I’ve lived in the SoMa neighborhood for almost six years!). 

Anyway, we’ve gotten closer post-college because of that shared Arkansas experience, and I love her a lot, but we don’t talk much – she has two young kids and lives several states away.and we’re just in different life places. But she wanted to catch up, so we planned a time, and she walked on the beach in Florida while I walked around SoMa at sunset, and we spent 20 minutes talking about work, and parenting, and me going to business school, and podcasts. 

And then she took a deep breath and said, “I just want you to know that I’m so sorry. I think about you and your family all the time. It’s so sad, and so unfair, that your brother died, especially so young. I hate that for all of you and I wish it didn’t happen.” 

It made me realize how few people have said that out loud. While I’m grateful for cards, and emails, and texts, there was something about her having the courage to say all of that, especially in the midst of an otherwise mundane (in the best way) conversation, that really hit me. She didn’t have to. 

And, it’s been over six months – I hope I’m wrong, but it feels like the statute of limitations on other people’s empathy is running out. Again, I hope I’m wrong, but for her to make time to do that now felt extra-special when so many other people have sort of stopped asking about him, checking in. 

So that was one of those moments that I felt – not really better, but like something clicked. 

And then I got back from my walk-and-talk and opened up Instagram and had a message from a high school acquaintance who lost her dad in December. Actually, he had a heart attack the night of Colin’s celebration of life – we had some friends who were literally driving over to the venue and they had to turn around and go to her house to babysit her kids and take care of her family. So our griefs are very connected. And she said, out of the blue, “I just want you to know that I think about you, and your family, and Colin every day. It was so wrong that we lost my dad so early, but Colin was so young and it just seems even more unfair.” 

And I know Grief Olympics are a thing, and everybody’s loss is hard AF, but also, damn! It’s SO nice when someone just acknowledges that this loss was and is uniquely shitty. 

Again, a tiny moment of not feeling – better, but like something clicked. 

Most of the other moments I’ve already written bout or alluded to here: blustery winds during a run or while I’m sitting on the porch feel like him. One tiny leaf rustling when everything else is still does too. Applying to five business schools in five days felt like sort of a sacred impossibility that he influenced somehow too, especially after I read that in Tibetan Buddhism that particular number of days after death is when your person is likely to be finalizing any unfinished business and closing any open loops.

Being interviewed at Ross by a guy who also went to college in the Midwest, studied mechanical engineering, worked at a plant, wrote his b-school entrance essays about managing a team of crotchety men way older than him, went to business school, and then was consulting at Deloitte also felt like him. For real – if Colin had been a ginger man with a lively interest in sports marketing, that was him. The moment I got the call that I’d gotten into Ross – my first acceptance and the one I was most excited about – also felt like him, and Emily and Jimmy were trying to celebrate me and I just crumpled into a ball and cried because I didn’t want to do anything major without him around. 

The dolphins in Jupiter were 100% him. That was synchronicity for sure, and again, right around the time when the Tibetans say your person is crossing their t’s and dotting their i’s and making sure things are okay enough for them to move on. 

Weirdly, Waffles gives me those tiny moments too. At first, being around her made me deeply sad because I was constantly mourning the fact that Colin never got to have his pug or Frenchie, and what a good dog dad he would’ve been, and what a good dad dad he would’ve been. But at some point, that changed, and now playing with Waffles or snuggling her or walking her or even last night getting up at 3am to clean up her vomit all makes me think about how sweet and tender he always was with animals, Luna especially. 

Occasionally I find those tiny moments in yoga too. I think about the class we took together at Indaba when I was much less advanced than I am now and he was truly a novice – and they were doing insane inversions, a million arm balances, 500 chathurangas, etc. And we both just sweated our faces off and acted like we belonged. So I channel that energy especially in difficult classes now, and the time nooma made The Fray song “Be Still” that was one of our options for Dominic to play at his funeral the savasana song. 

So many moments. This makes me want to look for more.