Notes on Grief in the Midst of a Pandemic

Today is five years since my father died. 

Hannah and Emily and I had left Mum at the hospital around midnight the night before, after we’d sat vigil all day. Dad had been unhooked from the oxygen, the albumin, the other medicines and support treatments the doctors had been trying for the last two weeks to give his liver a chance to do what livers can and come back to life. In the end, his could not, and so with multiple organs starting to fail from the overwork and exhaustion of his body trying to counter decades of alcoholism, we spent April 6 listening to his under conscious mutterings, his gasping breaths, holding his hands, and waiting for his heart and lungs to be flooded by the fluids his liver and kidneys were no longer processing.

It’s always meant something to me that it took so long for his heart to give out, as if it was his heart’s desire to stay here as long as possible. I believe it was. 

The Sisters left when it was clear that we weren’t going to get any sleep hunkered into the hospital room couch and chairs. Mum stayed. I knew when I left that Dad would likely die before I saw him again. I told him I loved him, that he was the best father I could ask for, and the only one I would have wanted, and that if he had to go before I came back, it was okay. 

Hannah woke up first on April 7^th. All three of us were sleeping in the same room, as close as we could get. She got up and pulled on her pants and said she was going back in to be with Mum. Emily and I tried to get up with her, and I don’t remember why we didn’t go then too. Sometime later, around seven, we got up and got ready to leave the house to join everyone. 

I was putting on pants when I heard Emily keening in the living room, and I knew then he was gone. 

We went to say good-bye. I regret so few things in my life, but one is that I kissed my fingers and pressed them to my dad’s forehead, rather than kissing his forehead directly. This, somehow, haunts me some nights still. 

After my dad, there was my uncle dying of fast moving cancer in December of 2015. My mother lost cousins in the next year as well. I put my beloved Noah dog down in June 2017 when his dementia destroyed his life. On July 21, 2018, we lost Hannah. In July 2019, my grandmother died, at home and with my aunt by her side. All were different, each as exquisite and unique death and loss, as each life was exquisite and unique and differently precious. None of them died alone in isolation in a hospital, surrounded by hard-working, heart-broken doctors and nurses in makeshift protective gear, without someone who loved them nearby.

It’s been a long and terribly grief-stricken five years. I have done what seemed unthinkable five years ago, in becoming accustomed to my father’s absence. I’ve had to do even more unthinkable things in grappling with life without my sister. My uncle, my grandmother, the cousins, all of these have been hard to take as well—the loss of the company of good people, the sense that the stability of my family is calving off like Antarctic icebergs. We are shrinking, and whatever comes next will never be as full as it could have been for all those absences. My dog, I know, is a different loss and grief, but when taken with all the other losses of companionship, he certainly bears mentioning. 

As the COVID-19 pandemic sweeps through everyone’s lives, disrupting things we thought we knew and thought we could count on, what I have found galling is the scale of grief we are facing. I have spent so much of the last five years being heavy with sorrow, brought to my knees at the weight of all the absence of so many people I love, who have defined my life through both their lives and their deaths. I have wondered how to go on, I have wondered if going on is possible, I have been gutted by the heartless lonely recognition that we—as little blood and muscle dolls over bones—do go on without the ones we love the best. 

I remember feeling cold and like I had pins and needles in every part of my body for the two weeks between my father’s hospitalization and death and the two weeks after when we were still in the earliest of the grief fog. My parents’ house—and only this year, and only sometimes, have I started to say “my mother’s house”—was littered with cold half-finished cups of tea. The fridge, blessedly, was overflowing with visiting casserole dishes and post-it-note instructions for how to warm up whatever kindness my mother’s church was feeding us all. Friends sent flowers, friends showed up, made food, walked dogs, got my mother’s vacuum cleaner fixed. Emily went to answer the door a few hours after Dad died and was startled by a man she didn’t know, who had stopped by the hospital too late to visit Dad and was so shocked he immediately drove up the hill to the house to offer his sorrow to us. I called one of my dearest friends who lived in my grandmother’s town, and she called their minister to go over to be with my grandmother. 

And in all coldness and grief and just an abject feeling of unmoored sorrow, the light and the warmth came from our friends and family who crawled out of the woodwork to scaffold my family with their love. Towns across New Hampshire where my father had worked on community planning projects rang their bells at the hour of his service in Hopkinton. It was loud and communal and heartfelt, and I’m still staggered by the enormity of love one slice of one little state showed to my dad, and by extension to us, his family. 

I don’t want 250,000 people in the United States to die of a virus that could likely have been mitigated and contained with a staffed and funded CDC. (I don’t want however many hundreds of thousands across the world to die, either.) I have been grieving—deeply—for 13% of my life, because the litany of losses has been like overlapping waves on a cruel incoming tide for five years, and grief is no more linear than love. Living alongside loss is something I have had to learn how to do, and while no one is immune and no one gets out of here alive, I cannot help but be heartsick at the thought of how many families and friends are being ravaged by loss. No matter the scale of the pandemic, each of these people is person, hopefully with people who love them. And not only are lives being lost to this sad end, we are actively discouraged from reaching out and showing up for each other. I agree with extreme social distancing, with face masks so we don’t accidently give others our germs, with all of the measures in place to keep the most people the safest and preserve the efficacy of the medical facilities. It just means that an awful lot of people are grieving, and no one outside their home can hug them. If they live alone, well. 

There can be no memorial services with bells rung across the state. There can be no stranger showing up at the door to say, “I just heard about your dad. He was my friend and I loved him. I’m so sorry.” There aren’t memorial services, period. Florists are not all open, and delivery is dicey. And the church ladies casserole brigade is subject to grocery store crowding and flour hoarding and needs to be left outside the door, rather than delivered with a hug.

For better and for worse, I am appalled at the human ability to withstand. I was about to write that I don’t know if I could have survived my father’s death, then my uncle’s, then my sister’s death, my grandmother’s death, without the people who showed up. But, of course, I could have. With Hannah, the only question was surviving the first hour after I knew I was, we were, going on without her. If I can live an hour without her living alongside me in this beautiful terrifying world, then I can live a whole day. If I can live a whole day…I can live my lifetime. So, with that as my metric for what is survivable, I know that I could have gone through all of my last years of grief alone if there had been no other choice. 

But…it would have been terrifically harder. There were friends, after my dad, who I could call up and come sleep on their couch when I was too sad to fall asleep in my apartment. There are friends now who remember my father’s birthday and help me celebrate his life, rather than dwell on his death. There is the unflappable force of my mother’s church who specialize in showing up and checking in. There are my parents’ friends who I can reach out to when I need more elders, when I need a joke about my dad or when there is support my mother needs that her daughters cannot provide. There are the friends of Hannah’s I have both inherited and made new friendships with as we showed up for each other.  

Thus far, I do not know, or know of, anyone personally who has died of COVID-19. There is a chance, and I selfishly wish for it, that this plague will pass over the doors of my tribe. Which doesn’t change the empathy for the millions who are impacted by this. This is one idea of my hell—to trap people away from each other when my best instinct, my best self, when what I know has helped bring light into my darkness, is to surge in like a good tide and reassure the lonely that they are not alone, that they are loved, even though it doesn't fill the void of loss. 

A friend asked for inspirational quotes for a birthday recently. The partial transcript of Valerie’s letter from the movie version of V for Vendetta was what came to mind, but it seems too dark for a birthday greeting. But, as a Valkyric love letter for those who are grieving in isolation, it is the best I can think of until we can show up in person for each other again. I love you. 

“I hope that - whoever you are - you escape this place. I hope that the world turns, and that things get better. But what I hope most of all is that you understand what I mean when I tell you that even though I do not know you, and even though I may not meet you, laugh with you, cry with you, or kiss you: I love you. With all my heart. I love you. -Valerie.”

Let's Not Be Cruel Anymore

Let me be clear. I am not suicidal. One of the things that keeps me most awake at night, thinking about my beloved dead father and sister is the deep sadness I have—on their behalf—to not be living in the world. I feel that I owe it to them to hang on to this gorgeous place, the thousand small pleasures of any day, the unspeakable comfort of being among those I love…all that it is to be alive, and stay really alive, for as long as I possibly can. As long as I am alive, so is some part of them.

And that’s just the rooting debt I feel to the departed. I cannot fathom suicide because of the further canyons of grief that it would cause the living—my mother, my remaining sister, our family, my friends. 

And then there is the simple fact that, despite my sister being nine months gone and my spending a lot of sad slow hours sitting alone and being unaware of time passing, I hugely enjoy being on planet Earth. It is delightful to move my relatively healthy body through time and space, to think thoughts and come up with new jokes, to feel heat and cold and snowflakes and sunshine, and to touch my loved ones in person and through technology. 

So, no. I’m nowhere near, in my grief, a suicide concern. Life is far too marvelous. 

But, all the same, I can somewhat understand the absolute horrors of recent suicides by those who lost their people to gun violence. 

Grief is terrible. I told my therapist that my grief over Hannah is just going to be an amorphous gray pet that moves with me for the rest of my life. It’ll change shape and disposition, but it’s a chronic condition to be accepted and managed, not an illness to be treated. Because a cure would be an erasure of her, in some way, and that feels unacceptable.

Which means that six years, one year, any number of years after a loved one is gone in a sudden snap instance, that pain and loss can surely spark up as fresh and terrible as the first moment.

For over two years after my father died, the first thing I saw when I shut my eyes was his body, lying in the hospital bed, when I’d come to say goodbye. I only regret, and I will always regret, that I only kissed my fingers and pressed them to his familiar forehead, but I couldn’t bring myself to put my live lips to his dead forehead. I will never have a second chance to do that.

Now, though, the constant refrain when I shut my eyes, is that I hear my mother’s breaking voice on the telephone—from New Hampshire to the northern tip of the Shetland Islands—telling me at 3 in the morning that my sister has died. Any sound that wakes me in the night is that terrible knock on my door at the wildlife sanctuary.

It’s a lot. 

But this, if you are curious and if you are a stranger to the feeling, is some of what it is to live with grief. Day in, day out, for years, forever in some form. And time passes and life does move on and condolence flowers get composted and there is structure in returning to regular routines. And then people think you’re fine enough or you fool them into thinking what they want to see because it hurts to see people you love in the depths of grief, and so they hesitate to mention your loved one’s name around you, possibly out of politeness to not say the wrong thing. And I’ve certainly tried to fool people that I’m better than I am because I can see how much my being so sad hurts those who would do anything to prevent me from having so much as a paper cut and can do nothing in the face of this. We’re a culture that is pretty fantastic in crisis and at "fixing" things, but less good at stewardship and accepting damage. It’s just easier and more pleasant to leave the names unsaid because it’s uncomfortable to talk about stirred emotions. 

And I’m lucky. I have a job with remarkable health insurance, which includes being able to find a therapist. My job pays well enough that I can afford a $20 copay for each visit. Of all the necessary miracles for mental healthcare in this country, I found a local, convenient in-network therapist who was taking new patients when I needed her, who meshes with me perfectly, and regularly assures me that—despite all the snotty tears I cry in her office, despite the gray pet of grief that I now have, despite everything I tell her—I’m pretty healthy, almost unnaturally resilient, and that I’m dealing with everything very well, all things considered.

“Jesus,” I say, tears and mucus dripping from my hankie, “that’s terrible! Because if how bad I feel is ‘well’, then how wretched it must be for those who aren’t coping with grief this well.”

“Some people try cocaine,” my therapist suggests, brightly. “Or a lot sex with random strangers. Or overeating or anorexia or bulimia or completely withdrawing from the world. There’s lots of unhealthy ways to cope.”

We agree none of these sound quite like my speed, particularly anything involving an addiction.

I get less and less crabby at the world regarding my father’s death every time I learn another good thing about what is being done to help those who are afflicted with addictive disorders. I don’t know that with my dad’s personality, his particular addiction, and what information about coping with alcoholism was available to him, that his death was particularly preventable. There are a thousand “ifs” behind that, and it breaks my heart to wonder. 

What is good is that addiction, even in the nearly four years since my dad’s passing, does seem to come more and more to be understood as a disease and a disorder, not as a failure of moral character or a constitutional weakness. If we can accept that, if we can get ahead of the deadly shame, then there is more hope for all those who have this particularly hideous chemical gremlin in their bodies, holding their best selves hostage. We are not good about the disease yet, but we are improving. Imagine if we told people with cancer that a twelve-step program and stronger will power would cure their disease. That’d just be cruel, but that seems to be the options for those with addiction until very recently.

Let’s not be cruel anymore. 

On that note of diminishing cruelty, if my father or sister had died from something as preventable as rampant gun violence in schools, and if time was passing and nothing was happening to prevent others from losing their families to the same violence despite all the promises when my grief was fresh, and if I wasn’t able to access a good therapist, a bolstering support system of family and friends, and if the more time passed, the more the world moves on and I was still broken hearted and grieving and feeling utterly alone and longing for my person, my people, on some other side of life…well, if I believed in an afterlife, I would probably consider jumping ship to be again with the people who I feel robbed of. 

The students in Parkland, the father in Newtown…these are explicable deaths, to me. Horrible, but if it's a feeling of helplessness that overwhelmed them, that seems like a completely rational feeling given all that has happened in their lives. Their particular trauma, whatever it has been that flashes before their eyes before sleep, if sleep, it cannot have been helped by any of the news of the world. I don’t watch movies or news about rock climbing because the horror of seeing a person fall would be too much to handle. If I lost a loved one of random gun violence, to see the white supremist terror on New Zealand mosques would surely bring on new waves of grief. Sometimes, I find, that when I’ve been “okay” with my grief for a bit, to have a sudden “attack of the sads” is so aggressively painful that I almost wish I hadn’t ever felt even that small bit better. To have the global news return you to the worst moment of your life is horrific.

The world can be a hard place. There is rampant random unfairness—my incredible sister rested her hand on a rock that came loose. Hannah’s hand, centimeters differently placed, and I’d probably never have heard much about that particular hike and we’d be chatting on the phone right now about Minions or pirates or sheep or her dog’s poop or something else important.

We, achingly, are not.

The randomness of horrible things makes it all the more vital that we DO what can be done to prevent what can be prevented. We need better gun laws. We need better universal affordable stigma-free access to mental health care. We need to be unafraid of talking about grief and emotional trauma. We need to recognize the wide nets that hold us all, and the eternal ripples of a traumatic event. I just learned that a car accident I was in half my life ago knocked my right hip a little out of joint—explaining some back and knee pain that have suddenly arrived. It is something to be so broken so deep inside and simply not know. Pain can have distant roots. 

A deep and shocking grief is a similar trauma to the soul, so of course there are collateral victims to mass shootings. 

Reinhold Neibuhr’s words— “grant me the strength to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change what the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference”—have been adopted by AA as The Serenity Prayer.

They are good words. Gun violence, mental health access, addiction and better understandings for the chronic ache of grief…these are things we can change as individuals and as a society. And we must. It is a disservice to the beauty of the earth and to the legacy of those who have gone too soon to do anything else.

Why I Want to Drive to the Airport

It is ten o’clock at night on December 23^rd. My sister Emily is making cookies in our mother’s kitchen, while Mum putters around with last minute craft things. Someone, I feel, should be making a move to the door, preparing to drive to Manchester to pick Hannah up from her flight, or to Concord, if she flew to Logan and took a bus north.

As much as I know this isn’t what we’re doing, it’s in my marrow and feels more wrong to be missing this ritual than much else has in the last five months and two days. 

This is the time of year when Hannah’s New England roots came through. Except for one Christmas she was in Colorado working retail at a ski resort and couldn’t come back East, one Christmas when Mom and Dad and Emily came out to Colorado for the Christmas when I was living with Hannah and Will, and the one Christmas when Team Taylor did Denmark, Hannah has always—dutifully, if occasionally squawking about the realities that travel at this time of year really sucks—bought a ticket and flown home for Christmas. Depending on ski practice schedule, Saco’s camp reservation or other Pet sitting program, and anything important in New Hampshire or Colorado, we counted on Hannah to be here for any stretch of time between December 23 and January 2. Once, she drove here and back with Saco, because it was important that he meet his whole family, including our grandmother. 

Hannah is my best friend, and although we talked an average minimum of twice a day for the last fourteen years, this last week of December is the longest stretch of time I or Emily or Mom or Dad could count on seeing her. There was always another visit or two throughout the year, but this was our time. We’re skipping Christmas a bit this year—a celebration put together by people with broken hearts, who are exhausted all the time, who cannot function in normal life, who are all missing the vital organ that Hannah is/was in our personal cosmology would just be a lot of work and only emphasize the loss. 

I think a lot about my life feeling like a smile missing teeth or a face with an eye punched out. Dressing all that pain up with tinsel and bells and trees and carols makes the wound seem ugly and unlovable. I do love my grief, because the raw ache, the tears that stream out of my eyes and into my ears when I lie down, the way that Minions make my chest hurt, all of this is a delightfully stubborn testament to my great sister. The ways in which Christmas, unless you take control of it, can seek to impose an ironclad Norman Rockwell/Martha Stewart/Hallmark ideology of tidy perfection and magical happiness are bad enough when life is just normal. When you are grieving, it’s astronomically impossible and deeply hurtful—I find—to have to go about in a world that is so hollowly, aggressively cheerful. The banality of being wished “Merry Christmas” by grocery store clerks, when I’ve had in-depth conversations about the nausea I feel about unwrapping presents or putting oranges in large socks or any of the thousand little actions that Christmas entails, because every little ritual that Hannah has been a part of, her absence feels larger than any other meaning the rite could possibly have…it’s been a tough month.

And only in the last few days, since I’ve packed my own bags and driven from Maine to New Hampshire, has it started to fully sink in that there will be no trip to the airport to retrieve Hannah this year. It’s, I see now, my favorite ritual and one I didn’t realize was sacred and necessary until now. 

In the time I’ve taken to write this, I could almost have driven to Manchester Airport, and be waiting curbside while idiotically texting that I can see her through the windows, and she seems to be getting closer to the car. There is no wiry hug through her puffy coats, no tale of crying babies or excellent people watching or travails of almost breaking down in the Eisenhower Tunnel. We are not clambering into the car, barreling to Hopkinton while plotting out exactly when it’ll be “ideal, simply ideal” to watch White Christmas. I have not been making last minute recon trips to local stores to see what can be found to supplement or replace whatever she’s ordered to be delivered to the house, but may not have arrived. There has not been an endearingly annoyed conversation between Mom and Emily and I about what to give Hannah—given that Hannah bought things she wanted when she wanted them, that she wanted things we didn’t understand existed often, or that she didn’t think were going to be “fun” for anyone else to give her, Hannah could be hard to find a good present for. There was no teary call as she dropped Saco off at “camp,” and needed to be reassured she was not a terrible person for abandoning her Best Thing so she could come eat chocolate and make jokes with our grandmother.

I know it is impossible, but I am trying to not imagine that cars in the driveway aren’t an airport shuttle van and Hannah is going to miraculously pop out of one, with her giant duffle bag, laugh her beautiful giggle, apologize for the confusion, and be here and make everything better as she always has (or at least, always since she stopped being a grouchy teenager.) I can, logically, wrap my head around the fact that I won’t see Hannah this week. What melts me is trying to absorb the worse thought that it’s not just this week, not just this Christmas, but all of every day for the rest of my life. 

People have told me that the first holiday after a loss is the hardest. I know that. We were flattened the first Christmas without my dad. He loved Christmas more and more every year, and my wonderful uncle had passed away not two weeks before that Christmas. It all made my family seem very small and rickety. The strength of surviving does not feel like strength—it feels like you could blow away in a light breeze, or just take a nap for days, if only you could fall asleep. We all got through that Christmas, through the holidays, although it was not pretty. I remember Hannah, particularly, curled up in fetal position sobbing under the kitchen table, because that’s where Darby was, and sometimes, a good dog is the only thing that won’t make the awful worse.

And then last year—the third without Dad—Mom and Hannah and Emily and Darby and I spent Christmas afternoon skiing on local trails. It was a bright and beautiful day, one of the best Christmases ever, and it felt like a grand huzzah of finding our new footing as a family without Dad, while also getting ready for Emily to marry Alex and mingle their families into something new and special. 

I know humans can survive terrible things. The litany of pain in the world brings me to my knees, often—every one of the 300 people killed in the Indonesian tsunami yesterday is as special and dear and vital to their people as Hannah is to me. And, those yet, those of us not felled by accident and disaster and disease, we keep going. I don’t find this inspiring, so much as a grim process of biology. The world is also lovely—there was an atlas of the world at the library I used to work at that was so beautiful I’d tear up looking through its pages at the marvels of deltas and mountains and ecosystems and urban planning and humanity—but beauty and pain aren’t opposites and don’t cancel each other out so much as spill into each other. "Your sister would want you to be happy," as someone said to me recently, doesn't change the fact that I am not happy without her.

Hannah, I know, would not want anyone to be miserable (unless they were mean to dogs, other people, or were otherwise cruel idiots), but the idea of ever being really joyful at this time of year, without her, feels like the most callous imagining. Part of the brokenheartedness I carry is for the life she loved and doesn’t get to live anymore. There are things about this season, about how Team Taylor does Christmas that Hannah loved, and if there is a wherever where she is in any way now, there probably isn’t Scandinavian coffee cake with cardamom, or luminara along snowy walkways, or white grapefruits, or any of the other thousand little markers that we use this week to tell our people we love them, to let ourselves be held in and reminded of the love of others. 

I’m not ready to do the things that Hannah loved as a way to honor her. It makes me want to vomit with grief to understand again and again that my dear Burda is only memories and honorings. Perhaps, in the alleged better and easier years to come, these actions will be possible, or perhaps it won’t be. 

As a reader, as a writer, I want a narrative. I want the beginning, middle and end, the loose things tied up, whodunnit unmasked, theses answered, moral achieved. Grief doesn’t give that tidiness. There isn’t a linear plot structure with crisis and resolution, just a lot of pain and the strongest friends in the world who stand by with hankies and jokes and food and hikes and silence and words and surprise postal gifts and spare beds and all the other things that hold my marionette strings taut and functional these still hard times. 

Hold your people, these celebration days. And thank you for holding me and mine and Hannah in your hearts. I would be even more truly lost without your love.

Aberdeen

This is a Pirate Bird Lady at the Aberdeen Maritime Museum. Her wing looks like an ice cream cone.

I never wanted to be in Scotland alone. I wanted to be in Scotland, and so I was, but the being alone part was merely because it’s hard to line up someone with the same free time and interests as me, and because I figured that my annoyance of not taking the trip this summer would be worse than the loneliness of travelling alone for a month. One should never FOMO oneself.

I started in in Glasgow and Edinburgh, where I mostly walked around a lot, getting very lost looking for whatever cool thing I’d been trying to see but hadn’t got good directions for, got blisters, got on wrong buses, walked through museums alone, and firmly re-learned that I’m absolutely no good at making friends with strangers when I’m alone. I don't think it's a personality flaw; my experience is that people travel in pairs and groups, and give suspicious side-eyes to solo travelers. 

By the time I got to Aberdeen, my last stop before heading to Shetland for wildlife volunteer work, or “being the top otter spotter amongst all of Dijit’s daughters,” as my sisters and I said, I was on the brink of a serious meltdown.

My backpack, stuffed with what I’d need for both volunteering in Shetland and then hiking around Skye for a week, was extremely heavy. When they weighed it for the flight to Shetland, it was over 50 pounds. Which is a lot to casually schlep around while traipsing about the several blocks of guesthouses a half mile and a steep staircase up from the  bus station. 

I found mine, after asking three people: one on the street, one who was in the first open guest house I found, and one who worked at a guesthouse which was fancy enough to have a staffed front desk, with a computer that connected to Google and a guy working who was nice enough to look up my place. It was a half block away, which was better than the extra 3/4 of a mile I'd trekked being lost, I guess.

It wasn’t that things were going terribly wrong for me, just that all the little things were adding up and I was exploding with things I’d seen and no one to talk to, and exhausted by the schism of feeling free and feeling lonely.

And so, after I went to the Aberdeen Beach for a while, I texted Hannah on WhatsApp and made a plan to call her on the same when I got back to the Wi-Fi at the guesthouse. She was just coming back from a ski camp weekend in Aspen, where she’d been in coaching overdrive mode of being aware of, in tune with, and several steps ahead of all the teenagers she was working with this summer. I know she loved the work, I know she loved the kids, but anything that takes that much energy out of a person always comes with questions. 

She was sitting on the bottom of her stairs, throwing tennis balls for Saco, while we talked. It was, really, nothing special in the anthology of Burda and Muffy telephone calls. We talked about Saco, who I call The Athlete, and liked to think he was appre-cee-ative of all the hours Hannah put in coaching him “on the Pitch.” I complained about how traveling alone is hard, talked about how I was excited to get to Shetland and the otters the next day because I was ready to have something to do, because everywhere I went in Edinburgh, all I could think was how much more fun it was with The Pod the summer before. She had her usual questions that she had after every ski camp about “is this really what I’m doing with my life?” and we went through our usual sorts of jokes. I can’t think what they were. Probably the call started with a drawn out: "This is Burda, calling for Muffy?"/"Muffy speaking, is this Burda"/"Yes, Burda present, to speak with Muffy, please." "Please hold a moment...Muffy here; who is this? Burda! I was hoping you'd call!"

It could go on for a bit.

I want to remember every word I said to her, every thing she said, each pause, each joke, each memory evoked, because this is the last time I talked to her.

And I almost hadn’t called. Because I felt silly and like a self-indulgent baby to be so homesick, to be so lonely, because I know travelling alone is hard, so why was I surprised. What I do remember is that I felt better talking to Hannah, and that one of the last things I said before we hung up was to thank her for being the person I can call from anywhere and everywhere when the poop is hitting the fan. I know I cried thinking about how I'd go crazy without her. I think she said something like: “of course, that’s what we do.”

There were other texts I sent her from Shetland. I told her about rooging the tatties, about scrubbing down seal holding tanks, about messing around in the peat. She sent me pictures of Saco swimming, Saco telling me from his lake that “I can be a seal, too, Auntie Muffy!”

But it means a lot to me to know that almost the last words she ever heard me say were, essentially. “thank you for being who I can call in tears from when you’re seven time zones away and your dog is running feral in the creek and you’ll still talk me back to normal.” 

When Saco went on his rogue walkabout the summer before, when the Team Taylor Tripp was in Edinburgh, Hannah and I talked on the top of some tower or castle—with her in tears this time—about how she was sure he’d be eaten by coyotes, how the worst part was that she’d probably never know how he went, and that her Best Thing, would go hurt and scared and without her. I cried too, having just put Noah down the week before we left because his dementia was making his life miserable. And the only truly good thing about saying good-bye to my wonderful dog was that I got to thank him for being my dog, for being the best dog. I got to tell him he was the best and mutter "thank-you-good-puppy" like a mantra until he was gone, with me cradling Noah, and Emily cradling me. If Saco was gone, as it looked from our vantage point then he was, I ached for Hannah to have that last comforting moment with her Pet Guy.

Hannah’s death is not like my dog’s death. The differences in those griefs shouldn't share a paragraph, really. But in the end, what is better than being able to thank people for being there for you, for sharing themselves with you? I can’t think of anything else more worth saying, other than “I love you,” but somehow a good thank-you is different. I think of it as a “thank you for loving me, too.” When Hannah and Emily and I left the hospital the night that Dad was dying, I wrote on a hospital whiteboard in his room, “Thank you for being our Dad. We love you and always will.”

What else can you say, even when your loved one is unconscious and swimming towards death in his sleep, as my dad was then? What else should you say, when they are vibrant and healthy and living their life alongside yours?

After I got off the phone with Hannah that last time—that it was the last time undoes me, every time I remember it as such—I wandered up the street for fish and chips, came back to the guesthouse, and ate my greasy local deliciousness while watching Nanette, on my Hannah’s Netflix account. 

Because of timing, because Hannah Gadsby has the same name as my Hannah, because of a lot of things, this has stuck with me as a connected turn of events. Of all the brilliance I found in Nanette, what sticks the deepest is when she unleashes her Art History knowledge, specifically Van Gogh. If you haven’t seen the show, this won’t really spoil it. 

Gadsby tells the story of a “helpful” man who approaches her after a comedy set to say that he doesn’t think she should take medications and therapy for mental and emotional struggles. His reasoning: Van Gogh was mentally ill, and he created beauty and art with that brilliant energy…” think of the Sunflowers! All that brilliance! You can’t tamper your creative genius with medications!” Gadsby, in her telling, unloads on him. Because Van Gogh was unstable. Because he WAS on medications. Because when the whole world gave up on him and crossed to the other side of the street to avoid him, Van Gogh’s brother loved him still, supported him, took him to doctors and therapists and specialists, and one of those early mental health professionals prescribed Van Gogh a medication that helped him, and as a side effect, happens to make the color yellow appear especially vibrant.

As Gadsby surmises, “we have Van Gogh’s sunflowers because his brother loved him.”

I’m not the sort of unstable that people cross the street to avoid. I’m starting to see a therapist but am not on any medications. I think mental illness is as real a disease as cancer and the flu and need to be treated with dignity and respect. I make no claims on being a creative genius, and I have been through enough pain to be highly suspicious of anyone how thinks suffering is Romantic and necessary to create beauty in the world. It’s not. It just sucks and makes your heart hurt and unsettles your stomach and gives you a stark perspective on how much beauty was already in the world that you perhaps took for granted.

But even if I am never going to paint sunflowers, even if I have a million other people who show me they love me and let me love them, Hannah was the person I called when anything happened, from a bad day in Aberdeen to a particularly funny shaped potato in a grocery store in Maine. When I was waitressing a few years ago and whined about not writing, Hannah stapled together some sheets of lined paper and mailed it to me, with the pointed inscription “This is paper. You can write on it!” 

I feel, I know a lot of people feel, that we are what we are, we are who we are, because Hannah loved us. 

If you’re reading this, thank you, is all I can really think to say. It cannot be said enough.

And I love you too. 

Hiking With and Without Hannah

Recently, I went alone up the Caps Ridge Trail on Mount Jefferson. It’s a bargain hike—minimal mileage for maximum view. One mile and you pop up out of the woods and into a rocky, blocky scramble, and another mile and a half brings you through the boulders and scree to the summit, and the Ridge.

The weather was perfect—cool and crisp and clear with the air starting to have an autumnal pop. I took water, work gloves, a peanut butter sandwich, a bag of potato chips, Sour Patch Kids, my warmest puffy, and a freshly painted set of fingernails (deep orange sparkle) and set off. 

For all the time I spend alone, I don’t often hike alone. Not because I think it is inherently dangerous, but because I have spent such glorious hours hiking with people I love that it feels like I am forgetting something more vital than water if I go alone. But, that Sunday, I wanted to go up to the Prezzie Ridge more than I wanted to be around my people, so off I toodled. 

That trail is the closest I can imagine to the terrain where Hannah died. It is rocky and scrambly, but nowhere steep enough that it would be considered a rock climb, rather than a rocky trail. At one point after I came out of the woods and on to the rocks proper, I came up a rock and steadied myself on the bigger boulder making a wall to my left and slightly overhead. I got to the top of the scramble and turned around. I had a rock wall to my right, a rocky-slab-trail slanting away below me, and a slight drop off to my left, with a bigger drop into the Jefferson Brook Ravine just beyond the boulders on the left.

I can see the physics of how a place like that was the last place Hannah saw, where she last was. To stand there, to look up to the right and understand that her dying was as explicable and random as if something had come loose there, knocked me down and dead on these rocks, on this mountain, on this ridge which is as familiar to me as the mountains of Colorado were to Hannah, was grounding. 

It is no more fair, it is no comfort, to see these things so close to home, close to the mountains I know and love, the trails I take off for on a whim and a need to be in the hills and sunlight, but it was a deepening experience. And then, if I imagined that I was Hannah, and that standing there at the base of the scramble was a smiling friend, someone I know and love and trust, someone who understands what is bold and sacred and joyfully beautiful about being out and alive in these places, to have a friend like that, a place like this be the last thing my sister saw and knew…it is not enough, it will never be enough, her life will always have been too short, her end too terribly violent where she was soft and kind, her absence too unshakeable, but it was also a something to have such a crystal clear moment of pure joy be rather ordinary in her life. 

That kaleidoscope of excellence in the moment just before the end was not random in Hannah’s life, it was routine. She died, and those words will never sit easy with me, but how she lived !

I hiked up and onward and began to come across the crowds who had hit the trail before 11 a.m. Some years ago, I finally started to get over myself as a hiker. When I worked in the huts, I was often a jerk to other people on the trail. Even when I was being sugary-High Mountain Hospitality-nice, I made sure that the other person in the conversation knew that I knew more than they did. I was trying to get into the good graces of the mountains, I think. I wanted to be Theirs. Which, spiritually, is a fine pursuit, but probably being arrogant to other people who are just up in the hills for something like the same reason I go there is not the way to the mountains’ hearts. 

I don’t do that anymore. Lately, I try to come across as merely cheerful, and not maniacally glad, to be sharing the space with other hikers. I assume the mountains work on others’ hearts the same as they do mine, and that seems like a much more a solid start for authentic greetings and smiles. It is a great day to be out. The weather is absolutely  ideal! Thanks for the tip, I’ll be prepared for it to be a little chillier on top! You have a good hike too! Yep, any day up here counts as a good day! Would you like me to take a picture of you, rather than you taking a selfie? I have hiked this trail before—it’s such a fun one! No siree, we sure aren’t  going to get many more days like this!

None of this was false or glib. It costs nothing to share the mountains pleasantly. And not to cut too close to the obvious of why I am writing this and why you are reading this, but none of us may get many more days in beautiful places, doing something we love with people who also enjoy walking steeply uphill on uneven terrain carrying basic supplies on their backs, for fun.

In the Zen Oxherding pictures, after the boy has found the ox, tamed it, and is sitting quietly with the end of his quest, there is one picture that shows nothing, and then the next picture is a riot of life. As I learned the series, the trick is not to balance the void with the fullness, but to be able to see and hold both truths at the same moment, like adjusting the lenses of a telescope.

Hiking Caps Ridge, and particularly taking a quick loop along Gulfside Trail, while smiling uncontrollably and unconsciously about being up there on such a day and wrestling with the realities of Hannah’s actual moment of death in similar terrain, and all the rippling repercussions of her loss to her life and my loss of her, everyone’s loss of her...this was the emptiness and the fullness crashing together. I don't know if the fullness is my heart of love and pain and the emptiness the serenity of the ridge, or if the fullness are the unfolding mountains and the emptiness the unfathomable void of life without my big sister. As I texted Emily that night “I just hiked past rocks that look like the last place my Burda saw, and I still love this ridge like a crazy person.”

Crazy person or no, that hike was the best I’ve felt since Hannah died. I didn’t feel better, exactly. It wasn’t cathartic or healing or a step towards closure or learning a lesson from her death or life in anyway. I don’t want to heal or be closed up or be able to find an “at least…” or some sort of koan hidden in all of this. That I can be as happy as I was up there while still being as utterly broken is either insanity or brilliant or both. Having my own mountain joy was like the sun coming out after a long storm, even though the shadows are darker in contrast to the light. 

I hiked down and paused again at the spot that looks to me as much like what Olof described as I can stomach yet. I didn’t feel particularly sad standing there. My right eyelid didn’t twitch the way it’s started to do just before I burst into tears. My chest didn’t tighten or hurt the way it does when I wake up from having Hannah make an appearance in my dreams. Standing on the rocks, holding my elbows tight to keep from touching the rocks and to hold my heart in, everything just made a terrible sort of sense. It won’t bring Hannah back to live in fear of or without the mountains or the emotions they hold. 

So down I went, being frantically chipper to everyone I met on the trail, because I want everyone to have nothing but perfect days in the mountains from now on. 

Död Amazon, By Olof Hedberg

Just at the point of today when I burst into tears at my desk while wishing that I could tell Hannah every funny thing, every dumb thing, every good thing, every any thing that has happened since she has died, my phone beeped with a text message from Olof, asking if he could borrow Granite Bunny for something he wrote about Hannah. It was like a comforting hug and high five. Nothing will ever replace Hannah, but to know how many hurt so deeply because we loved her so well is the best worst thing. Please enjoy his words, especially because Hannah used to tell him, "yeah, but my Swedish is pretty bad compared to your English."--Bethany

Död Amazon, by Olof Hedberg

All my life I have had the privilege to be surrounded by incredibly strong, independent and powerful women. Anyone who has met my mother knows that she is the last to bed and the first up in the morning. Early on she taught me that true life satisfaction is (for me maybe I should add) is reached by setting a goal and applying yourself towards it (then it actually doesn’t matter if you reach the goal or not - because you know you have done everything you can, so you are happy). My wife, Whitney, showed me that it doesn’t matter where you come from, but the only thing that matter is where you are going (hopefully together). And then comes the object of this blog - my best friend and co-worker for the last 4 years - Hannah. She showed me what it was to put in more work than the person that benefited from that work. There are kids that hardly cared about skiing, and couldn’t care less, but she gave them the same attention as the one that always had everything ready and followed every practice. Is that fair - I don’t know - but she was ready to pour her passion into anyone, no matter your level or dedication.

These three women have had huge impact on my life, One for now 4 decades, one for 14 years and the last one for 4 years. I’m going to digress a little on one thing I think they have in common - mental toughness. Mental toughness is a trait that I value very highly, probably because of the way I have been raised. The problem is that almost all people think they are mentally tough and have a strong mind. In today’s comfortable civilization there are not many times you can actually see if you are right.

Sure we can all pull an all nighter of work, sure we can break our finger on a mountain ridge and just snap it back into place, sure we can push ourselves in some athletic endeavor. I fully believe that is pretty easy and most humans can endure those things. Maybe that is why we all think we are tough. When it really comes down to it you won’t know how tough you are until you are cold, wet and scared (thanks Will). You have to be all three. Like when you shiver uncontrollably, through your wet clothes and start to fear that you might end up in the hospital - but smile and tell me that this is “no biggie”. Or when your cheeks are frost bitten and a storm is coming in so you dab for the Instagram and smile.

Me dabbing for the Instagram, as we had to abandon Plan A, Plan B and Plan C in the Gore range, due to an incoming storm. At this point we all have frostbite on our cheeks (and Hannah couldn’t feel her feet for some days) - or what Whitney, Hannah and I jokingly called permanent damage.

I don’t know if their mental toughness is why these women are so close to me or if it is just something I value in them - all I know it is one of the things that is so rare in today’s society and something that is hard to find. I also know it is one of the many things I respect so much in these women.

When the rock Hannah held on to broke loose and killed her in front of my eyes I did not know that Whitney was pregnant. Whitney and I found out 5 days later in a week I still don’t have any clear memories of. My life was already turned upside down, I couldn’t function - and I’m questionable if I still can. I have two huge holes inside me - one that is longing for what I now know is going to be my son, and one that is missing my best friend. My head knows that one of these holes is going to be filled with a tiny life. The other one will never be filled. It will shrink, it will transform and it will become workable, but it won’t be filled.

Right now my brain, my being, my soul can’t distinguish between the holes. People ask if I’m excited but honestly I’m just longing. I’m longing for the day that one of these holes will be filled. I would never expect, or put the pressure on my son, that he would fill both holes, or that he would transform the hole in my soul left by Hannah. The events are totally unrelated, and no human should ever have the pressure of taking another's place. All I know right now is that the feelings are too closely related - missing something that isn’t there yet/ missing something that will never be there again.

I’m not sure how to end this - or what to say. I know that I will do everything for my son to have a meaningful life, live with integrity, respect women, and smile when he is scared. I also know that he will never meet the warrior, Hannah Taylor. For that I am sad for him. I know there is so much he could have learned from her. I know she would have influenced his life, like mine has been influenced by strong women. I’m sad that he lost a role model he never met. So I’ll end with the last verse of Hjalmar Gullberg’s homage to Karin Boye - I don’t think there is anything more fitting.

För Thermopyle i vårt hjärta
måste några ge livet än.
Denna dag stiger ned till Hades,
följd av stolta hellenska män,
mycket mörk och med stora ögon
deras syster och döda vän

Things I've Thought About Grief from Books

Lately, as I go through the mechanics of performing the role of Me in the continuing saga Daily Life, I have a line from Hamlet rattling around my head, “I have, I know not where, lost all my mirth,” (or, as Hammy actually says, “I have of late—but wherefore I know not—lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises.”)

I know where I lost all my mirth. It was last seen in Shetland, evaporating off my skin in cold prickles as Mom told me about Hannah. And I didn’t lose exactly all my mirth—I still laugh with people I love, and I find bright joy simply being in the world. It is a beautiful place, the world, and deserves to be cherished and enjoyed. But there is a heaviness in my chest, like a cold that is lingering in deep, that cannot be shaken out. Every time something wonderful happens, every time something frustrating happens, every time the average Tuesday happens, I want to tell my sister. Last night, I woke up in a strange sweat from a vague bad dream, nothing memorable, just the awful sick feeling of deeply calibrated loss. I know where the bad dreams come from. It’s near where my mirth has run off to.

Not to spoil things, but Hamlet doesn’t end well. I’ve, at times, smugly enjoyed tying myself in bleak emo knots and intellectual complexity of Hamlet. I used to revel in that sort of English-major’s elitism, before anything truly sad ever happened to me, and I had the mental energy for mooning over fictional drama. Hamlet actually does grief well, but pretty much botches the revenge pieces, and then nothing goes right. Perhaps because vengeance is almost always a bad idea, perhaps because trying to fill the void of a loved one’s death is an impossible task in any instance. 

I read King Lear, at least the storm scenes and Cordelia’s death, during a thunderstorm last month—because I know the play well enough to recognize the horrible pain in those scenes and thought that maybe it would make me feel better to find some words for the horrible pain in me. I didn’t feel much better, I didn’t much feel worse, but learned that crying while a storm rages is fairly cathartic. And Lear’s howling, I like, although I feel pretentious howling myself. The sound that comes out of my mouth when I try is not nearly ragged and feral enough to make the keening hollow noise that feels right for this. 

But really, I don’t read much these days. Shakespeare is probably a bit much to wade into as a grief read, anyway. (Other than that ancient, timeless quality of his words and their general commentary on the human condition, the foot-fall cadence of the words, and the understanding that these words have mattered to humans for hundreds of years…I guess they have something to offer. But it is a bit of a dense tangle.) 

I do find myself carting around and occasionally even opening and reading a few pages of Voltaire’s Candide, and Brendan “Semi-Rad” Leonard’s The New American Roadtrip Mixtape. Candide I picked up because Olof told a story about Hannah making a great joke about the last line of Candide with him at a ski race once and jokes like that were part of why he loved her. I’d never read it, but if Hannah knew it well enough to make a joke that made Olof laugh, I want to join that club. (Technically, that’s the same reason I first read Hamlet—high-school Hannah said she loved it. So middle-school me read it.) 

And Andy and Jesse recommended The New American Roadtrip Mixtape. Trustworthy sources, who got to know some of the best of Hannah through adventures after they’d each made their separate ways west from Hopkinton to Colorado. 

Perhaps when your problem is a nail, all tools look like hammers, but I am finding the shallow waters of both Candide and TNARM’s early pages to be similar pilgrimages. Man-boy has thing happen to him, goes out into the wide world to explore, eventually comes home and will either tend a garden, or live a sort of peaceable existence having adventures and writing about them and growing that spirit among any who read his words. I like that Leonard is upfront about that part of his drive to adventure away from a heartache involves frank yet poetic descriptions of the physical pain of some of his running and climbing. There is something to this idea of pushing yourself hard enough that your corporeal misery matches your emotional kaleidoscope. But maybe trail running out of sadness is just the same as a Christian pilgrim’s hair-shirt and self-flagellation.

Because, it’s all the same, all of these pilgrimages, all of this going out and returning—changed but unchanged, deepened. Forty days in the wilderness, mindfulness retreats, vision quests, T.S. Eliot not ceasing from exploration, Kerouac, Chris McCandless, Elizabeth Gilbert, and all the rest of them and us. 

A lot of these pilgrimages grow out of what I think of as “the post break-up renaissance”—that window of time where the person who has broken and battered your heart and who you have also accidentally damaged becomes less important and there is sweet relief in getting back to the things that you did and loved with or without them. 

And you can, I believe, outrun that kind of heartbreak. I’ve always ended up coming back to myself, eventually sloughing off most of the baggage from different chaps, taking as much of good as doesn’t hurt to carry through the wreckage, and moving forward. You can struggle-slog-adventure-pilgrimage out from break-ups in personal growth and expectation, because it’s the typical adage of “wherever you go, there you are,” and a confidence and peace can come from more time, alone, with your Self, a “paragon of animals,” (Hammy’s words).

Grief, on the other hand…where could I go, what could I do, that could somehow bring me to a reckoned peace with a world without Hannah? I can’t think of any place. “It’s not down on any map; true places never are,” says the swath of Moby-Dick  that lives in my head. Wherever it is, every sunrise, every load of laundry, every tank of gas brings me deeper and deeper into the uncharted world where Hannah isn’t laughing and messing around in mountains, I don’t really want to go where she isn’t and where I somehow emerge healed from this loss. Healing, to me, sounds like the shit-fit that the narrator of Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael throws when he learns Ishmael has a syllabus, because a syllabus implies an end of a process. I reject that there is a tidy end point to any of this.

Even the places that I do want to go, and the things that I do want to do—more hiking by headlamp, more running, more skiing, more camping, more lying out and looking at stars, visiting glaciers, getting another dog, going to Hawaii, to India, to Turkey, to Sweden—it all becomes just so much less appealing to do these things without Hannah, to imagine that I have her excited good wishes to propel me for the rest of my life, but to not have her waiting for me at trail junctions, to not have her packing a secret bag of potato chips for me, to not have her offering the shirt off her back, the skis off her feet, the anything and everything to highlight that here we are, together, in this place. 

The boys in the books about adventurous pilgrims, they want to leave where they are. From what I've gathered from the few girl-books out there, we want to leave who we are, who the bounds of society and relationships of our lives make us. Everyone wants to be unfettered, to see what is new out on the road. It is self-discovery and self-rediscovery. I had that phase, and one of the things I discovered is that being Hannah and Emily's sister, Dijit and Jeff's daughter is one of the best things I can do with my life. And now, I hesitate to embrace newness, even the best new things, because it hurts my chest to not be able to tell the people I most want to tell.

For the last three and a half year, because of the way the words embrace his loss of the world as well as our loss of him, I’ve found it hard to say, “Dad would love this,” when the ocean is aggressively choppy, when New Hampshire is particularly good at something, when the sunlight hits a wooden boat in the water, when Emily and Alex got married and their wedding was beautiful and the most fun my family has ever had. Writing “will ever have” seems dark and melodramatic, but I think that we will never be “okay” without Hannah in the same way Mom and Hannah and Emily and I were just this summer cusping onto a new normal without Dad. Hannah’s loss was too sudden, too unfair to the life she still should be living. Dad had a disease that had been hurting his body for years and we all knew it, and while he went too soon for me, sixty-seven years of life is more time than thirty-nine. 

I doubt I’ll ever be able to say “Hannah would love this” without bawling because she cannot be here to love it herself. I balk at the reality that, once I can eat enough to have energy to run, I will likely start doing more things that Hannah loves, because she loves them. It’s a pattern I’ve had for much my life, anyway. I reverse the words from Eddie Vedder’s Society “I hope you’re not lonely, without me” to something more like “I hope the world isn’t lonely without Hannah’s exuberance and constant presence,” and so I want to get out there and put some joy back where it belongs. Who is to say that mirth isn’t a crucial part of any ecosystem? And given the combined loss of both my dad and Hannah’s fierce glee at being alive in the world, that’s some major keystone species collapse and some of us the living should pull our socks up and get out there to remedy.

But, still, when I get close to doing things like what Hannah loves, I feel the double ache of her loss of all the life she’s lost on top of my own sadness. It is hard to enjoy new adventures, to enjoy anything new when the people you most want to share the best and worst of everything with are absent. And every day is new. And every day is hard.