Huts and Churches

I licked a church once.

It was the Christ Episcopal Church of North Conway, New Hampshire. This happened on an early evening one June day in 2003, and was undertaken in a completely sober and well-intentioned manner by three adults: me, my sister Hannah, and her friend Josh.

To go back to the total beginning of why this matters would be to unpack more of my childhood and relationship with my sister than I yet have words or the emotional stamina to explain. Suffice to say, Hannah and I loved each other as small children, and barely tolerated each other for pretty much all the years we lived at home and went to school. I don’t know and now won’t know what her trouble with me was. My trouble with her was that I always felt smaller, weaker, dumber, chubbier, weirder and lesser than her and this filled me with a particular combination of fury and doubt about my place in the world. 

Sometime when I was in middle school, I taught myself how to be funny, because it made Hannah laugh. When she laughed at my jokes, we were closer to being the easier going sister-friends we were as very small children. 

I still gave her a wide berth, because I couldn’t understand the fire that seemed to rage in her—she pushed herself to be faster and stronger in all her sports, muttering the names of her friends and teammates as she sweated out push-ups. I didn’t ski and I didn’t run on our high school teams, partly and mostly, because I didn’t want to risk the tenuous thread between us by becoming one of those names to beat in her world.

Life happened and things began to melt more between us. We both went to college, we started to spend time together outside of our family house, we started to turn into our quasi-adult selves. It wasn’t always perfect, but things were better.

According to a birthday card Hannah made me three years ago, the major turning point in our sistership came when I visited her at Mizpah in the fall of 2002. 

Something opened in Hannah, I think, in her time in the huts. It’s a common experience. My sister Emily says of her hut friends that “we knew each other as we were becoming ourselves,” and that’s a part of the glue between many of us, and why we can be the best of friends but not see each other for years at a stretch. 

Hannah’s season at Mizpah was also where she found Josh, who was the hutmaster. My mother said that she never saw Hannah make as good a friend as fast as she and Josh. It wasn’t the same as if Hannah just had a hut-crush on a cute mountain man, but more like finding a new friend who serves as a mirror to your best self.  Except, when the friend is that good, you don’t have to talk about your emotional connection and can just go on for days making soy sauce jokes and doing dumb skits and singing John Prine songs, because you can trust that the other person gets it, and the daily stuff is the important part. As I said to Hannah once about some of the loyalty I have to hut friends—“they get me, so they get me.”

When I visited Hannah in the hut in October, Josh was on days off and so I didn’t meet him then, but as Hannah and I hiked down into the Dry River in the rain and then up to the ridge and back down Pierce, I heard all sorts of stories about him and the rest of the hut croo and how fun it was to be in the mountains and how all these people were doing interesting things and going off on adventures and trying on different ways of being in the world. Someone was planning a thru hike, someone was applying to grad school, Josh was preparing to move to Hawaii, and so on.

The most important part, to me, was that Hannah was actively sharing her happiness and her happy place with me. Rather than grunting out the names of people she wanted to be faster and stronger than, or trying to keep her life private, she was telling me stories and jokes and inviting me into this world. 

It was a place I desperately wanted to be, both in Hannah’s world—anywhere that might be—and amid this community of mountain folks, figuring life out amid the hills. 

Hut folk can be tribal and snobby. We can, as a group, humble-pride ourselves on qualities of exclusion and being different and having a million jokes that no one else can understand. Part of that, for better or worse, I think is that we’re often a bunch of sort of strange birds who are so grateful to have found the group that works for us that it’s important to maintain our identity as separate from anyone else, because interlopers could spoil our sense of security. We might also just be elitist dicks who spend too much time being treated like mountain gods by the wealthy families from “20 minutes outside of Boston” who form the bulk of hut guests, and all that adoration goes to our heads. 

I am not proud of having been a part of the darker sides of the tribe, because it is so much better and deeper and stronger and wilder to share that space and time than to hoard this common ground away. We are better when we are open, and what we all have together should make us stronger enough to be kind, as we are at our best.

Rather than the bad attitude—which can even extend from seasoned Hutmasters pulling rank on terrified new croo—Hannah shared her hut life with me. I don’t know how much that generosity of spirit came from how Josh Guerra ran his hut, but in reading the tributes to his life, I can guess that he had a strong hand in that.

For that, because how and who he was helped to blast open the door between my sister and I, I have always loved him an extra note deeper than some of Hannah’s friends.   

That, and the church, of course. 

After visiting Hannah at Mizpah, I ended up working in the huts the following summer. I was doing something I’d always wanted to, and also had all of the intense joy of sharing this strange corner of the world with Hannah—that my new best thing and my old best person were united in my every day was magic.

As was my first set of Days Off. Hannah picked me up at Lonesome Lake, and we drove to North Conway, to have dinner with Josh, who was in Maine to visit the camp he had worked at. Hannah and I drove across 302, talking a whole new language of the huts and jokes and old stories. She made me run through where all the cutest hutboys were working, which set of Days Off they had, and reminded me to “forget not the caretakers and Construction Crew boys, some of them can be quite the lookers!” We stopped to swim at what I think must have been Kedron Falls, and we felt like nasty frozen little Golems creeping around the rocks, and giggled so hard we would have peed our pants if we hadn’t been skinny-dipping. 

We got to Flatbread and I finally met the famous Josh. He was exactly as promised, and knew about as much as me as I did about him. Apparently, parents can learn a lot about how their children feel about them by how they talk to their friends about them. The same is true for siblings, and I felt so loved by Hannah in that moment that more distance and more years of ice between us just stopped mattering.

When we finished eating, it was late, but not that late. We all had to drive—Josh back to the camp in Maine, Hannah and I to Hopkinton. We got ice cream and found Josh coffee. 

And still we weren’t saying good-bye. Not yet understanding about hut love, I kept trying to give them some space as if they were on a date-date, and they kept including me. We walked all the way south in North Conway to the bookstore, and then turned and walked all the way north to the church at the intersection and lights.

“Hey,” said Josh. “You girls ever licked a church?”

“No,” we said—and I thought that this comfortable, casual unexpected question was proof I’d met one of the coolest people on the planet.

“Well then, let’s!” 

So we found a subtle spot, screened by shrubbery, and gave it a try. 

It tasted like paint, and we continued on our way. Hannah and Josh said goodbye, he wished me all the luck and fun of my first hut season, and off we all went—Josh suggested we both come visit him in Hawaii, in November, when the weather is, he said “crisp.”

And that, fifteen years ago, is the only time I met this man. I have no claim on the deep and horrible grief that I know his People are meeting in these horrible early days since his death. But grief isn’t about ownership, any more than huts and mountains are. I am writing this because it is impossible to understand that these two brightest of lights went from the world within a month. Their deaths are not linked, other than through stupid random chance of each having luck and physics be against all their wisdom and experience for a crucial second. 

I reached out to Josh in the early days of life without Hannah. I wanted him to know, as if he didn’t, how much she loved him. Selfishly, I deeply wanted him with me as I grieve—the Hannah he knew and loved was so close to the version of her I hold in my bones and lungs and skin. And she loved him. When I worked at Mizpah another year, I saw in the Croo Log something Hannah wrote about perhaps we all have to stop our wandering at some point because it becomes too hard to keep meeting these friends, and then having to say good-bye. And so, she loyally kept her finds, rather than say goodbye.

When Josh would come to Colorado to visit his family, Hannah would drop everything to spend a few hours with him. When she and Will went to Hawaii, Josh hung out with them and tried to teach Hannah to surf—not her best sport. When Dad died and we were wondering what on earth to do with his beautiful dories and boats, Josh offered that maybe his old Maine summer camp could take one—and he was a friend that was dear enough to Hannah, and so to all of us, that a place that mattered to him would have been a proper home for a piece of Dad. 

The words we are all using about these two marvelous jokers—radiant souls, adventurous spirits, people with brilliant kindness in their bones—almost make it worse to me. It makes the hollowness I carry bigger, to have that absence doubled and to see the words of all the qualities I wish to put into the world coupled with loss within a month. I know how Josh’s passing would have hurt Hannah, because I think it’s the mirror of what he wrote to me when I got in touch after Hannah:  

“I can’t even begin to imagine how you are all coping with the loss of such a special lady. Her absence in my life will be a gaping hole. I loved her and her steadfast friendship so so much. I know we only met once, but I still clearly remember it and how we all got along so famously. Wish I could join you guys to celebrate and reminisce. Just know that my thoughts and my heart is with you guys. If you need anything or ever want to talk, I’m always here. I loved your sister so damn much. She was one of a kind. Much love to you.”

I want to say something here at the end about learning from my afternoon in the company of these friends, about trying to be better at opening doors and sharing the best of your life with everyone, but instead, I just break down and cry when I try to wrap things up too neatly, because there is no tidiness and no lesson to learn that we didn’t all already know. Neither of these people died doing what they loved best, because what they loved best was their people.

Instead of tidiness and platitudes, I offer my love to those who knew Josh far better than I. Hannah would offer you anything she could to help, and I can only do the same. 

And, if the licking of churches is required, I was trained by the best and will gladly be your girl.

Going On

I have eased my way east from New Hampshire to where my life in Maine is usually. I’ve walked into my office for the first time, and now a second. I have put meetings and projects on calendars, emailed my student employees. Overall, I feel a like a lowly-evolved sea creature, living in some other species’ larger abandoned shell. I’ve visited the storage unit that Hannah encouraged me to rent in June when the house I was living in was being sold and I had a grand plan of taking advantage of my lack of summer responsibilities to go travel in Scotland for a month. She helped convince me it was okay to be a gypsy for a while, that I wasn’t a screw-up to not be buying houses and having babies and getting married the way everyone else seems to, that it was a kind of awesome to do what I wanted to do, even if it was weird and scared me a little to give up the façade of being more conventional.

I lasted two minutes at the storage unit before I burst into tears and came home to the friends I am staying with. Everything is there, just as I left it, which doesn’t make sense to me. How do my possessions still sit in the boxes, how has my hair not turned pure white, how is the world still in brilliant color, how come everything has not stopped?

Because it does not. 

My mother’ friends showed up, early in the loss of Hannah, with the words from Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot:” I can’t go on, I will go on. This is what I have been saying to myself for days, because I do not want to go on in a world without my sister, but I also cannot seem to help that every day shows up and we get through them. I have no death wish—I love the world and my people with a ferocity equal to Hannah’s—but I resent the days that pile up between a world with Hannah, and the world without. I am stunned and annoyed that I can and that I will, almost without my acting one way or another. It’s like being pulled by the tide, no matter how hard I sink my feet into the soupy sand and try to stay. “I can’t go on,” says the petulant tantrum. “I will go on,” says the quieter wisdom, resigned to the obvious forces of biology and the spinning earth and the bureaucratic demands of living through a close death.

The Beckett words work for me. Perhaps they would not for another. People mean well, in all the things they say to the bereaved. Mostly, I try, very hard, to not listen to the words but to the sentiment behind the words that people give me. After all, there are very few things that can be said that give comfort. To say anything is something, to say something valuable is a gift. 

In those many words, some people have complimented my and my family’s grace and fortitude, our strength, our willingness to share the different sides of Hannah we all knew with those who knew other facets of our best person. I am not saying this to brag—I feel neither strong nor graceful, and I don’t want to be either, because those words give the false impression that I am stoically holding my shit together, that any of us are okay. I contemplated curling up in fetal position in the grocery store today. I want to be catatonically sobbing in a corner with Hannah’s dog, because that is how I feel inside. That we can get through anything is because we are hollow and numb, not because we are resilient. I would rather not be resilient than have come to it like this. I am not thoughtfully sharing my sister, I am bleeding out and some people are close enough to be splashed and learn more about who I love. I find myself wary to receive the love and care of others, because I am afraid that where they are soft, I am raw and feral and may accidentally bite with acidic teeth into the kindness they offer, and I'll drive them away and be even more alone. I am tired. I am tired of carrying a gray ache in my chest that I am afraid will both never or ever lessen. I am tired because I do not want to wake up another day without her. I am tired and cannot sleep while memories of Hannah crowd my head and I cannot understand how all that she was, mentally and physically, is so molecularly reconfigured as to be unrecognizable. When we were little kids, we had bowl cuts and put tights on our heads to pretend we had long beautiful braids for playing dress up. She fell off her bike when she was ten and skinned her chin and cheek so badly we thought her freckles might not come back in that patch. They did. She had one freckle in the exact center of the tip of her nose. Her smile was radiant, and the towel Mom put under her head to catch Hannah’s drool the first miserable night with her braces and headgear was moss-green. The week before Emily's wedding we stacked firewood and danced in the yard to cheesy pop music and I brushed bark out of her hair and told her to take a shower and she laughed. And all of that…I deflate like a balloon at the thought of what is gone and that I have no idea where she is gone to. 

I feel fragile, knowing that, really, any of us are alive by luck alone—that we can go from life to memory in the blink of an eye, the snuff of a candle. Not very many years ago, Hannah visited me in the New Hampshire mountain town I lived in. It was winter, and the house was full of some raggedy collection of the mountain rats who are some of the dearest friends of my life. We were talking that night about the Holocaust and some theory that maybe a deep combination of grit and soul was in those who were able to survive, versus those who did not.

Hannah, ever the smartest person in the room, called bullshit. Plenty of the people who perished had the same grit and soul and fight, she said, but they were on the train that went to straight to the chambers, they were shot in the head as they tried to run or as they were trapped in a van, they were simply not in circumstances that would allow their survivor gene to shine. This may have been the first time I heard her articulate something she came to often say: “expect all things from all people.” It's either the most inspirational or the most cynical way to look at fellow humans, both the ones you know and humanity on a conceptual level. I think she knew enough to mean it all ways.

It is that luck, that bad luck, that randomness that flies in the face of so much of the insufficiency of words trying to bring comfort and peace around death and grief. She died for a reason, but it was a geologic reason, relating to weather and pressure and balance and time and erosion and gravity. I am not obstinately refusing to see cosmic sense or deep meaning in her death—there simply is none. It was bad luck, which doesn’t mean that any of us deceptively fragile little dolls wandering the earth have anything other than good luck, at the moment. If humans survived on an alchemy of grit and will to live, I would not be writing this tonight, because I would be talking to Hannah about seals and 100 mile races and how Saco's swimmies were today. Instead, there was the worst luck, and here most of us are.

And all we can do with our current luck is go on, even as my heart lies panting on the floor of grocery stores and storage units, and as the sun rises and sets, tides ebb and flow, and time that I do not want to pass, passes. I know there will be a time when I jump back into life with some fevered idea to live as much like Hannah as possible—to run all the places, hike all the trails, ski all the mountains, pat all the dogs, and I am looking bittersweetly forward to that renaissance of wonder—but for now, simply going on is as much as I can handle.

Early Thoughts on the Shock of Losing My Sister

In the world as I used to understand it, I would be getting off a plane in Boston tonight after a month of traveling alone in Scotland. My mother would meet me at the airport, and maybe my sister Emily. I would have called my sister Hannah in Colorado as soon as the pilot allowed passengers to use our phones on the ground. I would have announced that I had arrived, that the Loch Ness Monster was safely stowed in my luggage, and that I had become more extreme than all the sheep.

I also would have cried a little when I talked to her, because I would have been so relieved to be back in my regular life, where Hannah and I talk a few times a day, text about how cute her dog is, or if tacos or burritos make a better dinner, or anything else that is so crucially important to tell each other. I was prepared, on my trip, to be lonely for Hannah for a month, but no longer.

Instead, at 3 a.m. on the very early morning of July 22, I was woken up by a knock on my door from one of the folks who run a wildlife refuge in the north of the Shetland Islands, where I was volunteering. “Bethany,” he said, “you’ve got a phone call.”

Nothing good happens at 3 a.m., but I could never have thought my mother would tell me: “Hannah has died. Hannah is dead.” 

No mother should ever have to say those words. If there were any karma or reason or balance or benevolent deity in the world, my mother should have been especially spared. Not because my mother is more special or Hannah more precious than other mothers and daughters and sisters who are ripped between life and death every hour of every day, but because the losses of loved ones have just piled up upon my family in a way that feels unfathomably out of balance. Some people have all their parents, all their aunts and uncles, all their siblings, all their cousins, all their children, all their spouses. My family do not. If there were a God, if there were a reason, if there were anything that could be clung to as a way of making sense or keeping faith, then this cavalcade of loss would be different to me.

But it is not. I now wake up every morning again trying to wrap my head around how it is not different, and that my sister is really gone. Forever. I say “my sister,” but the word doesn’t go deep enough for what Hannah is to me. My sister Emily has said that she gets annoyed at women who will lightly talk about “the sisterhood” of all women or refer to each other as “work sisters.”

“No,” says Emily. “Sisters are sacred.”

And they are, but with less of the priggish sanctimony than the word implies, and much more discussion of underpants and Minions and the best way to work with helicopters. At least, that is how it is with my sisters. 

What Hannah is to me makes every word I know about friends and sisters and companions seem utterly pale and useless. She is simply my person. I have thought, at times, that perhaps I will be okay at this somewhat lonesome time in my life when every one of my peers seems to be part of a nested pair and I am not, that I am not really alone because between the tight constellation of dear friends and the constant daily contact with my sister, all of that added up to something even fuller in some ways than a partner. It’s not the same, but it’s what I had and it worked well enough.

I digress. One thing that Hannah and I often said to each other, with wry smiles and one raised eyebrow, while complaining about this or that way in which the world as we dealt with it was not going as well as it would if either or both of us where in charge was: “but this isn’t really about me, now is it?”

And that’s a lot of this. While I am broken and hollow, while my mother naps hugging Hannah’s sweatshirt to her chest, while Emily has lost her third parent and idol, while Will rattles around their house with his sadness and Hannah’s heartbroken dog, while our grandmother sighs more often and looks at pictures of Baby Hannah—her first grandchild, while Olof helps his and Hannah’s skiers handle their emotions, while Whitney makes nerdy jokes without Hannah’s impish laugh to cheer her on…while we all who love Hannah struggle to do any of this, all of this, anything we can and have to do without Hannah, it isn’t really about any of us. It is about Hannah.

She stood on a rock slab, braced herself with one hand on the rocks to look ahead to her best adventure friend, smiled, and the rock in her hand gave way, sending her down ten feet to a ledge, another loosed rock slammed into her head, and the impact sent her body down a steeper section of rock. 

Imagine you went to the grocery store and a watermelon fell off a display, hit your head, and that is the end of all your living and breathing and loving and being. For all the time and experience Hannah had in mountains, her end is about that strange and unavoidable.

Where she had stood was not steep. She was not on the edge of danger, pushing her comfort zone. After our father died three years ago, Hannah started to do more of the things that scared her, because Dad believed in pushing limits and it was a way to be more alive and to honor that part of him. I should say, she risked safely—she was not a woman seeking to touch the void. She adventured to live, not to die. But this, Hannah’s accident, was not one of those adventures. This was, as she would say—imitating a fussy British Olympic commentator on slow Nordic skiers—“positively pedestrian.” 

People, meaning well and trying to make sense of the senseless have said: “at least she died doing something she loved.” I find this reductionist and unhelpful. While she loved mountains and hiking, she also loved napping with her dog, goobling over her friends’ babies, looking at fancy shoes, making birthday cards, painting her nails, calling our grandmother, throwing tennis balls for her dog, wearing umpteen towels wrapped around her at the beach to protect her fussy skin from scorching like a lobster, and all the thousands of things a person does and calls it living. 

And that all is what my most special Hannah doesn’t get to do any more. And all the hikes we can take, the chocolate cake we can eat, the memories we can share, the whatever rituals and adventures to be done in her spirit…all of that—which we must do as long as we each feel we must—doesn’t add up to a fraction of the life that she still had yet to live.

I have grieved before. I know too well what the living do. I can, eventually, get out of bed and eat. I can do laundry. I can laugh. I can even make small talk with strangers. Soon I’ll go back to work. I can do all the things, in time. I do not doubt the human animal’s beautifully hideous ability to survive the harrowing of grief. There is a deep shock and sadness in knowing that we will, in some ways, become okay again. It does not seem possible now, and I do not want it to be possible, because that part of grief and healing, when the active pain is gone, feels as if the departed is somewhat erased. This seems unbearably cruel to me.

But again, this is not about me. It is about the life that Hannah—fierce, goofy, wonderful Hannah—does not get to continue. As desperately as I want Hannah to have never left my life, I more deeply grieve she is no longer in hers. I think this is a hurt that does not heal.