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.