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. 

The Brutal Importance of Accuracy

All my Best People,  June 2018

In the last week, I have had to tell nineteen new people about Hannah.

My job gives me the summer off, so there is a lot of naive enthusiasm of “how was your summer?” that needs to be navigated. And I have about thirty college students who work for me, and I felt that in the first meetings I have with them each, I should explain why I may be a hot mess this year.

One of the folks I told, a professor rather than a college kid, said that he'd read an article about Hannah online in a running magazine post.

“Oh, that one?” I said. “They got her wrong, they said she slipped. She didn’t slip. They corrected things eventually, but they got it wrong at first.” An edge of hysteria sharpened as my words came out faster and the professor backed off making desultory conversation about how he'd read a sad story about a woman who turned out to be my sister. She is my sister, Emily’s sister, Mom’s daughter, Will’s lady, the beloved family and dear friend of many, and a coach and mentor and person to more people than can be counted.

Hannah is too much to be a quick one-offed news story.

I know that this running magazine wrote about her online. I know this because Olof and Whitney called me in a fury because the writer had gotten permission to use Summit Nordic photos, had been offered the contact information for Olof—who has the desolate honor of sharing Hannah’s last hours, minutes, seconds—and then the writer just copied and pasted together the words of earlier articles in other papers, including the misinformation that Hannah slipped.

The words “she didn’t slip” are important to me. It’s a bitter little mantra, something that I can breathe in and out to while bawling, which I do best when I’m alone in my car.

It matters that she didn’t slip, because Hannah was not out of her depth or beyond her abilities. One rock crumbled in her hand, another hit her head. It is stark and it is random and it gives me night and daymares, but it is the truth.

It’s somehow easier when a person dies in the mountains to tell a story of hubris. It’s especially easy and common and untrue with women who die in wild places, to paint them as dumb Bambis who just weren’t strong enough or experienced enough to be where they were.

There is also the more awestruck bro-y rationale that, “well, they knew the risks and they went for it anyway,” as if there was some mystic purity in being a martyr to the Spirit of Adventure. This seems to give comfort to the same sort of idiots who offer up the “at least they went doing something they loved” platitude. When I wrote that Hannah’s death was as random as walking into a grocery store, past a display of watermelons and being hit in the head, imagine the idiocy of a person saying that there was to be some comfort in “at least…she always loved watermelons.”

To make it a question of skill or preparedness or even of belonging in the outdoors puts the possibility of any of us going so quickly and randomly far away. “I would be prepared,” we can say. “I wouldn’t do that, go there, make that choice…”

Any of us would. Any of us could. Some of us may. I was fussing with a hose today, watering the flowering tree my grandmother has given my mother as a memorial to Hannah—something pretty, that will grow. The tree is planted right next to the porch Hannah painted in the days before Emily’s wedding. The margin between lacing up your sneakers for another hike and having your family choose a species of tree to memorialize you is less than razor thin, and none of us are as in control of our own fates as we imagine.

But that is not the point. The point is that death is awful and permanent and painful for those who remain. (I have no ideas about how it is for those who go—I only hope it doesn’t hurt as much for Hannah to be without us.) If words are one of the only ways to do justice to a life, to tell the stories that keep a memory alive, that send little girls flocking to roller skis, that get teenage boys punch-dancing to Taylor Swift, that make us all dig a little deeper to live a little better and be stronger and kinder and go farther to keep the world from being too lonely for all that Hannah brought to it…if all that is the case, then it is crucially important to get the words right.

I write. I like words. I like when I find the ones that can give needle-like accuracy to the feelings I want to convey. I know I get it right when it feels clean and when people say "that's just what I felt, but I didn't have the words," and we can connect over the shared experience of whatever it is to be human.

When professional writers use their platform and words wrongly or poorly, I am deeply furious and offended at the tools being put to uses beneath their power. Objectively, Hannah made a great news story for papers in Colorado and New Hampshire and for running and skiing and adventure race forums. Beautiful white girl dies in tragic dramatic accident in mountains. Boom. Probably there is a formula for how many more likes you get on an article based on the wattage of the girl’s smile. Hannah’s was a million.

I wish all of this attention had come to her in life, because she hasn’t been made extraordinary by death. She was even more so in life. Everything that is now listed as an accomplishment and evidence of a vibrant life…she was doing all of that which is now missed and celebrated and mourned, all of it unsung, underpaid, and often unnoticed.

And, as that is impossible now, I wish that newspaper writers and online magazine compilers would show a little more humanity and responsibility in their writing about death. I wish that the two local New Hampshire papers had gotten in touch with my mother before she went out to grab her paper from the driveway and saw the front-page story that highlighted Hannah’s local roots, yet did not mention her local family. That the Colorado papers had waited for the official report from the Coroner’s Office before writing anything about how Hannah died, because those small errors were compounded each time another lazy writer used those stories as a base, rather than doing their own research. That, if Hannah was a news story on the local New England news, someone at WMUR had asked us or told us before Emily’s coworker mentioned it in passing. That the running-writer had used the contact information for Olof he was provided with at the start, and gotten the story right, the first time.

All of this was poorly done. I know that our news media is broken. I know that the sub 24-news cycle is absurd, that journalists are under more pressure to get likes and shares and retweets than to get their facts straight, because profit matters more than truth.

And I know that I don’t care about any of those bullshit reasons for making avoidable mistakes.

These stories, like all news, are about people. In this case, they were about one of my best People, and anything that was wrong or inaccurate or sloppy about her is painful, because all we get from now on are memories and sharing stories. Hannah has become a finite resource, in some ways. While I have the rest of my life to tell Hannah stories, there is also no second chance for how news of her death entered the worlds she touched.

It is that lack of care and respect that enrages me about things that were written about Hannah, that people who wrote stories about Hannah without knowing her and without reaching out to those who did know her. It was, actually, kind of the professor to say he’d read about Hannah—my fury is that there is any inaccuracy about my sister in the world.

It’s quite bad enough that she is gone.

Hannah was such a stickler for truth and accuracy and responsible grammar, though, that it is a little insulting to have to correct these statements. I’m sure there are more places than I know that wrote about Hannah—rightly and wrongly—but there is only so much policing the internet for accuracy that I have the stamina to do. It should not fall to the bereaved to correct the record of a passing—the record should be correct before it is published.

My mom asked me today if I thought there would be a time when we’d run out of Hannah stories, or if people who love us would simply have had enough of hearing the same thirty-nine years of stories about Hannah.

I don’t think I will ever be sick of them.   

At the Beach with my Sisters

Hannah & Me, after deciding to "swim" in storm infused waves in 1997

Emily and I had a wonderful afternoon at Popham yesterday. Mom and Emily and I took a walk along Back Cove last night. Emily and I went sailing with great friends today. The beach was beautiful…for all that the climate is changing the shape of that beach, there is something eternally lovely and comforting about being there. At Back Cove, I got to point out to Mom, across the dwindling light, all the places I like about this city I’ve loved for two years. The sail was also fantastic—two of my favorite Short Friends climbed all over the boat, all over us, and the weather was as gorgeous as September could possibly be. It’s better to be sad outside in the world than sad in a basement, but all the beauty of these days doesn’t much touch the ache within.

All of this good living, this is what I miss for Hannah. 

She would have run more 100 mile races. I loved looking at the ages for the Big Horn 100 race and seeing that most of the lady endurance athletes are in their 40s. Hannah was literally running into her prime. She did the Elk Mountain Grand Traverse this year, for the third or fourth or fifth time now. And doing it with the usual suspects wasn’t as fun anymore, she said, and thought seriously about skipping it this last year. After the race, she said the only way she’d do it again was if Emily or I wanted to give it a try. And we could probably been talked into it. I wanted to crew for my sisters whenever they were ready to ski the Birkebeiner together. Hannah was over the moon with the idea that if Emily and Alex have kids someday, she was going to be Adventure Auntie, and get those babies up their first 14,000 foot mountains before they were 10. Hannah’s running of 100 mile races has helped Mom get excited about running, and Hannah was as thrilled about any of Mom’s 5 and 10k races as she was about her own longer jaunts—"our Mum! She's so cute. And strong," said Hannah when we talked about The Dij going for a run.

I’m sure that the folks who skied and ran with Hannah have a million more trails they were looking forward to doing with her. I’m sure Hannah would have wanted to do them all with you too…as long as you brought snacks and weren’t going to be either an idiot or a dick. 

But, although I once made Hannah laugh so hard she almost fell of her bike by deadpan stating that “I am primarily an Athlete,” and I would give a lot to spend more time doing any sport she wanted with her, it’s not the trails run and the miles skied that I miss for Hannah. To me, all of Hannah’s sports were things she did, not who she was. Her warmth and grit and delight at being out in and seeing how far she could go in this beautiful world were part of who she was, and whatever sport that manifested in were just a symptom of her personhood. If her love of the world had taken the form of oil painting and rebuilding engines, she would have been the same person to me.

Yesterday, Em and I walked and sat and swam at Popham Beach, where we grew up spending a week every summer from birth until we were all in middle and high school. This is the place where Hannah turned cartwheels on ever grain of sand one summer. She'd just gotten her ears pierced and lost an earring in the sand. I looked for it for years, wanting to get it back to her. This is the place where Hannah and I ran down together into the rainy windy hurricane improved surf one morning to jump in and swim because everyone else said it would be crazy. This is the beach we walked down when Hannah told me about Austin Powers movies and said “we need to get you to watch some movies outside The Parents’ domain,” This is the place where Hannah put my best doll into the cabin freezer to “cool off,” so I took Hannah’s last pair of clean underpants, ran them under the faucet, and stuck them in the freezer. This place that is as much a part of my childhood as the houses I grew up in…I am shattered that Hannah can’t ever come here again, wrap up in her ten-towel Burd-kini, and watch the water come in and out. I don’t know when the last time she was here was, but I called her almost every time I went, and always got a “Jeezums. I love that place.” 

I want to sit here with her when we’re forty and sixty and seventy and eighty and tell these stories. Emily and I have our own code, our own stories and history of this place, and the beauty of being the middle sister is that I have rich and robust lives with both my sisters in ways that I’ve always found their particular relationship without me to lack. They big-baby sister worshipped and protected each other, and have come to a different beautiful mode of being in grown-up sistership. Me, I’ve always gotten to be more of a friend to each, apart from us being our intesimable trio, being Hannah’s first team, being my best people always. No one of us would trade what we each have had, but I’ve always felt like I got the best deal. 

Lately, when I walk around alone anywhere, I imagine my knees just buckling under me and falling. The Christmas Carol “O Holy Night,” and the line “fall, fall on your knees” sung with such emotion that the words could topple a cathedral comes to me.

I want to fall on my knees most of the time.

Because how, how on earth do we keep going? I can convince myself on one level of the brain that Hannah is gone on a trip and will be back. It’s the permanency of death that fells me. Days are long, and to want to seize each day and throttle it for me, for Dad, and now for Hannah, to not always feel capable of getting out of bed, to feel hollow enough to be unstable, and then also to find myself in beautiful places, surrounded by people I also love, smiling and laughing and talking about every day things like politics and grocery stores, all the while knowing that I have lost forever the person who traced around my ears as a newborn and announced “her ears are small,” I just don’t see how we do it. I know we can and will. It's the how that boggles. 

A dear friend told me today “you’re stronger than you think you are.” Thank goodness. However, I already know we all are strong enough to do what needs to be done. Heck. We’re strong enough to do it with some style and maybe even grace. I simply don’t want this to be what needs to be done, and all the strength in the world and in me cannot change that obstinancy. A part of my heart simply isn’t in this new post-Hannah world, because part of my heart was in her. I identify as Hannah and Emily’s sister before any other part of my being, before even my name. 

Emily and I talked yesterday about how we are still and always three sisters, there’s me here and her there and then there’s Hannah…we’re not sure where. Molecularly, some of the fire of Hannah has already been released into the world. The rest of her, at some time we and Will somehow will find the right place to let those parts of her go into the ecosystems—and we all know she’d be sort of fascinated to understand exactly the science of that. But, the molecules that go into the ocean or forest or mountains…these don’t have Hannah’s laugh. They don’t know the stories I want to laugh over and try to explain what we were thinking or weren’t thinking. Hannah always said it was great for her that I have a good memory, because it meant she could use me as a reference for her childhood. I have Emily, I have Mom, but I am missing the parts that maybe only Hannah also knew. I want her to fact check me, I want her version of events, I want her.

Because, when we share memories, it’s not at all about getting the facts right. It’s about the mutual adoration society, and about being able to see each other from and as all the stages we’ve been through. When Hannah and I laughed now about the underwear incident, we could see how far we’d come, without making a fuss over things. Memories are emotional shorthand, because “I love you so” falls far short and is much too serious when you are speaking Minion and trying to find wedding shoes and doing all the more important work of being aboard the sistership. 

That Hannah doesn’t share any more chapters with me, with any of us, that we all don’t get to make any more great stories together, that fact knocks me flat. Every time. 

(This is Emily, yesterday, standing in a hole and eating a sandwich, to make a point and making another great story that we'll have for this place.)

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.