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.

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.

Twelve Years

Twelve years ago, I went to Biloxi, because I was at loose ends, because my parents bought my plane ticket, because them sending me was something they could do to help in Katrina’s aftermath. I worked with Hands On Disaster Relief (now All Hands Volunteers), the sort of outfit in its early years that asked only “do you have your shots, and do you want someone to meet you at the airport or bus station?”

My friend Serena had found this group, she went down a week before I did and met me at the airport. Other friends—Nina, Josh, Lydia, Kate, Carrie, Beth, Laura, Will, Vee—came too, or we met and made friends with each other as the raggedy bunch of recent college grads we were. I don’t remember it all, perfectly.

What I do remember is the knot of horror and rage that left me feeling like I was going to cry or vomit most of the time. I’m a white girl from New Hampshire with an expensive education. I spent most of my time in the mountains. I was not prepared for all of the destruction, for shaking hands with the people who had been left behind or stayed behind or just got back to Biloxi after the storm. I was not prepared for reality.

I came out of all of that, after a few months, with a puppy. Carrie had fallen in love with him at the animal shelter, but whatever home she’d thought to give him to had fallen through. And then when it was time for me to go, the puppy was on the edge of just being a spoiled feral pet of Hurricane Camp, so I adopted him. It wasn’t anything official—I just happened to be the one to take him to the vet, and I happened to write my name down as “owner.” I named him Noah, for the flood. They told me naming him Noaa would have been too much, even for me.

I kept that little guy, and I loved him. And for almost twelve years, he was my constant companion. He went with me across the country six times, saw me through two shattering heartbreaks and some minor heartaches, came with me to grad school, hiked where I hiked, swam where I swam, was where I was, for all that time. When my father died, I regularly cried into Noah’s fur like the world had ended. It has been a roller coaster of a decade, and Noah was there for all of it. We were the most secure daily fixtures in each other’s lives through all the changes I dragged us through, the adventures I sought, the troubles that hit. Until my poor sweet Pet came down with dementia, became uncomfortable, inconsolable, in his own skin and I had to let him go—two months ago now—snuggled in my and my sister’s arms, loved until the last moment he knew and beyond.

As the rain falls and the water rises in Texas, I feel as if no time has passed. Because the news is the same, the pictures are the same, the devastation is the same, the goodwill of neighbors, the kindness of strangers, the imbecility of the leaders, the ovine shock of the rest of the country…all of this is the same. My dog has lived a full life and died, and we—the people—have still not addressed the root causes of why these storms are so devastating.

The climate is changing, and we are changing it. The people we elect to leadership positions are not leading. These storms are not the wrath of God, are not natural—unless you might, as I could be convinced, think that these storms are the divine wrath of the forces of nature rising up against the species that has wrecked and ravaged our way through the world since we first discovered fire.

Storms are more frequent and with heavier loads of water because the planet is warming. The planet is warming because the emissions from making cars go, planes fly, smartphones charge and plastics ubiquitous and life too convenient are thickening the atmosphere and trapping air closer to the planet. We are thickening the air, insulating our planet from the necessary cool of the rest of the universe. And so, in our little chemical hothouse, the warmth begets moisture, the moisture begets storms with greater wallop than ever.

What is stopping us from stopping these things? In part, we are simply a lazy, selfish and unimaginative people. We think such things as Katrina, as Sandy, as Harvey will never happen to us, personally. It’s easier to think that. It’s easier to turn off the imagination, the voice that says “what if…” Horror of our own is incomprehensible, surreal. But, as my friend Mary, reporting from Charlottesville last week said “the thing to say is ‘it’s so surreal’ but that is an utter disservice to the reality that this all is.”

I don’t care if mass flooding and destruction is never going to happen to me. I’d rather it doesn’t, but it’s going to happen and keep happening to others, and there is nothing special about me that is going to make a storm pass me by. Anyone’s reality could easily be my own, if the tides turn, if the weather shifts. When.

If you did know that a storm was about to destroy your life, but could be soothed by taking a bus or putting up solar panels or air-drying your clothes, would you make those changes? Can you go without, can you live smaller, simpler? Could you use electronics less, more wisely? Are you willing to donate not your blood or money to relief efforts, but to make structural changes in your life that will cut the emissions that are increasing the severity of storms?

And then there are our politicians and industrialists. The policy makers seem hamstrung by industries that make money while Rome burns and floods, because they are. Our president cares more for his t.v. ratings than for staffing the agencies that oversee disaster response, never mind his abysmal decisions on loosening regulations on industries that will further increase the cloud envelope around the planet. But, much as I despise Trump, he is not solely responsible for this storm, personally. The fault is with all people who have power and refuse to act responsibly with it. All people. Anyone who makes a choice has power, that is the sort of power that needs to shift, that is the power we all have.

Twelve years. That is the difference between a first grader and a high school senior. That is a lifetime. I simply cannot accept that so little has happened on a large scale when so much happened in the small space between myself and the little dog who came out of the flood with me.

Lastly, a nice man I met in Biloxi, standing outside what had been his house, said that in disasters, people should donate socks and underwear. He could cope with a lot of the troubles, but being able to wear clean underpants just makes a person feel more human. This is the scale that horror happens at. Send underwear. Thank you.

Why the Wilds

Right now, I’m sitting in a big house on the coast of Maine. The breeze is coming off the water, and when the tide goes out again, I’m planning to kayak out to say hello to the seals on the nearby rocks.

And, in the meantime, I’m checking the news and seeing nothing good. Charlottesville is happening—I’ve just read about a car plowing into the crowd of KKK, Neo-Nazis, and their counter demonstrators, showing up for equality. One person has died, and more are injured, and it’s only mid afternoon.

Yesterday, the news was full of the President talking about using fire and fury and something even worse against North Korea.

And that this was, again, the hottest year on record. And refugees are still dying to leave their homes, and unwelcome on more and more shores.

The news, my dear, is as bad as I’ve ever known, and this is not the first time I’ve thought so. The weather is hot, the planet is crowded, resources are scarce, and we are all so frightfully on edge that damages that cannot be undone will be, are being, done.

What place, then, do words about seals and terns, stars and pine martens have? The more I know, the more frequently it feels like treason to still love wilderness, to still use the privileges of my skin and geography and lineage and education and bank accounts to go places, to watch for tides and scramble up mountains. Sometimes I worry that caring about the natural world and ecosystems and wilderness is very much rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic—if humanity does itself in with race wars or nuclear explosions or anthropogenic catastrophe, how much will the golden slant of sunset or the relationship between blackflies and blueberries or the calming transcendence of being a wild place matter?

I sure as shit don’t think we need a Wilderness Matters movement. Unless the bears and toads and birches are going to start rioting against the rank injustice of how they’ve been treated by humans, that’s just comparing sunlight and humans—as false a dichotomy as pro-life and pro-choice. Personally, I’m both. I’m for all of it. Sunlight and humans, life and choice, nature and culture, town and country, women and men, white and black and all the shades and variances between all of the supposed end points of spectrums.

A renewed appreciation and commitment to all the things is what I get from being out in the world. The scope and scale of the world will blow your mind—we operate so far from mere binaries and three-dimensionality. Recently an old friend and I hiked in the White Mountains. We passed through three major ecosystems and innumerable microhabitats. We’ve hiked the same trail together several times in the fourteen years of our friendship, and each have hiked it other times, with other friends. Our conversation was thick with their names, with stories and catching up have to tell, with the revelations and inanities that accompany any good hike. In one breath, we talked about the alpine plant community and the ways in which media is improving at portrayals of brown women. We hiked a busy trail on a beautiful summer Saturday and the trail was thick with other folks, all out for something like the same reasons we were, all passing over the same roots and stones with different stories and words and histories. All in the same place, yet each hike was distinct to the hiker.

And that’s just the human aspect. The mountain avens—subalpine flowers with a bright yellow buttercupish flower and leaves like spiky strawberry leaves—experienced the same day however flowers do. Maybe that’s just taking in sunlight and nutrients to pump out buds and blooms and fruit and propagate their species as best they can. Maybe plants do more than that, feel more, but even if not, that’s a remarkable amount of life happening in a little patch of the world.

The water rushing by the trail—frigid at the waterfall we stopped to swim in—all of that gushing and glugging along has little bits of life in it as well. And the rocks that the water runs over, that we clamber over—I draw some line at geologic sentience, but still, glaciers passed over those same stones before we ever did and snow sits on top of it every winter, waiting to hatch the mountains anew each spring. There are layers there.

I know, we all know, that human activities are changing the world, the ph of snow and ocean, the climate that ecosystems evolve with, the creation of trails, the pollution of water and air. And yet, I get great, humbling pleasure out of the reality that the mountains and the sea do not care about humanity. If I have a god, it is the ways in which I don’t matter to the rocks and the sea. The world means the world to me, and it doesn’t know or care what I do.

In the Scientific and Industrial Evolutions, there was an idea that God was nothing but a watchmaker, and that if the world could be picked apart and explored and investigated from the largest cogs to the smallest bolt and screw, the world could be known and Man (never Woman—we were busy with herb gardens and healing and raising babies) would be equal to the Divine.

This, I think, is horseshit. Even if I can think of all the cogs and wheels and layers and threads and fantastical tapestry of a single moment of my hike on that busy trail, if I can contemplate the lives of the seals and seabirds and tidal creatures and plants that I have been kayaking out to each morning while I housesit, my head and heart start to explode. If I add in the lives of all the people on the trails, the summer people owners of the moored boats and summer cottages, the people who live here always and maintain the docks and lobster buoys that I see as I sit as the lone human among twenty seals—well. The world is too big and beautiful to be understood taken apart like a simple watch.

I know enough to know I do not know a damn thing. That variety of ignorance brings me the greatest joy, allows me the space to fall in love with the world and all that it holds. Maybe there is something primal out there that rips a few layers of protection off my eyes, off my heart, but I come back from wilder places more able to see the complexities of life where humans live. And that helps, enormously, when reading the news and trying to figure out how to be in a fraught world.

Pine martens will not stop racism. Knowing the constellations will not erase the American caste system. Watching a seal dive will not calm the political discourse. The smell of salt water, of balsam fir will not stop nuclear proliferation.

What the wilds may do is open your eyes to the world so that you may better participate in the wider world.