Tags: #notes-app #grief [[0013. on personal documentation and the case for custom software]] | [[0015. looking at the screen of addiction]] **Warning**: This addresses themes of death, grief, and significant loss. > Grief is different. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life. > - Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking Grief and I have become intimately acquainted in the past 3 years.  1. Uncle E in 2020. 2. Ate A in 2022. 3. K in 2023. ## One Uncle E was the eldest of 4. My father's only brother. Cause of death: organ complications I still don't fully understand. We didn't have much of a relationship, but I mourned my family's loss. We were never quite the same after he left us. He was suddenly hospitalized in early 2020 and passed away a week later. After the wake, we shared a meal at his favorite diner with our family and an assortment of the people in his life who loved him. That was the day before NYC shut down for the pandemic. The chance to grieve together had been pulled out from under us. We had a single day of mourning, after which we were forced to suffer separately and alone in our own households, unable to see or grasp at one another, to share stories, to heal.  At the wake, I remember how my father expressed the inexorable loneliness he felt at losing his oldest and only brother. Dad described it as a loneliness his two elder sisters could not fathom - while they had lost one of two brothers, he had lost his only one. The younger was now alone.  He recounted a conversation with Uncle E. Uncle E had asked if my dad had ever had an experience where he truly knew in his heart that God existed. When my dad said yes, Uncle frustratedly exclaimed how he yearned for that feeling. How he wished he could know 100% that God was real. I smiled. That's one thing Uncle E and I have in common.  In the years since, I still sense my father's thinly veiled pain as he remembers on occasion that his hopes of enjoying retirement together basking in the Florida sun have slipped through his fingers like sand, washed away by the age-old *I thought we'd have more time*. ## Two Ate A, my cousin's wife. The best. Cause of death: fuck cervical cancer. She made you feel seen, whoever you were. I regret not knowing her better. ## Three K, a good friend of mine. The most painful. Senseless. 27. Twenty fucking seven. Cause of death: hell if I know. "*No foul play*, " and all of us are left to move on, the incessant *what why how* insistently gnawing away at our insides like a wound left to fester.  I was in Chicago for work when we all learned K was missing.  On Tuesday, I had just settled in at the hotel when I saw the news he was missing start to make the rounds on social media. I reached out to a few friends and learned that he didn't turn up at work Monday morning and hadn't been seen since a concert Sunday night. Just shy of 48 hours. Already not good. I wondered about him the whole week. I stayed connected with my friends and shared all the social media posts and kept tabs on the search while trying to remain present at work, my heart sinking with each passing day.  On Friday, I flew back to New York. After landing at La Guardia, I turned off my phone's airplane mode. Opened Messages. I don't have it in me to publish the raw contents of the messages on the Internet. My words will have to do. **First**: A 1-liner message from my friend, closer to him than I, describing the circumstances in which they found his body, and "He's gone." **Second**: Lengthier messages of consolation from my other friend, less close to him than I, checking in on me, panicking that they could not reach me.  **Third**: My fiancé wishing me a good flight, and urging me to call him once I landed. I cried quietly as we waited to deplane. Turned my head toward the window to have some semblance of privacy in that unbearably public place. I let tears stream down my face as I walked through the airport, stared out the window of my Uber, shellshocked, not hearing a single word my unusually (exhaustingly) chatty driver said, got home, told my parents before I lost my nerve, fielded their well-intentioned stupid questions (why did his friends let him leave alone | was he gay | were you actually close | you'll make more friends), got ready for bed, went to bed. As I lay in bed, I'll admit I questioned whether he really was a good friend of mine. Doubt crept in about whether I had any right to mourn. I last saw K three months before it happened. Before that, we had drifted apart during that post-collegiate "figuring ourselves out and hiding from the old friends we were afraid to be vulnerable with" era, maybe seeing each other once or twice a year. There had been only a few of us at this outing. We feasted on soy garlic chicken wings and downed soju at the now bb.Q chicken in KTown, forever known in my brain as bbq olive chicken. After, filled with pent-up energy from a stressful week at work and full from dinner, we were in the mood to let loose. We tried a few karaoke spots. All turned us away, full or reservation-only, so we settled on a random pub nearby, Captain's Bar and Grill. Not too crowded on a weekend night. It was the type of place where you could actually hear each other talk. So, we ordered a few beers and a round of tequila shots and got to talking. I learned he'd been looking forward to moving to his own apartment in Brooklyn and finally savoring that sweet taste of independence. He was excited about new work opportunities. He had just started a new band. It was one of those incredibly fun nights where you feel invincible, immortal, filled to the brim with all the love you want to share with others. It felt just like old times. But it also felt like the start of a new era, a renewed friendship. We promised to check in more, to attend a show together this summer, and to "do this more often." I'd felt like we were both finally in a place where we could make good on those promises.  I thought we would have more time. Several months later, I look back at the videos I recorded from that night. **First**: An extremely blurry twenty-second shot I took of the Washington Bridge twinkling in the darkness over the Harlem River as my Uber crossed the opposite bridge, the Alexander Hamilton. **Second**: It had been a few weeks before his birthday. To celebrate, he'd gone to the bodega next door and bought a Corona to puncture with his car keys and shotgun on the sidewalk outside (the bar didn't have cans). It wasn't a little 12 oz thing either. A proper, 16 oz tallboy. **Third**: On the walls at the bar, there was a four-panel polyptych of a quote often attributed to John Lennon, "Everything will be okay in the end. If it's not okay, then it's not the end." Cue: me obnoxiously yelling the hallowed words, then brandishing my phone in my friends' faces, asking if they'd had fun tonight. From K, I got a resounding yes. Little did I know it would be the end. I always imagined that grief would be all-encompassing, constant, intense. I imagined I would feel hysterics and cry all the time. Some of it ***is*** like that. Nothing prepares you for how it's going to feel like thrusting a corkscrew in your heart and twisting, *hard*, to watch 60-year-old men hoist your friend's coffin on their shoulders and fight back tears as they bury their son, nephew, and friend. But what I've come to learn about grief is that it's surprisingly normal. What is there to do after the initial shock and pain but go about your daily life?  You go to the vigils, you share stories with your friends, you attend the wake and funeral, and take shots of his favorite Espolon with the people he loved. Then you eat, sleep, go to work, and do it again and again. It seems like you're moving on; you didn't even think about him today! Oh crap. Now you're thinking about him again. You remember that he's gone. You'll never see him. You and all your friends will take new jobs, fall in love, get married, have kids, go on grand adventures, have dull days, and he...will not. Again, you'll mourn the loss of all the lives he was about to live. The first several times, it won't feel like any less of a gut punch just because it's been a week or a month. More time will pass. It'll seem like you're moving on, and you kind of are. But then you unlock a new flavor of emotion from the ice cream truck of grief - a Bitter Chocolate Avalanche of shame and anger at yourself for moving on, for daring to offend his memory and go days without thinking about him. ## Go When K passed at the beginning of the summer, I'd just started training for a one-day Inca Trail hike I'd been planning to do with my parents - 7.5 miles, 1968 ft elevation gain, highest point 9022 ft above sea level. It's no Everest, but it was nothing to scoff at for a kid who's lived her whole life at sea level. The entire oppressively humid and glorious summer, we'd do distance loops around Central Park and on segments of the Old Aqueduct Trail. We'd climb all the stairs we could find (the Inca loved stacking stone stairs to the stars) - the Appalachian Trail stairs to Perkins Memorial Tower, the Vista at Untermyer Gardens, the stairs from Fort Tryon to the Cloisters. We'd chase as much Hudson Valley elevation gain and rocky terrain as I thought my parents' joints could handle, even tackling the Bull Hill Full Loop on Mt Taurus - 1300 ft gain, 6.5 miles. On these hikes, I'd often draw a little way ahead, walking briskly up and down stairs, scrambling up a satisfying sequence of rocks, and realize that under my calm demeanor, I am seething with rage.  It's obscenely hot out, and that's a steaming pile of dog shit.  *Why were you so reckless and stupid?* Mosquitoes and flies and gnats flit around my head. I bat them away.  *How could no one at the club put him in an Uber?* It starts to rain. *What if just one person made a different decision that night?* All this green is beautiful. Serene. *My life will go on, but K will forever be 27, a memory.*  What is there to do but put one foot in front of the other and keep moving? --- Created: November 26, 2023 Last Modified: November 28, 2023