I often think about that time now, especially since my mom’s death. I’m grateful I have that year of everydayness to look back on, days and days of just being in one another’s lives, less as mother and child and more as adult friends worming their way through this world together, ordinary and extraordinary at once.

My parents’ house is on an acre of land, set back in a cul-de-sac just on the outskirts of a mid-sized Midwestern city. The front yard reaches out and out and out, building in some separation between them and the three other homes in the neighborhood.

One summer, I dug out the rock landscape the builders had lazily dumped around a wild cherry tree in the middle of the yard, shovelful by shovelful hauling wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow of river rock to the woods.

I worked for days, and by the end I thought my back would never be straight again.

My mom planted roses and native grasses, a few bushes, and every season peppered the space with birdhouses on shepherd’s hooks and baths, and spinners that would catch the wind.

Year after year, spring after spring, summer after summer, she would coax life from the soil, play host to birds and bees and butterflies, spiders and beetles.

That year, I also picked up my camera again. I’d purchased a mid-range digital camera years before and played at nature photography. I took a class. Followed photographers. Read about different settings, and, more than anything, took a lot of photos.

I got average, but I thoroughly enjoyed the hobby.

With my parents, my hobby was thrown into overdrive. I’d get up early and spend an hour or two out on their deck, walk their property during lunch or sit quietly at the border of my mom’s garden and watch nature carry on her rituals of living.

The time became a meditation, a communion, an honest collaboration and reaffirmation that I am united in ways both big and small with all living things.

I know. I know. That sentiment is sometimes so overused, and in some ways so commercialized, that describing anything in terms of connection with the natural world feels cheap and fabricated.

But in those moments, giving myself over, fully, to the present, blurred the boundaries.

We all, every sentient being, cycle through our lives in overlapping, returning seasons.

We are brand new, beginners more than once in our lives.

New experiences, new hardships and joys crack us open when we let them and soften what’s tightly bound, providing space for growth and renewal. We can reach for the light. We can settle in and let hardship do its work of nudging us toward something deeper, more fundamentally us. We can strip ourselves to what’s essential and then rebuild truer.

I have a very clear memory of watching a bumble bee get stuck in a spider’s web as I sat on a gardening stool in my mom’s flower bed out front, camera on my lap. I sat for a minute, thinking the bee would shake itself loose and fly off, clearly misunderstanding the genius of the web.

There would be no freedom without intervention.

My choice was going to have consequences for one of the players in this drama. Let the bee nourish the spider or save the bee but risk damaging the industrious architecture spun for just such a necessary and life-affirming occasion?

After a moment’s hesitation, I choose the option that didn’t require any immediate loss of life. A thin stick helped me carefully free the bee, whom I then placed in the lawn a short distance from my seat where it sat and sorted itself for a moment, eventually buzzing away into the woods.

Nature, interrupted.

But, I thought, how many times had my own life been interrupted. How many joys, how many disappointments, how many trials (and errors)? How many nights have I laid awake wondering if this was it, was I finally going to be pushed over, dumped fully into the darkness? Alone and messy and lost.

Then again, how often have I been plucked from misery? Picked up, pitted and bruised, maybe barely hanging on, but safe again, or safe enough, to mend myself.

Restart.

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My neighbor’s cat is a wanderer. I don’t like indoor/outdoor cats. They are incredibly hard on bird populations. In Chicago, if you suggest outdoor cats are a nuisance, you’re met with instant and hostile feedback. “They keep rat populations in check!” (They don’t). “More birds are killed by window strikes!” (Wrong again).

Tiny cat is the worst kind of hunter. He kills and leaves his prey bloodied and dismembered for others to find. Nothing is taken for nourishment or to cull populations that are unsustainable in greater numbers.

Tiny cat, as many cats do, kills because he can.

I came around the corner toward my back stairs one morning to see a baby bunny frantically scratching at my building’s brick exterior like they were going to dig their way in. A reverse escape.

Tiny was crouched low a few feet away. “NOOO! NO, TINY CAT. NO!” I shooed him away and took my sweater off to scoop the bunny up.

After crossing the street and depositing the bunny in a patch of grass I was only about halfway up my back alley when I decided the spot was just as unsafe. I walked around my block, finally nestling it in some bushes by the schoolyard.

I’m reminded of how dependent we are on one another, how much I need the steadfastness of who and what supports me, the places I find solace, the ways in which I am integral, both in what I give and what I need.

I always shrunk, a lesson I subconsciously inherited and nurtured throughout childhood, like I was continually apologizing for existing, trying to just fill instead of take up space.

Age and lived experience opened me up, allowed me to recalibrate my understanding of myself and reconfigure my internal landscape.

What’s that they say? It’s all about perspective.

Small is not the same as powerless just as big cannot assume righteousness.

Death and loss more than anything has encouraged a nuance that forces me to reconcile that in this world very little we consider in opposition is truly antagonistic.

I can hold grief and joy, happiness and sadness, life and death, and in every one of those moments I can find multitudes, overlapping emotions that hint at the complexity of life, the ways in which living deeply engaged, wholly committed to both humanity and my own humanness, is rich with subtlety and mystery.

When I’m honest, I don’t always want to be here. I don’t always want to exist.

Put simply: I sometimes passively wish for death.

The sentence isn’t active: I want to die.

More like: I don’t want to live.

There is a difference, subtle but significant.

Often, though, I remember how elemental every mortal’s existence is in this world

Where everyone and everything anchors me, and I anchor everyone and everything.

Reciprocal, collective.

Shortly after I’d hung up the phone after telling my mom I was pregnant she called me back. I was still standing in my kitchen, leaning against the counter, my stomach finally settled from what I remember was a mix of nervousness and excitement.

“I just had to call and tell you that I haven’t stopped smiling,” she confessed.

My relationship with my mother has always been close and complicated.

Not any more complex than any other meaningful relationship, I should be clear. Is fully loving and knowing another human being even possible without some tension existing?

We, all of us, bump up and against one another, refining our sense of ourselves in both the sharpness and softness of others. Coming into being is not and never has been a solitary act.

We are born in need of community.

As I get older, some of what I’ve come to despise most about modern culture is our insistence that deeply caring for one another, whether connected in family or friendship or complete strangers, is somehow a shortcoming instead of a strength.

For my mom, though, I was always (subconsciously) more interested in being who I thought she needed me to be versus developing my own idea of myself. Psychologists would probably have a field day studying all the ways in which my adolescence was marked more by a deepening imprint than honest individuation.

Interestingly, and maybe only to me, looking back I see my mom, too, was giving herself over, constantly creating space for everyone but herself. When my dad remembers her now, he consistently places how much he misses her in context of her use to him. Sounds crude and vulgar—because it is, honestly—but I’m not sure how else to interpret the sentiment in this sentence, which I’ve heard more than once from him during mourning: “I never realized how much she did for me.”

He doesn’t talk about how she could coax life from almost anything, like the gardenia plants she would buy every spring that would have at least one near-death experience per season before blooming for her. Or the way she talked about getting her hands in the dirt every year, itching to get her roses pruned and her garden cleaned up.

Even before being diagnosed with the chronic illness that limits his mobility today, my dad didn’t spend any time with her at the local greenhouses. We’d go every year, me pointing to beautiful flowers and asking “What about this one?” and her usually answering me “That’s a perennial.” (Because we were looking for annuals).

Does he know how peaceful she found the arboretum, her face serene as we’d walk the rows in silence. Does he remember how amazed she was one February when she’d gotten a tip that there were gobs of bald eagles at the lock and dam so we hopped in the car and drove down? (We were not disappointed). We visited almost every morning the entire month until the weather started to warm and they headed further North.

He doesn’t talk about the ways she’d grow cilantro every year for me, even though I lived three hours away, or how we’d usually buy two basil plants and talk about making pesto, “It freezes so nice!,” only to have the plants go to seed with only a single batch made.

A few days after she’d died, he noted how he hadn’t given her enough credit for all she did for him, like she was an employee who’d been passed over for a promotion instead of an autonomous human being with a life of her own, separate from him and wonderful if underdeveloped and unrealized because of life circumstances.

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There are circumstances that shape my life, too. I don’t think that’s something any of us can avoid. As with my own mother, the experiences that make me who I am as a person also shape who I am as a mother.

As I sit with my own grief, I also grapple with how my son will think of me after I’m gone, as well as how he thinks of me now. I am marked by both great fortune and great tragedy, the love of my life buried young, the subsequent years lost, at least in part, to a return to simple usefulness instead self-possession.

I worked hard at the time to rebuild my ability to tap into my tenderness. I wanted to broaden my capacity for love. I didn’t want to stop weaving myself into the world.

But I couldn’t quite shake the trauma. I couldn’t quite inch past the part of myself that too often imagines the worst whenever my son is a few minutes late or doesn’t pick up his phone. He grew up basking in both the heart I grew instead of stunted and the shadow of my too-easily-agitated unease.

An impossible place, really. Like me, he instinctually plays the role of caregiver, though we approach the work differently.

Once, while visiting my parents in Florida during a holiday break my senior year of college, I raced out of the car after my parents continued to ask me how my applications to graduate school were going. My dad was fascinated with having a child with a doctorate degree. “So, people will call you Dr.?” he used to ask me during every discussion of post-graduate work.

Instead of telling them I wasn’t really interested in going to graduate school, that I was probably at the beginning of what would become a clinical depression, I lied until lying wasn’t workable. Miserably collecting applications I’d only half-heartedly fill out, and rarely to the end. Asking professors for letters of recommendation. Visiting the registrar to collect transcripts.

My son doesn’t want to worry me, so when I ask after his grades, his scholarship dependent on a B average I know is becoming increasingly unlikely, he rattles off generic percentages like “mid-80s” and “low-90s” in an attempt to suggest my apprehension is unnecessary.

Until the phone call that mirrors my own bolting from my parents’ car where he confesses losing his nanny (my mother and one of his best friends) tanked his mental health and the second semester will end about as poorly as the first.

We go round and round, as we have for most of his life, stuck in what feels like an intractable pattern that is, ironically, grounded in a deep love and an abiding desire to save me from myself.

How do we free ourselves? How do we find our way back or to a place where we understand we can tell one another and love each other through hard truths?

Before my mom died, we were having frank conversations about our own buried truths. She told me one night how surprised she was that I’d married my ex-husband. “I knew you weren’t excited when he proposed,” she told me. “I should have said something.”

She went on to ask me why I stayed with someone who treated me so poorly, having been witness to verbal abuse and other bad behavior.

“Where do you think I learned that?”

She didn’t know, and when I told her from watching her, she moved on fast.

What might sound like bitterness was actually me reaching for her in a more honest and authentic way. I wanted the hard truths between us out in the open. No more raking darkness over the most complicated and vulnerable parts of ourselves that both connected us and caged us.

“You allow dad to get away with everything,” I tell her. “You do everything for him and he gets to treat you however he feels.” I’m angry and scared at once because I know she hasn’t been feeling well and something about our conversations feels both urgent and unnecessary.

She hints at being too old to change. But my son came out as trans when he was 10 and my mother, then 73 and having zero idea of what being trans actually meant, was his staunchest ally from the start. “There is no such thing as too late,” I remind her.

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My grief for my mom is tangled with a realization that the dynamic we had for most of my life is being repeated with my son. The hard truths that need telling are different, but the outcomes are similar if not indistinguishable.

Just as I unknowingly became like an extension of my mom, absorbing the overflow, working to make the lives of the people closest to her easier so they, in turn, would make her life easier, my son looks for ways to ease the pressure he knows is too often lurking just beneath.

In the effort to sustain equilibrium, we’re both missing out on the opportunity to deepen our relationship. There is real beauty in rocking the boot, even when your stomach churns and your knuckles and face go white.

Losing my mother in the midst of what were some pretty transformative conversations has reinforced what has been scratching at the back of my brain for a few years: I don’t want the same for me and my son.

I loved my mom completely, but I didn’t know her completely, in part because she never took the time to know herself completely.

I think that’s actually pretty common for mothers. We stretch and stretch and stretch, losing some of ourselves, too tired, maybe, or too busy to take the time to really ask ourselves who we are and, more importantly, who we want to be.

Self-actualization, at least in part, is a selfish endeavor.

But in the ways mothers and their children do, my mom and I were muddling through, guiding one another to fuller versions of both ourselves and our relationship, mother/daughter, friend, confidante.

It’s work we should have started earlier. It’s also work I’ll continue doing with my own child, not only for him, but for me, too.

About halfway through my most recent session with my therapist, where talking about my mom became almost tangential to mining the grief that continues to resurface around losing Kurt, I stumbled on a feeling I hadn’t previously connected to the loss.

Shame.

When he first died, guilt was my bully, like a drill sergeant screaming in my face: “HE’D BE ALIVE IF IT WASN’T FOR YOU.” “WHY DIDN’T YOU JUST PICK HIM UP YOU LAZY PIECE OF SHIT.”

I picture myself wheezing out a defense in the smallest whisper I can muster, chin tucked tightly to my chest: “he wasn’t supposed to walk home, sir. he promised me he wouldn’t walk home.”

"WHAT’S THAT? YOU’RE SAYING THIS IS HIS FAULT?” “OH, I SEE. YOU FELT ‘SICK’ AND WANTED TO SLEEP SO THE LOVE OF YOUR LIFE DESERVES TO DIE. GOT IT.”

“no, no, no, no, no,” I whisper, shaking my head, tears building then silently dropping down my face. “that’s not what i’m saying. i didn’t know. i didn’t know what was going to happen. he was beautiful. it should have been me. if it was going to be anyone, it should have been me."

“YOU’RE DAMN RIGHT IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN YOU!”

Kurt was the first person who helped me see myself clearly. Being with him felt like a long overdue exhale. I had no part to play, no role to fill, there were no expectations, all things that felt true for nearly every other relationship in my life.

Being with him was … easy. Loving him was easier. The surprise was that letting him love me was the easiest.

I’ve talked before about being too much. My emotional landscape always felt endless and … I can’t get the word here and I want to be precise … raw, unprocessed, tender, green?

Untamed, maybe?

Untamable might be what I’m looking for, but interpreted less like savage and barbaric and more like unrestrained and unreserved.

I couldn’t create a bottom to the depths of my connection to world, the ways in which I felt accountable to everything and everyone. In youth, that, among other personal dynamics, often made me a shapeshifter. I was who people needed me to be.

I say “in youth,” but really that habit followed me into adulthood. How could it not?

So you might imagine how powerful being loved by someone who saw me and then reached in and pulled something genuine and true to the forefront felt. Or, maybe didn’t pull but invited, encouraged, coaxed.

I don’t think I really understood until he was gone, and even then not right away.

After Kurt, there was nobody for awhile and then a string of self-centered, sometimes abusive people I knew I maybe didn’t deserve but allowed anyway because I was … too tired to push back against the guilt that hovered close and constantly reminded me that somebody’s got to pay.

I didn’t have the will to remind myself that Kurt would never ask or need or want me to be with anyone who didn’t lift me up. No penance was required.

From run-of-the-mill assholes to master manipulators that weaponized Kurt’s death against me—”There’s always been three people in this relationship, me, you and Kurt!”—the constant was always some version of having to be over Kurt in order to love another human.

That wasn’t my grief. I didn’t want an end. I wanted integration. I wanted to not have to disavow my love for a person no longer on Earth in order for my love for another living human being to be acknowledged as real.

Instead, my guilt was doubled; I was twice condemned.

I talked for awhile before what had been silent and dormant for all these years finally shook herself awake and peeked out from under the mountain of guilt I’d always assumed was the main byproduct of sorrow.

Shame.

I think both my therapist and I were a little surprised by the discovery, especially because we were exploring grief that was, by comparison to the loss of my mom, aged.

Guilt in grief feels expected, especially when, like it or not, something about your own life or actions directly intersects the point where everything shifted. “It’s not a lie to say that if I hadn’t gotten sick Kurt would still be alive today,” I tell my therapist. “Or, at the least,” I correct myself, “he would have survived that night.”

Even with my mom I wondered and still wonder sometimes if I could have saved her life if I’d been there. “I’m a nurse and I couldn’t even save my husband’s life if I needed to perform CPR for 20 minutes,” one of her health care providers told me. “Doing CPR correctly for 20 minutes is harder than people think.”

But, I mean, what is she going to say? Yes, you could have saved her if you were there but you weren’t so now she’s dead.

Those are the gray areas I hate, those places where you both know and don’t know, that I’m continually struggling to let quietly exist without question or judgment.

Some things in this world just are.

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Now, to the shame.

Shame.

The unexpected visitor who sat me down and asked, “Hey, why did it take you so long to realize that I’m the underside of the guilt you’ve courted for so long?”

“I don’t know,” I sighed. “Maybe guilt feels less personal.”

“Right,” she answered, “because unlike guilt, where you’re encouraged to just beat yourself senseless, I ask for something more nuanced and exacting. I want you to take a look at yourself.”

“Yeah, that bit … I don’t like …”

But she cut me off.

“I want you to ask yourself if you honestly believe that all you’ve ever deserved these last 25+ years is to spend your time doubting and diminishing who and what once gave you the most confidence you’ve ever had in your whole life? I want you to wonder why it’s so easy for you to think he had you so wrong? What do you need in order to believe you still deserve to be loved the way he loved you?”

“Oooof, c’mon now,” I beg.

That last question? That one’s a killer.

Both the heart and soul of the shame I feel.

I meander to my point with my therapist, as I often do. “I’m ashamed I’ve spent so much time with people who didn’t deserve me.” Even that I say cautiously. Who am I to believe I’m special?

Yuck. NO.

“I look at the years I’ve wasted,” I try again, “the ways in which, after Kurt died, I almost instantly reverted back to a person who would just squeeze herself into whatever space was made available to her, believed she was only worth whatever someone was willing to give her. I feel real shame about that lost time.”

The subtext of that admission is almost always: “Because that’s not what Kurt would want for me.”

But something about this moment changes my perspective and I move from thinking about “how would Kurt want me to live?” to something akin to “what would Kurt say to me about the shame I’m feeling?”

“He’d have compassion for me,” I tell my therapist. “He would know I’m doing the very best I can, have always done the very best I can. He wouldn’t be disappointed. He wouldn’t judge me. He wouldn’t feel like I’d betrayed what we had together because I couldn’t sustain the clarity he fostered. He would remind me that what we had was whole and unconditional, and still is, even now.”

“There you go. I think you’ve got it,” I hear shame whisper.

Maybe shame is the sometimes more tender side of guilt, what you’re left with after drilling through the heap of mostly inconsistent and false assumptions served up by a brain marinating in sorrow. Perhaps shame, in the right dose, helps you slide some of the pieces of yourself back in place where you can begin to see a crisper, clearer picture of who you are now.

I don’t know. I’m still learning, obviously. Aren’t we all?

Would love to hear your thoughts.

There is an invisible weight to grief that is bound up in our inability to honestly grapple with the emotions experienced and expressed by grieving humans.

I mean that more as an observation and not a statement of fact or in judgment.

We are, or at least can be, as a species, extraordinarily miserable at piloting ourselves and others through heavy emotion, grief being the most profound I’ve yet to experience.

I think of other mammals who mourn.

The orca who carried her dead calf for more than 1,000 miles, followed by another who did the same, diving, diving, diving to retrieve her lifeless baby each time it slipped away from her own body.

The elephants who stop and form a defensive circle before tenderly exploring the remains of their matriarch, trunks interrogating skull, hind feet delicately pressed against skeleton, bleached bones picked up and worried over inch by inch.

The weight of that body or those bones, what do they mean against the heft of the deep, unrelenting grief that fills nearly every internal space?

Nothing, and maybe everything.

I see the ritual of carrying at least part of our grief on the outside as a means of maintaining what little control we have over the newly scrambled signals of our internal life.

There’s something beautiful and righteous about Tahlequah nosing her decomposing daughter around Puget Sound as if to say: “Something in me, too, is rotting.”

When Jason came to the house to gather information he needed to cremate my mother, I asked him if he had her. “Yes,” he answered. “ We pick the body up within a couple of hours.”

Shortly before he left, I asked how long it would take. A brief flash of confusion crossed his face before he answered: “Sending in all the information and getting the death certificate and social security taken care of, three to four weeks usually. Social security has been backed up since COVID.”

I suspected he knew what I was really asking: How long will it take for my mother to turn to ash?

I wanted to know my mother’s very last moments, didn’t want her alone, even in thought, until she was returned to us to eventually return her to the wind and the rain and the sun and the Earth.

I wanted to know the chamber used during the cremation process is called a retort and that temperatures reach 1400F to 1800F, the body’s large water content evaporating first before the soft tissue, fat, muscle and organs break down. From start to finish, the average human takes between 2.5 and 3.5 hours to cremate.

What’s left is mostly bone, first passed over with a strong magnet to pull any metal before being pulverized in a cremulator.

I first thought her pacemaker would have been left to be picked from the remains, but learned it would have been removed prior to her being placed in the retort because the lithium-based battery is at risk of exploding when subjected to such high heat for so long.

When we unplugged her pacemaker monitor at home when it started blinking, I wrongly assumed those slow flashes of orange meant she was in the cremation process when all they really indicated was that she was gone, which I already knew.

I imagine some folks can’t understand my need to fill in these blanks. Why would I ever want to know what happened to my mom during the cremation process?

I don’t really know how to answer that beyond saying this point is just where my brain and my heart meet. Over the years, I’ve developed a very real reverence for life–in no small part because of the losses I’ve endured–which includes a very deep respect for death.

Honoring my mom’s life, honoring our relationship and the abiding love we had for one another obliged me to see her through to dust. I didn’t want unknowns clouding the clarity, how wholly I saw her and me.

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After Kurt died, a friend caught me coming out of the English department office and told me, exasperated: “I wish I could turn you upside down and shake the grief out of you!”

Unlike orcas, human tolerance for outward-facing grief is low. We want equilibrium restored quickly, or at least the appearance of composure. We don’t want to have to bob and weave around someone’s emotions. We expect, as the old and wholly untrue myth of America demands, self-reliance.

Throughout her vigil, Tahlequah’s pod sustained her. They would carry her calf so she could rest or eat. Sometimes, they fed her. They stayed close. Her grief was truly communal.

I think about that now. What if I had 10 or 15 people constantly close. Would that be a comfort or annoyance? Probably a little of both, though I’ve always loved closeness.

When I was young, my maternal grandparents, aunt, uncle and cousins would come and stay for a couple of days during Christmas. We’d get the rollaway cot out, kids in sleeping bags, a fire would burn down to embers late into the night.

There was a feeling of fullness in those days and nights.

Maybe that’s what I’m missing in grief. The knowing connection that can only exist when people engage in this world and with one another honestly and with a vulnerability that can be very hard to muster.

The one relief I have is knowing that I loved my mom with as little reservation and defense as I could, even when I knew this day would come, miles and years stretched out before me without her. She left this world knowing exactly what she meant to me and how much I loved her.

I think that’s the kind of love I need to get through grief.

I think that’s the kind of love we all deserve.

My mom was my barometer.

She could tell me if I was overreacting. She could give me examples from her own parenting so I could better gauge if what I was spiraling over was something I truly needed to be concerned about or could let go.

She knew when I wasn’t feeling well or when I was upset. She understood my ticks, like when I rub my thumb on the outside of my ear, indicating I’m tired or stressed. Sometimes, when my ears are cold, I just like the way it feels.

She empathized with my penchant for worry and had a way of easing my mind.

She was, after all, a mother who raised a son with an anaphylactic allergy to peanuts in a time before epipens were common. How many races to the hospital, my brother’s face exploded like a pufferfish and his throat closing, did she make?

She was cool, and what made her composure even more stunning is that its origin wasn’t a lack of care or compassion. She just always understood the assignment.

Kurt only came to me in dreams twice. The first time was shortly after he died. My parents were in Ohio with me, sleeping on a futon in my front room.

In the dream, Kurt was talking to me on the telephone, though he was somehow still present, too. He was telling me he had to go.

I must have been crying in my sleep because I woke up to my mom sitting on the edge of my bed, her hand gently resting on my head. She didn’t say anything, at least not right away, tears just silently slipping down my face.

I think about the immensity of the pain she carried then with my brother, too, in the mist of his own heartache. She must have felt how far she needed to stretch her love to protect us both. She must have wondered if either of us would be too broken to survive.

When I first got the call, I didn’t believe she had died because I hadn’t felt her leave.

Now, knowing what we know about her brain injury, she was gone before she even got to the hospital.

I don’t lament the hope we had for those few days.

I don’t regret saying out loud: “I think I would know if she was gone. I still feel her here.”

I can think rationally about how those feelings were simply my mind helping me cope with what felt like an impossibility. Part of the genius of our brain is its ability to understand the information we need to be spoon fed and what can come in a rush.

Love, the floodgates open, euphoria reigns. Grief, start sandbagging.

The truth is: I still feel her here.

Still.

Still.

Still.

Still, I’m lost without her physical presence.

I’m unmoored, unanchored, topsy-turvy. I try to think of other, less ordinary ways to say what I’m feeling. Why can’t I find a description as extraordinary as the loss?

I understand the language of grief. Why is my tongue so twisted by this specific absence then?

The whole world is peculiar and foreign. Is this really the street I’ve driven hundreds of times, mindlessly going to pick up a prescription? Are these the same sidewalks my dog and I have rambled for years? Why does the city I’ve know for 25+ years feel dusky and unfamiliar?

I feel artificial. I wonder sometimes if I’m losing my mind. I’m scared I’m never going to feel good again.

That’s when I want to call my mom most. I want her to talk me back to my center.

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In a brief video of Anderson Cooper talking to psychoanalyst Francis Weller about his book “The Wild Edges of Grief,” Weller talks about the need to honor grief.

Living to deliberately avoid what grief is telling us about ourselves inevitably backfires.

“But at some point, the strategies fail, and then something more genuine is asked to be encountered,” Weller says.

I think of David Attenborough’s documentary “Ocean,” the scenes of the bottom trawlers scraping the sea floor clean, not in renewal but like a botched abortion, sediment and rock rising in both protest and resignation, marine life shoveled into nets indiscriminately.

Interestingly, just when you think Attenborough can’t drag you any deeper into hopelessness, he unveils the ocean’s greatest strength: her resilience.

With a little bit of our help, she has an amazing capacity for regeneration.

I remember that’s my strength, too. Resilience that’s not tied to indifferent endurance or defiance but is instead dependent on my willingness to meet an ask for authenticity with vulnerability.

All of the things that make me feel unsteady and unhinged are necessary. In many ways, just like grief, I am the same, same, but different.

I am me … and not me.

The work, I remind myself, isn’t getting over or even through.

The work is running my head and heart over a landscape I don’t recognize anymore and learning who I am anew.

I always hated the way the pastel flowers on my comforter looked against the brown and rust shag carpeting covering most of my apartment. The phone on the floor is ringing. It’s early morning. I reach down, lift the receiver and croak: “Hello.”

Time links together seconds that turn to minutes and hours that become days and weeks and months and years. You would drive yourself crazy thinking about all the possibilities contained in a single second, but you’d also be a fool to deny its potential.

The words come fast, like he needs to get them out before he inhales them back in, swallowing what he knows without doubt will be marked as a defining moment in my life. I don’t remember the exact order, only highlights: “Very bad news,” “hit and killed.”

One second. Half marked by a sleepy hello; the other half a fissure, a small crack threatening a wide expanse.

“Very bad news” and “hit and killed” flood into mind where they are quickly stamped with denial. “No, no, no, no, no” I send back into his ear, south to his heart that wisely recommends silence, the absence of everything — time included.

The brown I’ve always hated closes in on me. My apartment feels too small. Outside, I pace, imagining that by simply putting one foot in front of the other I can stay ahead of that last half second, stop myself from dropping into the vast unknown of grief, stay where denial can reign without upsetting reality.

But alas, you know that’s not possible.

Half seconds merge, becoming one whole second, undivided, sleepy complacency muddled with a terror and sadness I didn’t think possible.

August 9, 2016

I slide the back off one of the pictures and look for the obituary I know is tucked inside. All those words that can’t possibly be expected to convey the value of one lifetime, no matter how impossibly short. Born, died. Surviving, survived.

Surviving, survived.

I’d never thought how apt a description that is, taking the task of grieving down to its barest essential: continuing to allow my heart to beat, breath to fill my lungs, one second to one minute to one hour to one day to one week to one month to one year over and over and over again.

But of course, that doesn’t tell the whole story.

As with most of us, grief proves more complicated in character than her imagined obituary might suggest. All of her darkest imperfections are matched by a lighter tenderness that becomes more apparent as seconds become minutes become hours become days become weeks become months become years over and over and over.

I carried unbearable until I came to acceptance. I guarded despair while waiting for promise. I didn’t blink against the darkness until I saw a pinhole of light. I submitted to I have to until I want to took hold.

And that’s all grief’s domain, the territory she shares with you, sometimes against your will, until she can deliver you to something better than just surviving. All of her, in that one second, contradictory, both relentless and merciful until the landscape shifts and surviving becomes living.

Living.

I flip the picture back over and whisper, “I love you.”

I love you into this life that includes your death; one second allowing me to pull you from the past into the present without tying myself to misery, for all the minutes to hours to days to weeks to months to years and on and on and on.

For weeks after Kurt died my routine was the same. Get up and smoke a cigarette and then perform the very basics of living. In and out; in and out; in and out — breathing was compulsory. The only thing keeping me tethered to Earth, really, was my body functioning as it was born to function. If I’d had the option to flip a switch and be gone … I’d be gone.

Of course, that’s the immediate story—the story that was my inner life in it’s truest and most unedited form. The story of me after sudden and deep loss.

The truer of the true stories I tell myself about losing Kurt is there was plenty that kept me tethered. My parents, my cousin who flew out and got lost with me on some random Ohio road, steady to my insecure. My brother, whose letter to the court I couldn’t even read or submit it was so full of rage. Kurt’s dad, who stood up that day and acknowledged me as family. His mother and brother and sister who did the same, every day, before and after. My friends.

Music.

I vividly remember meeting Kurt, sitting next to him that night as he sang this song, one of his mom’s favorites. I don’t think he chose it from the jukebox, but he sang it like it was a part of him.

Then, he looked at me and said: “Nevermind.”

My marriage was never good. The signs were always there, but I ignored them and in some ways, perhaps, I needed to punish myself—not just with my marriage, but with everything. I wore living like a hair shirt. If I wasn’t suffering, I wasn’t paying mind to his memory.

He never asked for this penance, of course. He never demanded that my husband come home one day and simply say: “I’m moving to Colorado. I don’t think I want to do this anymore.”

Similar to Kurt dying, my physical body took over. I walked down the stairwell of our condo building, through the first door, through the second, the phone ringing in my ear. I don’t remember being panicked. I don’t remember silently hoping that my mom would pick up, though I am sure I did wish just that. The air was cool and I gulped its crispness into my lungs, similar to how when you wake up hot and hungover you gulp water.

When she answered, I’m not sure what came out of my mouth first, but soon enough the cards were on the table and everyone knew what was happening, everyone waited in shock. By the end of our conversation though, I knew I’d be OK. My parents were in Colorado visiting my brother and niece, and though they offered, though my brother nearly insisted, I didn’t want them to fly back. I was fine. I was going to be fine.

“You don’t come from a dysfunctional family,” my dad reminded me a couple of days later, and by this he only meant that I had people who fully supported me—and I did. I did. I knew I had resources, both financial and emotional.

I played this song endlessly during my divorce, which was frantic and stressful. My mom was the only other person in the courtroom who knew me the day my marriage was dissolved. The only thing the judge asked me about directly was religion. “What if your spouse wants to raise X in X way?”

The answer was short and agreed upon. My child’s dad didn’t want them caught up in endless battles, so whatever was fine.

My lawyer, who, as I remember her, was good and thorough and kind, told me as we walked to file the necessary papers after appearing before the judge: “Being a divorce attorney is surprisingly family friendly.”

My kid was crying when I opened their door. A friend of theirs had suggested they might harm themselves. “Nobody can get ahold of them,” they told me.

OK, I thought.

The protocol around suicide is … slippery. Post, everyone hurries to talk about what they could have and should have done. You think you’d move mountains, and in all likelihood, you would.

If the lead in, the preparation, didn’t get in your way.

Because the lead in, … she’s complicated. You don’t want to intrude; you don’t want to overstep, even when every instruction you’ve ever been given has made overstepping necessary; you don’t want to assume you know the person better than they know themselves.

Outside of outright confessions of suicidal ideation, when you’re here, soaked in the interior, your moves become calculated because there is risk on all sides. Push too hard and, like a turtle seeking refuge, you witness who you’re trying to help slowly recede. Push too little and you get a phone call that immediately signals failure on your part.

It’s an impossible position for anyone who loves someone.

“Hi …” they finally text.

Now, the tears suggest relief, not fear. A giving over to the notion that the outcome could have been entirely different—but isn’t—even when the fear and the endless texts asking for assurance would never have prepared them for the alternate reality, the timeline where their friend suddenly stops existing.

I don’t know how close my kid’s friend came to completing suicide. I don’t know how seriously they were truly considering death, what was the angst of age and what was indescribable despair.

I know that to speak that word out loud, to fill it with the very breath that keeps you here, is an act of self-preservation, a call for back up.

A few months later, we’re driving home from a birthday dinner for my kid. We’d all stuffed ourselves with salad and pasta, everyone ordering a dessert to share. When we’re done, we lean back in our chairs and sigh, smiles all around.

I drive and my kid and their friend pick the music. At first, they can’t decide. But when they do, we spend the rest of the car ride singing loudly, joyfully. Alive.

Dying is a bitch.

And that’s simplifying everything we know about dying.

There is a mythology that surrounds dying that promises release and freedom without ever mentioning the agony and pain that bookends the experience. We’re conditioned to want death to be peaceful. “They died peacefully,” we tell ourselves. “They’re at peace now,” we assure the mourning.

For me, there is a real fear attached to knowing that I will one day be every person I’ve ever buried. Every time I notch a symptom that might speak to larger problems, I have a moment of calm followed by a laundry list of reasons why I’m not ready to shed my mortal coil.

My kid. My family. My friends. My dogs. The perfect day. When we first hit 65 degrees after consecutive cold months. Sunshine. That feeling of accomplishment when I finish a hard workout. Teaching my kid something new. Smiling at strangers. Talking to people with similar interests. Trying new beers. A big sigh before I finally relax enough to sleep. Watching baseball.

I’m not thinking of death today. But perhaps my experience with death, in all of its immediacy, has prepared me for loss in all of its iterations. Loss is everywhere, especially in times of uncertainty, especially now.

Loss of income. Possible recession. Decrease in intimacy, closeness, warmth. Death, certainly. There is loss everywhere in this time, this right now, and it’s hard to reconcile the world that we’ll emerge into, reborn, not in a religious sense, but fundamentally. Everyone who walks through the door to freedom, to any sense of a renewed normalcy, will be a survirvor.

Survivor.

Strangely, my constant—music—has left me. Here, now, today and these past weeks, I’ve depended on my kid, who, like their mom, has found the sheltering quality of music. I haven’t listened to any of my own, save the one or two we have in common.

I’ve largely relied on them, and have found a beautiful mix of rebellion and community in their play list.

Rebellion not in the sense of misunderstanding what’s at stake. Rebellion in the sense that we’re all underdogs right now. There is a sense of fight, as unintentional as it might be with my kid, that is rooted in knowing that these are unusual times that require both individual and collective strength.

My memories will be both individual and communal. I’ll have made personal decisions that could haunt me, or not. I’ll have worried too much or not enough. I’ll have either contributed to a greater good or I will have …

I don’t know.

What I do know is that I heeded a call. A call that, when I listened, spoke to the best in me. The need to be fiercely me coupled with a focused determination to take care of my larger community, my kid, the next generation, the previous generation—myself—so we all might learn, I might learn, that we’re always interconnected, always dependent, even in solitude.

Always our best when we hold both me and you together.

She died more than a week ago, but titling this “My mom died one week and one day ago” seemed too precise, and in ways that feel unexplainable and murky, my mom does die everyday, over and over.

When I was 26, I lost the love of my life on a dark road. He was walking home—home to his own mother—after working the door at a local bar, a job he did some nights after he finished as a mechanic at one of the dealerships.

“It’s been awhile since I’ve stayed with my mom,” he told me as I got into my car to go home after we’d had dinner together. I made him promise he wouldn’t walk, he agreed, and then I kissed him goodnight and left him, standing there, hurrying to get home because I wasn’t feeling well.

I get a lot of calls from 800 numbers that are spam so when I looked at my phone that night I let it go. A couple of minutes later I noticed a voicemail. The transcription was something about my parents medical alert system and how my dad had called because he couldn’t get my mother awake.

I started to pace. Always a bad sign.

My dad’s hearing is bad, and truth be told I wasn’t ready to hear what I knew he was going to tell me, so I dialed her number instead even when I knew the chances of anyone picking up were slim.

I messaged her friend and let her know my mom was having a medical emergency. Can you go over there and see what’s going on? “On my way,” she wrote back to me in an instant.

Next, my brother, who was driving his daughter to college. When he answered he thought I was his wife who he’d been spoofing, trying to make her believe he’d seen Snoop Dogg in a restaurant. “Mom’s had a medical emergency,” I told him. “I can’t get in touch with Dad but Cindy’s on her way.” He would try dad, he said, and call me back.

The details came from a Sheriff and an EMT who’d responded to the call: She’d been down for 20 minutes without a pulse. They shocked her twice and administered four shots of epinephrine.

“I’m sorry, Shellie,” my brother said when he called back. “She’s gone.”

Kurt’s dad woke me from a dead sleep. When I picked up the phone, my voice was still froggy and thick. “I’ve got some really bad news,” he blurted out, probably unsure he would be able to finish if he waited. “Kurt was killed.”

The part of my brain that processes incoming information slammed shut, unwilling to let those words have meaning, letting them sit outside, useless and undefined. “No, no, no, no, no, no,” I screamed back at him.

“I have to call my mom,” I said, hanging up.

“She’s still with us,” Cindy exhaled, and everything I’d been holding back and pacing away across my floor came rushing to the front of my mouth. “Really?” I sobbed.

She was, in that moment, the sickest person in the hospital, the ER doctors said, but they’d intubated and sedated her and were going to transfer her to ICU.

When I summed up for the doctor what I thought I’d heard him tell me, he agreed I’d understood: “There were some positive signs that suggested she might make a recovery, in some way. There were a lot of critical signs that suggested she would not survive. The next 24 hours were going to be critical.”

“She’s alive!” I shouted to my son in Vermont, who’d been at the library when I first called to tell him his Nanny was in trouble. He’d muted himself so he could be sick in the bathroom.

My mom was in the room when I gave birth to my son. Watched as they delivered him to this world, poked him under the lamps and cuffed him with a bracelet that said he was mine.

“He’s beautiful,” she said with true wonder, as though seeing something otherworldly for the very first time. Their hearts instantly knitted together.

“She’s alive?”

I immediately tempered the expectation infused in that word: “She’s very, very sick,” I added. “She’s was down for 20 minutes without a pulse. She is still critically, critically ill and may still die.”

The guy who hit Kurt left him in the road, turning back toward home to get his son. He’d been drinking, or that was the assumption.

A nurse who saw Kurt stopped and called an ambulance.

“When they put us in the small consultation room, I knew it was bad,” his sister told me later.

Doctors said he died instantly. His neck had been broken.

When I first saw my mom laying there, intubated, a ventilator doing some of the work of breathing, I couldn’t bring myself to touch her.

My dad was in a wheelchair at her side, stroking her arm. I put my hand lightly on his shoulder, “Dad,” I said, bending down to give him a hug.

“Oh,” he exhaled over and over.

Out in the waiting room, my mom’s friend grabbed me, my aunt and uncle enclosing me in a hug, everyone shocked into near complete silence. A short while later with my dad falling asleep in his wheelchair, I went back to be with my mother.

Finally, alone, I laid my hand on her forehead. “Hey pretty lady,” I whispered. “Looks like you just got your hair done. You went a little shorter and spicier with the color. I love it.”

I bent over and kissed her cheek and told her that I loved her over and over and over.

Two days of peaks and troughs—hope and heartache—were followed by three doctors visiting with the same definitive and devastating news: She had sustained a massive and irreversible brain injury.

The pulmonologist was the last to leave, telling my brother and I that he would write orders such that nurses could access as much morphine as needed. They wanted to slow her respiration so when they removed the ventilator her breathing wouldn’t quicken too much, and they wanted to help with any anxiety.

As the ICU nurse explained what would happen, I asked, as I asked every nurse who’d provided care to my mother, if she’d always wanted to be an ICU nurse. She was the only one over the two days my mom was there who’d answered “Yes.”

“Have you ever seen ‘Dying for Sex?’” I asked her. When she said “No,” I told her she might enjoy it, that one scene in the series stuck with me and came to mind as she was walking us through my mother’s death.

“There’s a hospice nurse who tells those caring for the young main character who is terminally ill that ‘the body knows how to die,’” I described. “I thought that was such a beautiful way of talking about the process.”

She agreed on both counts.

My mom needed loads of morphine to get her respiration down far enough to remove the ventilator. Everyone in the room had a chuckle about how this woman who didn’t drink was now high as a kite. “She is flying,” the nurse confirmed.

When the ventilator was removed, my dad and brother and I stayed next to her bed, my son on the phone. She shepherded him into life and he would usher her into death.

I rubbed her forehead, tears traveling down my face and dripping onto her neck, a continuous stream of love and gratitude and sorrow and promises poured into her as her breath rattled and rattled and rattled and, finally, stopped.

Years ago, I had a friend who was traveling abroad. We kept in touch via email. During one of our exchanges, he answered one of my questions with “same, same but different.”

That’s how loss feels to me: Same, same but different.

The loss of my mom feels familiar in ways. The deep pit in my chest as I tried to work out for myself that my mother no longer exists. The catching myself thinking of something I have to tell her. The wondering if in some other plane of existence she is alive, well, either saved or never sick.

All of those and more I’ve felt before. Same, same but different.

What never changes is that loss follows what I’ve found to be life’s larger pattern: A study in opposites, an ask for all who make her acquaintance to test their ability to hold what feels contradictory together.

They came and interrogated my mom’s pacemaker while she was in the ICU. They could pinpoint when her heart went into ventricular tachycardia, somewhere around 6:10 or so.

“She had a small run at 3:48,” the tech said. “Then one at 6:10 or so that was more than a minute long.”

Back in February, I was visiting when she fell over like a tree. I heard her as I came back in from walking my dog, though at the time assumed it was my dad. When I got up to my parents’ bedroom, she was conscious, but her voice was a forced whisper.

I called 911 and went back and forth between her and the window, checking in every minute or so, asking if she was still with me. “Yes,” was always her answer in a low moan.

She spent two nights in the ICU and another two in the cardiac unit.

At discharge, I was talking with a nurse who told me a heart can’t sustain a v-tach rhythm for more than 20 seconds or so. “Then, you go into cardiac arrest.”

After she died, my son told me he’d gotten a Facebook message from her that simply said “I didn’t send this!” She was talking about a previous message that was probably from my dad poking on his phone and sending things by accident.

Her message was sent at 6:05 p.m.

I sometimes wonder, suddenly and without any deep meaning attached, how close I am to dying.

Do you ever think about that?

Like, you’re sitting or driving or working or chatting with friends and, unbeknownst to you, you’re living the last 30 minutes of your entire life.

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When my mom wrote that message to Ben, her heart might already have been in v-tach. During the earlier episodes, nurses in the ICU would come running in, alarms from my mom’s heart monitor blaring, only to find her sitting up relatively unfazed.

“You don’t feel that?” they’d ask her incredulously, looking at the wild rhythm on the screen. “You’re not lightheaded or dizzy?”

“No,” she’d answer.

I think about that now. The bottom chambers of her heart — bumbumbumbumbumbumbumbumbumbumbumbumbum — on a rapid race to oblivion, sprinting to its own demise.

She was talking to the same friend I’d only minutes later ask for help when she arrested, not in a panic or pained gasp, but quietly.

“I heard your dad shout “Flowers, Flowers,” she told me when she called from the ER, “but I thought he just needed her help and our call had dropped.”

I wonder if she’d been standing instead of sitting the v-tach rhythm might have been interrupted by a fall. I wonder if a pacemaker with a defibrillator would have saved her. I still type in the symptoms she was experiencing prior to the cardiac event, imagining the questions I’d encourage she ask her doctor.

I wonder about those minutes and seconds that were ordinary and mundane until they were anything but in an instant.

Death, swift and greedy.

Grief is unknotting the wonder and knowing what you can let go and what you need to resolve. My problem has always and forever been my resolve for resolve.

I know nothing will bring her back.

And yet, searching feels like clawing something back from death.

Maybe what I’m really hoping for is a way to make those last moments count for something more.

Almost every evening after dinner, I restart the series “Heated Rivalry” from the beginning.

The story centers two closeted hockey players — Shane and Ilya — who fall in love. One gay, one bisexual; one Canadian, one Russian.

I first heard about the program as its fandom started growing in the U.S. after HBO Max picked it up for distribution.

My reaction was immediate, weighty and visceral.

I think I’ve watched the entire series no fewer than a dozen times, likely more.

It’s become like therapy for me.

I sometimes think about all the people who exist that I’ll never meet, or those I’ve met but no longer know.

Similar to how if you plot your individual presence within the reality of the universe you start to realize you are but an almost imperceptible blink of energy.

Here … *poof.*

While here, I am a collector.

My mind squirrels away tiny moments I have no logical reason to document and rarely understand their meaning beyond small, seemingly mundane remembrances.

But noticing, quiet observation, is my way of knitting myself into this world.

Shannon, the photographer, my head in her lap, her fingers in my hair as she drove me back to my dorm the weekend we graduated from college.

Andy, muscles and tank top that if you were judging books by covers might make you think he was a frat guy instead of a person who would let a mosquito drink her fill from his forearm. “I mean, she already bit me,” he explained when he saw me staring.

Leah, who one night leaned over and asked if she could kiss me while we were sitting at the bar. One, short but slow. Years later she’d text when one of our favorite bartenders died. “Hey you. Pretty sure Ed was our bartender a few times. Loved these nights looking out onto Dearborn.”

Tim, a true punk rocker with spiked platinum blond hair, leather and Docs, who spoke so eloquently in my freshman seminar class about how the first step to being able to kill someone is dehumanizing your target.

Suzy, tiny and fit, thick English accent, in love with a much older man and independent films.

The longer I live, the more I open myself up to letting my feelings saturate my internal landscape, deep and nourishing if occasionally intimidating, steered by raising my trans son and losing two of the greatest loves of my life.

I want to be in this world fully.

I did not learn intimacy growing up. My parents didn’t model closeness.

There was no hand holding or hugs. There were very few “I love yous” spoken either casually or seriously. Kisses were scarce and awkward, saved for occasions like an anniversary or birthday. Affection was for behind closed doors, which when you’re a child feels like secrecy and shame.

Their relationship looked more like a division of labor than a love story. My mom the emotional bedrock, my dad the provider.

In a conversation not long before she died, my mom shared she’d spontaneously kissed my dad on their wedding day, after the ceremony but before the cake. “Why’d you do that?” he’d asked her in response.

“I knew I was in trouble,” she told me.

The trouble here being a person who felt deeply, needed her roots generously watered with emotion and compassion, had herself grown up in a house punctuated by cruelty and coldness and somehow still managed to want more.

The way, as a kid then teenager then adult, I always wanted more, too.

I just didn’t know what I was wanting or the depth of the deficit I was carrying.

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Kurt caught me off guard, both in life and death.

My experience before him was shallow and insignificant, not just in romance but everything.

I was always, always too much.

My feelings like a chasm, deep and endless, with no proper channel, just me, their imperfect and stunted vessel.

I had no way of taming my need, my desire to give meaning to the entire world and make sense of my own place. Imagine carrying all your senses on the surface, heavy and burdened with input, but not having the understanding or skill to process the overload.

That was, that is, that can be me, then, there and now.

Circuits screaming for relief and me — dumbfounded and raw — unable to find the shut off valve or rewire.

I didn’t want avoidance or absence.

I wanted conversations that would help me unravel the disorientation created by having such big feelings with no real place to put them. I wanted people to recognize themselves in me. I wanted fellowship. I wanted deep connection in ways both big and small.

Kurt taught me how to slow down, stand still long enough to let someone take in the emotional view, get acquainted and acclimated.

“Are you …” he began, before trailing off, having just sung the entirety of Me and Bobby McGee in honor of his mother as we sat together nursing beers at the bar.

I knew the question and answered, a little bewildered he’d even wondered. “No, I’m not seeing anyone.”

In therapy, I finally come round to my point.

“When my mom died, she took my entire history with her.”

Trying to put a bun in my hair when I begged her, even though she knew it was too thin to hold.

Grabbing a stuffed animal like one Ben had gotten for his birthday that I liked, the shopkeeper asking, looking at Ben, “Is this for this little cutie?” My mom responding, looking at me, “No, it’s for this big cutie.”

The blueberry pie she’d make from scratch for my birthday every year. The poppy seed thumbprint cookies every holiday. Godiva truffles in the mail and bags of Cool Ranch Doritos on the counter whenever I visited.

Silently sitting on the edge of my bed after hearing me cry in my sleep, waiting for me to wake up, a hand gently resting on my side.

Watching my son take his first breath. Yelling at the doctor to do something about the pain. Waiting for his dad to leave the hospital room before giving me a necklace with Ben’s sapphire birthstone. “I wanted you to have this.”

I think of her brain cascading away, sweeping everything she ever knew into the abyss, collapsing under the weight of oxygen deprivation.

“This is where everything that makes you, you is stored,” her doctors told us, explaining the brain top to bottom, finally arriving at the brain stem, the only thing really left of my mom, giving her the involuntary but essential ability to take a few breaths on her own.

The person who knew me best and loved me most was already gone before I was at her side in the ICU.

And, in ways, me with her.

Grief loops back. “You’re talking more about Kurt,” my therapist notices.

It’s true. Even knowing you can’t compartmentalize grief hadn’t prepared me for how much losing my mom would revive the loss of Kurt. Then, the ache was physical, like someone had scooped out my center and left a furious, gnawing void.

“I feel a lot of the same feelings I did when he died,” I admit. Close to three decades of absence suddenly feel stifling and near. “We didn’t have the decades my mom and I had together, but he was the first person to really get me, show me care, be vulnerable so I could be vulnerable, too.”

When I told him how often I woke up at night just to slip my hand under his shirt, craving skin to skin contact, and he responded by just not wearing a T-shirt to bed anymore.

Stepping outside when the door at the bar was slow, him leaning against the building, me leaning into him, kissing, unbothered by the outside world.

My feet resting in his lap, his thumb slowly smoothing over my skin as he talked to his twin brother about a soccer game.

Driving home from a long road trip to a friend’s wedding. “How does it feel to know you won’t ever have to do this drive alone again?” he asked out of the blue.

Sitting on the curb of a gas station in the early morning hours one of the first nights we met, talking about how he came home sick one day to find his then fiancee fucking someone else on their couch.

Driving to bingo when I started to worry I’d left a candle burning and him quietly turning around to go check with my asking.

Sitting on the couch, visiting with his family when he gets up to go do something. He leans over and gives me a slow, unreserved kiss before leaving the room.

Playing Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together” on the jukebox every time we shot pool together.

In ways both similar and different, my mom and Kurt both gave me cover and a way to continually renew my promise to myself.

They both held up a mirror and introduced me to my tenderness, not as a weakness but a strength. Taught me how to protect her while at the same time coaxing her out into the open so she could seek herself in the wild, unafraid and gutsy.

“I think that’s why ‘Heated Rivalry’ is such a balm to me,” I tell my therapist. “I’m replaying what two of the best people I’ve known in my life taught me about intimacy. Ilya and Shane are like both sides of myself.”

One cautious, one a little more audacious. Both with their own reasons for not believing they can either have or deserve what they want and need but still, somehow, finding ways to reach and reach and reach, compelled to nurture their feelings, attend to their softness, over and over and over — after joy, after disappointment, after heartbreak, after contentment.

Against every impulse that suggests self-preservation requires distance and solitude.

Intimacy, in all its forms, demands daring and patience. A resolve to dampen self-doubt and cultivate resilience while knee deep in unease and insecurity, because beginnings, and endings, are always plump with both potential and peril. Being that open, that alive, is a definitive and unambiguous kind of exposure.

You … laid bare.

In the show, I come to realize, I find the heart of both my mom and Kurt reminding me that living is, at least in part, a conscious choice to remain entangled.

I want to remain entangled.

Woven in and around, in spite of death, in celebration of being, vital and essential, knitted to the cosmic human experience, moment by moment, again and again, from ever to end.