Due to a death in the family, there will be no Daily Drip this week. This week’s piece is on grief and healing and finding god in the weirdness.
Some undeniably mystical shit has been going down.
Last week, my boss sent out a link to our new employee handbook that we could access via the payroll platform. My username and password were saved, but when I went to log in, I got an error. I clicked “show password” out of curiosity. “Kathleen” was entered.
I’ve never used her name as a password in my life, nor was I typing it anywhere recently. As far as I know, there’s no reasonable explanation for my dead best friend’s name to be saved as the erroneous password to the payroll platform.
Any tech bros dying to mansplain me out of this grief-shock, the floor is yours.
I don’t know how into the whole god thing you are. I’ve become more open to it with age, fed up with angsty old versions of myself who denied any meaning in the divine irony that informs my life. Stepping out to a sky so reassuring in its blueness on a day that otherwise felt bleak. A tender touch that makes the hair on my knuckles stand up, to which I say, “I did not know I had hair on my knuckles.” My dead best friend’s name saved as the erroneous password to the payroll platform.
It comforts me to chalk all the little wonders up to something more poetic than science or chance. My friend Alli calls these moments “godwinks” and I think learning that term alone made light of confronting something so big and daunting. If I just picture “god” as a series of winking moments, existential flirtations, I am more apt to believe. I guess I’m a sucker for charm.
I was recently talking to a colleague about feeling lost. Since getting rejected from a job I wanted, feeling stuck in writing, lacking travel and adventure, etc. I’ve spiraled, dissociating or looking for ways to. She’s an incredible confidante. Maybe the best ears your woes could fall on, now that I think about it. This 6’ platinum blonde amazon of a woman with tattoos and bangs and glasses and gorgeous fake boobs. She’s led a pretty unconventional life and thus has the wisdom and listening skills of a monk. As I lamented this weight on my chest and the futility of absolutely everything, she looked me square in the face with the calmest expression of certainty and said, “You have experienced more loss in the last few years than some people do in a lifetime. And from the outside, it looks like you’ve just kept moving. There has been no time to process and heal.” Her words filled the room like light. My paltry cries of needing a spontaneous week in Madrid felt so small beneath grief, this invisible force that everyone can see despite my best efforts to shrink it. This colleague of mine has unique expertise in that she’s celebrating 15 years sober. Beyond her own addiction, she’s sponsored tons of other addicts, and therefore knows what it’s like to try hastily putting the pieces of the puzzle together without first addressing the root of the root. She told me before I even think about work, art, or adventure, I need to build a foundation of spirituality, however that looks for me. No more arrogant pleas to Eat, Pray, Love myself out of proper mourning. I need to welcome grief before trying to escape it.
My friend Karl overdosed on heroin in August. It takes a lot for me to type those words. It takes even more for me to accept the fact that he was likely dead a few days before anyone found him. I’m already so sensitive to the loneliness of the world; to imagine my dear friend fading unconsciously into shallow breath, deserted by whoever sold him the bad dope, dying alone in an apartment full of contraband… it’s a loneliness so grotesque and indiscriminate, it gives me chills. Karl’s place on Pine Street is forever crystallized in my mind as an IKEA showroom of small town stoner paradise. I’d lounge on the couch, languid off medicinal, contemplating the psychedelic art on the walls while sacred bass thumped along slowly, keeping the pace of my heartbeat.
I said for months I’d write Karl’s parents a letter. These were people I knew so much about, but somehow, never met. In writing a letter, I hoped to meet them in a way, whether it brought us together materially or bound us on the ethereal path of grief. They mean something to me. And though they have no way of knowing this, I’ve been withholding by putting off memorializing their son. As a writer, you can’t know just what power exists in your words. The eulogy stakes are especially high. All you can do is submit to the hypnotic glow of your laptop and hope to do them justice. I started writing the letter pretty stream-of-conscious after that talk with my colleague, and it felt, for the first time in a while, like I was actually taking this grief thing head on. That I was finally a willing participant in the things that have happened, and continue happening to me.
Now here’s where shit gets weirder.
Two nights ago, I was trying to get Mousse to bed. Poor guy is still stuck in his neutering cone, so all the drama of puppydom feels extra theatrical. So there he is, cone around his head looking like the sun baby from Teletubbies. Blank expression, two black olives for eyes just like his dad. He’s standing in the dark kitchen staring straight ahead at the oven. He is perfectly still. Mousse is never perfectly still. I keep an eye out for movement, a mouse or a roach, the inevitable pests of city life that I’ve yet to see traverse that kitchen floor, god willing. But nothing happens. And still, my little poodle stares onward, shocked by something I cannot see, unflinching to my constant inquiry: “Honeybun, what’s wrong? Are you ok? What do you see?” I always wish he could talk, but I especially do in this moment. Was it Dawn? Was it Kathleen? Was it Karl?
Or was it the strange omen that said this storm cloud keeps rolling?
Last night I’m out to dinner with my girlfriends for Annie’s birthday. We’re at El Vez in the Gayborhood, scheming on some nachos and me, a limey Modelo. I looooove Mexican lagers and I looooove a good girls’ night. Everyone’s dewy and beautiful like they just had orgasms but these girls actually look that way all the time. It’s wild. And when I’m wearing tall shoes with a mini skirt and a trench coat, I feel generally optimistic about the evening. But my Apple Watch kept buzzing. My dad never calls more than once unless it’s an emergency. I answered the phone to hear my uncle died. This news does not care if you’re out to eat, I’m learning. I’m at least 2 for 4 now with meals ruined by abrupt death.
Realistically, I should have been prepared. Uncle Tom wasn’t supposed to make it to Thanksgiving. I was fortunate enough to see him the last time I was home right before he went on hospice. He was in good spirits, but frail as can be. Like an old, gutted house, just bones with no walls, no insulation. It broke my heart when he had to ask his brother for an extra coat, shivering in 60-some degrees.
We weren’t super close. I didn’t have his number saved in my phone. We only saw each other a couple times a year. But sometimes it’s more the tapestry of familial connection that makes loss sting acutely. To see my mom lose another of her four siblings who grew up close in a small house with a single, widowed mom. To see my mom lose another person to cancer after my sister. Uncle Tom was Dawn’s godfather. They even looked alike, all dark and striking. Losing him is like losing a living relic of her. Is it any coincidence they both had cancer spread to the lungs?
When I think about the way people in my life have passed, I feel ashamed of my own impulses and neglects. To leave the house without SPF. To smoke cigarettes when I drink. To not keep naloxone on me or own a drug testing kit. To feast on sodium and sugar, red meat, white carbs. I can’t tell if I’m living it up in their honor, or ignoring the most powerful lessons of my life. Surely there must be some key to balance, a password to happiness and longevity, no matter your fallibility.
Maybe I’ll try “Kathleen.”
Thanks for making time to peek into my world. You can support this newsletter monetarily for $5 a month. If that’s too much (especially around the holidays), a simple like, comment, or share goes equally far. Abbracci e baci.
My condolences for your losses. Very compelling and emotional read. Thank you for sharing.
❤️ you have a beautiful spirit and voice