My Story
I first met grief in 2020. Here’s where my story begins.
Six weeks ago, we lost my cousin Henry to a car crash. The details are as random and immaterial as they were consequential and catastrophic. Sunny September afternoon. Our boy, now boy forever.
The time since has moved in a sort of strange warp — like it’s fast and we’re slow, or the other way around — we can’t quite tell. And any efforts I’ve made to make sense of things — to find meaning or reason or logic — have felt flimsy and frail. Perhaps, down the road, I’ll see with bright, clear eyes a plan, or a purpose, or someone at the helm. Not today though. Today my eyes stay bleary.
In the meantime though, a different kind of clarity finds me. I doubt I’ll ever make it to the “everything-happens-for-a-reason” camp, as much as I’d love to go there, but I have now been initiated to the “my-God-humans-are-astounding” one. Things feel so fuzzy and unfinished since we lost Hen — the world one big frayed edge. But it’s also dappled with miracles. And whatever else happens, I’ll never unknow what my brothers and sisters taught me these difficult last weeks about the power of the human heart: this miraculous, muscular little engine at the center of my chest, and theirs, and yours. Suddenly in focus, I almost can’t believe it’s been sitting here all along.
Over these weeks, I’ve watched this thing work — in the pair of arms that quite literally caught me those first terrible moments, in the muffled voices on the other side of wounded, wordless phone calls in the hours that followed, and in the dance of agony and jubilation in the days after that: the wails, the belly laughs, the cocktails, the casseroles, the quiet, the noise. Grief like this, I’ve learned, collapses the space between. People you love and perfect strangers will try to pull the pain out of you with their eyes and arms and actions. You feel it everywhere, perhaps most from those who’ve been where you’ve been. “That looks heavy,” you can feel them say, “Ok if I hold it for you for a second? Just while you catch your breath? I’ve held something like it before.”
Being cared for in this way changes you, just as one is changed by administering such care. The world looks different to me than it did before. And though sadness sits so very heavy, inspiration does, too.
Most mornings now, I wake up and listen for the sound of my own heartbeat. And when I wrap my arms around someone, I listen for theirs. It started in those first few crushing days. I found myself in a series of embraces I wasn’t sure my body could bear, and listening for a tha-thump, tha-thump gave me something to hold onto. Now, it’s just a thing I do. I listen to hearts beat. And I’m so head-over-heels in love with the sound of them, I worry my own might explode.
A mystic poet named Kabir once described God as “the breath within the breath.” For us, I think now, Henry is the heartbeat within the heartbeat. A bass line. And I just plain can’t believe my good fortune that he’s right here at the center of my chest, and in yours, too. His life took less time than mine. I wish it hadn’t. He’s closer than he’s ever been.
At the end of the day, I know that I’ve had just a taste of tragedy. If I’m lucky, I’ll never know the kind of pain Henry’s parents do, and have carried with a kind of grace I simply didn’t know existed. I also know, for all I’ve received — for phone calls, packages and prayer hands, walks in the woods and tea on a dock, everyday sweetnesses — just how much I owe.
“That looks heavy,” I hope I’ll say, “Ok if I hold it for a second? Just while you catch your breath? It looks like something I’ve held before.”
Training & Background
Before this work, I spent a decade in leadership at communications and insights organizations. I know what it means to hold responsibility, to perform when things are breaking privately, and to navigate loss while the world keeps moving.
Certified Grief Educator (David Kessler)
M.A., Columbia University
B.A., Princeton University
Certified 200-Hour Yoga Teacher