“So it’s true, when all is said and done, grief is the price we pay for love.”
― E.A. Bucchianeri
2019 started as all years do, some light resolutions, and hopes that it would be better than most. Six weeks in, my best friend of 20 years finally shed her mortal coil after a two-year struggle with liver cancer. She had been in and out of hospice for a few months, but this was the end.
The message came at 0622 mountain time. I can still feel my hands gripping the sheets. My daughter and I had returned from San Francisco the day before, and she needed to go to school. So, either out of shock, pain, or whatever, I chose not to tell her and treated it like a Monday.
On my commute that morning, my brain began to shift. “Why in the fuck are we still here?” I wasn’t satisfied with my job, as someone who has had a defined mission for most of their lives, merely making cash, was never built into that equation. I want to help people, fight for the underdog , and make sure people sleep better at night.
I told Marit that evening. I held her that evening. I have no idea how soaked my shirt was with tears and snot and more tears. This was my daughter’s first close person death. I always expected it to be one of my parents or her mom’s parents. Never Stacy. She face-timed Stacy. When we were thousands of miles away, she would facetime her. She could always reach her. Now, she couldn’t. For the first time, she couldn’t ask Siri to connect them.
I still hear her at night talking to Stacy in the darkness of her room. At first, Marit waited for answers; she doesn’t anymore, now she just talks to her.
For the next five months, I’m not sure I’m going to be in Colorado by the end of the day. Also, I had to turn off First Wave on my radio, too much ugly crying on the side of the road on the way home. When your relationship starts in a goth club, and kinda blooms in that environment, the last thing you want to hear on the way home is “Pictures of You.”
There was one day in early April where I had reserved a POD and was looking for a packing crew. I went home, and my daughter said that she had was going to perform in her school’s talent show, I canceled that reservation.
June was the month where everything turned for me.
June. I went to GeoINT, in San Antonio. If anything told me I wasn’t in the right job with the right mission, it was this. I blogged about it and said that “I wasn’t ready to go back yet.” But I was. I so was ready for my 9 to 5 to mean more than a paycheck, more than what I was getting.
June. I had my memorial for Stacy in Paris. We’d meet in Paris for European adventures. There was always a direct flight from IAD to Paris 4 times a day. It was also easy to get to from client sites east of Paris.
In June, it was 103 degrees, and I was pretty drunk for those 25.5 hours I spent in Paris. I was drinking Absinthe at this Absinthe bar near our go-to hotel. And as Oscar Wilde said….
After the first glass, you see things as you wish they were. After the second, you see things as they are not. Finally, you see things as they really are, and that is the most horrible thing in the world.
The grief I had felt, and my behavior in dealing with it, and how I had changed certain actions, seemed like I felt exposed. I started parsing through this and realized that I no longer had the insane amount of defense mechanisms that a kid with a gender identity issue, raised in the 80s, in Kansas, had to create to survive. Those were just gone.
See, since moving to Colorado, I had been going through EMDR therapy for PTSD. I was doing a bunch better with stuff, but it was also destroying the defense mechanisms I had built up over 40 years. I noticed myself feeling more exposed about it, and trying to counter that with increases with tech-bro like behavior. Ugh, sometimes I hate tech.
I only had one safe space left, the truth.
I chose 9/11 for many reasons. It was a day that had meaning for both Stacy and I, and how my career evolved from “developmental economics” to “GIS Spooky Stuff.”
She came over that day, not long after the attacks and we sat in my apartment drinking and spent a good deal of time talking about my gender issues as we watched smoke rise from the Pentagon from my window.
I sent HR an email on that day, 18 years after the attacks. 18 years….
At this point, I knew I had to leave Colorado.
I blasted it out on Twitter the following Saturday. Got nothing but support. Thank You. Put it out on Linkedin, lost about 20% of my connections, but gained some stellar ones.
Now. Now, the situation is nothing like it was three months ago, and if you would have told me at the beginning of 2019 that at the end of 2019 I’d be in New England and a Director of Spatial Products at a Fortune 500 company. Yeah, not even remotely on the radar.
Things are still falling into place, but I can see tomorrow, which is something I hadn’t been able to do for the last 8 months in Colorado.
Grief gave me the strength to get out of a situation that I was needed to escape. Grief put my life in perspective. Grief brought my daughter and me closer. Grief made me not want to get out of bed. Grief helped me tell the truth about myself.
2019 is ending, and I’m in a completely different situation than I was at the beginning. While I still miss Stacy, and I’m not over it, nor will I ever be. It’s easier, and I can see 2020 clearly.
Thanks for reading this non-technical/GIS blog post of mine. Grief dominated my life in 2019, and it will be a part of it until the reaper finally gets me.
Happy New Year, folks, may all your resolutions be attainable and may you find your success.
My resolution is to get back on the podcasting horse :)
