December 7, 2019

​

I can’t stop thinking about XXXTENTACION. His music has always been a huge site of moral contention for me because his personal history precluded me from listening to him in his life—an attempt at justice in the age of capitalism and streaming—but as a musician, he’s phenomenal. His finer music almost perfectly embodies the modern hip hop I crave; “alternative r&b” if you will, as I was told by Spotify. And he’s tortured, but in a hauntingly beautiful sort of way, compelling, understandable, relatable. His heart and soul sing of a deep pain and uncertainty I’m not sure everyone understands.

​

It’s much easier for me to listen to X’s music now that he’s dead. The guilt I previously had about streaming the music of someone I didn’t want to support is gone. Our economic choices are political and our leisure choices are economic—thanks, capitalism! How could I, of all people, listen to X’s music shamelessly, while knowing it benefited someone who stood against the very social causes I proport to care for? Certainly not.

        

To be clear, I absolutely didn’t want X to die. I’m not happy that he’s dead by any means, neither for my own selfish, guiltless listening purposes nor because I believe in divine retribution. In fact, I’m saddened. Despite the choices and behaviors that made supporting X difficult for me during his life, death is not something I take lightly. I would never wish death upon anyone. This is a central tenant of my moral philosophy, so to speak.

 

My point is, in spite of the admitted tragedy of his murder, his death absolved me of much of my guilt enjoying his music. Listening to his music no longer feels like a moral reconciliation. In fact, I feel liberated to appreciate and celebrate the finer parts of him—his brilliance and depth of emotion, the music he created and people he broke down walls to speak to, rather than those he harmed. The moral quandary has transformed: now, I must reconcile guilt over my newfound guiltlessness.

 

A page later and I’m no closer to an answer. I’ve thought a great deal about this; lots of thoughts, but not that many solutions. That’s kind of my point. I have so many thoughts and so many questions. Most breed more questions, only some answers. The inside of my head sometimes feels like an echo chamber; thoughts bounce around relentlessly, often repetitively, compulsively. Sometimes they careen in as if out of nowhere, the spontaneous and abrupt entrance of a text box onto a Microsoft 2007 PowerPoint slide, a poof of magic dust arriving so suddenly and urgently at the forefront of my mind that it’s hard to stop from blurting them out. At times exhilarating but many other times, it is just exhausting.

 

***

​

December 8, 2019

​

Juice WRLD died today. Another rising artist, 21 years old, dead. I’ll be 21 in less than 2 weeks, not on this upcoming Saturday but the following one. Life will go on. I will listen to his music mournfully, not knowing what kind of person he was but anticipating that I soon will, posthumously.

​

I’ve never dealt with a big death in my family. I constantly dread it though. I am terrified of the inevitability and indiscretion of death to an at times overwhelming, chilling extent. Philosophically, more than behaviorally, i.e., I don’t behave as if life is overwhelmingly precarious, but I think a great deal about the fact that it is. Often about my loved ones, or myself.

 

***

 

December 12, 2019

​

I’ve actually been doing really well recently. I’ve been singing in the shower, which I think is an overall positive mental health sign. Another classic, tell-tale mental health trope is that your room reflects your mind; if your mind is feeling hectic and unorganized, your room will be too, or so it goes. My room normally looks really just not good—messes get away from me as piles of clothes and books and clothes I impulse-bought online build up on the floor around me. Sometimes I start organizing, but I can’t decide if I should organize my books alphabetically or by size; it looks so odd to have hard cover books in between paper backs. But I finally cleaned my room, which I’m not sure is a reflection of my positive mental health or the new ADHD medicine I’ve been taking.

 

Luckily, I’m not someone who struggles with depression or suicidal ideation as primary symptoms of my mental health conditions. I only even vaguely truly felt like thinking about killing myself once, during a high school break up that felt, of course, like the end of the world. I sat on a sidewalk in the middle of White Plains during my lunch break from my summer internship in the legal department of an insurance company, staring at the street through thick tears, feeling like nothing would ever be okay again. Feeling like it might just be easier if I just ran into the street with cars speeding past. But I knew deep down, that wasn’t what I wanted. On that day, the will to live felt like a burden, the biggest burden, and I still knew that I would continue to choose it over death. Most days, one of the things I feel the most gratitude for is that, for all of my flaws and struggling with emotions and thoughts, I am intrinsically happy to be alive and optimistic about the future.

 

Being suicidal isn’t just thinking that death might be easier. Never in my life have I felt genuinely suicidal, not resigned and exhausted of what life is currently offering while not actually yearning an end, but truly wanting to end it. I understand why people feel that way, but I have never in my life felt empowered to actually pull the trigger, wildly inappropriate and untasteful pun unintended. Fortunately.

​

         XXXtentacion was shot dead.

         Juice WRLD died, probably because of an overdose.

         Tessa Majors died.*

 

*Actually, she was stabbed to death in the park I played softball in for years growing up. Once when my friends and I were sixteen and walking to a party at night, we almost crossed through that park to cut time off our commute. We were stopped by the woman working the entrance booth and forebodingly warned of the screams she had heard from those inside, late at night. We walked around the park.

 

I am alive.

​

***

​

DIAGNOSIS

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My friends always call me manic and I totally get why, but I’m not even bipolar. I’ve asked google, therapists, my best friends, my bipolar friends, my otherwise mentally ill friends, my family: do you think I’m bipolar? They don’t think I am and neither do I, ultimately. I do, however, have some other problems. Generalized Anxiety Disorder was my first diagnosis, which I didn’t get until I was a sophomore in college even though I’ve been notably anxious, and aware of it, as long as I can remember. I also have ADHD, diagnosed officially in the summer before my senior year and recognized by almost all of those who are close to me now, but rarely in childhood. The jury is still out on OCD—obsessive compulsive tendencies are definitely there, in some ways more than others, and I occasionally go down google wormholes and self-diagnose myself. I’ve always loved to self-diagnose myself, flitting between potential psychological disorders that could explain why I feel, somehow, so different. But at this point, another formal diagnosis is honestly kind of arbitrary. With each passing day each of these diagnoses, supposedly separate and defined by distinct bullet points and symptoms, codes corresponding with the disorder's place in the DSM-5, seem to merge together into something singular and layered, to one large condition or function of my brain's chemistry.

​

***

 

December 15, 2019

​

It’s kind of crazy that [lost train of thought, got distracted]

 

***

 

December 16, 2019

 

On the flight to LA. Pending the submission of my final paper due December 20th, I am done with first semester of senior year. I am less than a week from turning 21. I’ve been waiting for this birthday for what feels like an eternity, and have celebrated so many other twenty-firsts before my own that the age has lost its shock value. However, with less than a week of 20 left, I’m thinking: this is the very last week of my childhood. Adulthood may legally be 18 and age might be just a number but nonetheless, once I turn 21, I can no longer claim childhood. The events that happen to me will not be childhood. I’m not sure if they’re quite adulthood either, but I’m a mere few months away from being catapulted straight into the beginning of adulthood. One day, I will get dressed and put on a cap and gown and cross a stage. If not then, than certainly my first day of work, in mid-July, but this is pushing it. The beginning of adulthood.

 

Blinking cursor.

 

Processing the passage of time is difficult. On the very first day of freshman year, as my family moved me into my dorm room in West Quad, my mom turned to me and told me, Olivia, these four years will go by before you know it. I know, I said. Good things always do.

 

On the first night of camp every year, all the girls in the oldest age group introduced themselves to the camp, each sharing a one-liner about camp. At least six people every year say something along the lines of cherish every moment because it goes by in the blink of the eye which was cliché, but it always did. Seven weeks later, we would find ourselves dumbfounded at how quickly the summer passed by. Regardless of the constant markers reminding us of the passage of time throughout the summer, forcing us to realize the date, how many weeks in we were, how many were left, how fast the summer normally passed from each point in time.

 

College is like that too. Every year it has been—the very first semester; second semester, when the dust finally starts to settle and things start to feel normal, comfortable; sophomore year, first semester in the house, living with sometimes too many girls and navigating frat parties expertly, and then second semester, recognizing all too soon that this is your last semester of these parties, that you made all of these friends and got attached to silly Greek letters that will soon all but cease to matter; junior year, one semester, my first finally in the public policy school, blurred together snapshots of feeling washed up; abroad, traveling the world, living in Spain, my first time in Italy; a glorious highlight reel of a summer in Ann Arbor, epitomized and eternalized in moments from the Arb captured on film; and all of a sudden, we’re seniors again and there’s no one older and we’re living and drinking through the last game days and suddenly everyone is 21 and I live and spend every day with friends, drinking coffee every morning and eating pasta every night, finally feeling at home and having friends you love and knowing that all too soon, it will be over.

 

Clichés that apply here:

        How lucky I am to have something that makes leaving so hard.

        It’s crazy that it’s so hard to fully enjoy the times of your life that you will miss the most because you’re so sad about          them passing.

***

 

December 25, 2019

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I am having cognitive dissonance about being 21. For really all of the relevant years of my life, those actually formative and pertinent in my memory, being under 21 has quite literally been a personality trait. Being young has always been relevant; with a birthday on December 21st, I was always guaranteed to be one of the youngest in my grade. Many of my best friends are over a year older than me. And ever since the activities that all under 21 are barred from doing became relevant to me, turning 21 became the thing to wait for. Throughout the last year or so especially, I have watched all of my friends turn 21 (or 22) as I have remained the “baby.” Turning 21 was anticlimactic because I’ve been waiting for so long, I nearly forgot that I wasn’t already 21 too. I wasn’t in a rush to drink on my 21st birthday because… I’ve been drinking illegally for a really long time, and I’ll be drinking legally for the rest of my life.

 

We’re all 21 now—the end of an era. Now what?

 

***

 

HOW TO… LIVE?

​

Life is hard. I spend a lot of time thinking about this—not in a self-pitying or life-hating way, but because I wonder if life feels hard for everyone. I mean, is existence inherently hard, or only for certain people? Certain species? Maybe we’ve just evolved too much for our own good… do apes have anxiety disorders? Do people in third world country struggle with mental health, too, and just lack the vocabulary and privilege to vocalize and prioritize it?

​

How do we reconcile humanity? The good, the bad, the ugly; the never-ending contrasts, orange sunsets look brightest and black mountaintops look darkest—most striking, most beautiful?—when contra-posed. X battled demons and helped others battle theirs, but he also beat up his gay cell mate for looking at him wrong and battered his girlfriend nearly to death. So how is someone good? Or bad? Are we a sum of our actions, the direct things we did or the When we die is there a scoreboard of points? Do you just have to net positive?

 

Of course, I think it is simultaneously all the more complicated and more simple than that. Humans inherently try to find explanations. We psychoanalyze our emotions and learn history and crunch numbers and we come up with brilliant answers that make sense, that make our brains light up and ding with satisfaction. But on the whole, all of the things we want to understand probably just are. The world, most likely, just is, and as much as we might wish it was created in seven days by a man in the sky or whatever, there probably is no rhyme or reason or method to the madness.

That’s what I mean, with my mind racing, racing, racing…

​

For just a moment, I wish it would

​

        all

                just

                        stop.

***

​

December 27, 2019

​

My grandfather is in the hospital with cirrhosis of the liver, in addition to the million other things that have always been wrong with him. His kidney is functioning at ten percent, apparently. He’s been so chronically sick my entire life that it never deeply occurred to me that the time would soon come that he would maybe become fatally so.

 

This is my first big encounter with something like this. I feel very thrust into adulthood within the last week. I turned 21 and all of a sudden, I was thrown into a situation where I need to behave like an adult. When your mom breaks down crying in the car on the way from the hospital to Christmas dinner, or sobs during appetizers and needs to take a long walk, when you can’t stop the hot tears from streaming down your face too as you wait for her to return, trying to be helpful setting and clearing the table, hoping nobody notices the fact that you’ve barely eaten.

 

I started out writing this expecting to talk about past trauma. I expected I would reflect on something that happened to me in my past, something I felt moved on yet forever changed from. But I was just suddenly struck by the fact that I’m not doing that at all. This is happening now. This is my life now. I thought graduation would bring adulthood but within days of my 21st birthday, I’m in a situation where I have to be an adult.

 

 ***

​

January 1, 2020

 

Today, the first day of the year and decade, I spent most of the day in the hospital by Poppy’s bedside. He was asleep more or less all day. I spent time with my grandma, which was nice even though it was under obviously terrible circumstances. Yesterday, Pops told me to find someone (like my grandma). When I was in a relationship I felt suffocated by the feeling that I shouldn’t be. Now, for this whole year or so, as everyone around me has been comfortably falling in love and being happy and cute and mature, I feel the pressure that I should be—another sign of impending adulthood.

 

***

 

January 3, 2020 (12:12 AM)

​

Today I woke up at around 1 pm and started getting ready to go straight to the hospital. I got there a little after 2. Pops was in and out, but more conscious than yesterday. He’s noticeably weaker though; his speech requires effort and is difficult to understand at times. Regardless, we had important moments. He told me how much he loved me as I spent the day by his bedside, holding his hand, sitting in the reclining chair next to his bed.

 

I told Pops he is the best. “You’re the best,” he repeated back, smiling.

 

“No, you are.”

 

“You are.” I leaned into the bed, hugging and talking for what I knew would be one of the last times. I rested my cheek on his chest, still warm and beating with the signs of life that seemed so oddly contrary to the inevitable reality of his quickly impending death. He kissed my head, and I relished in the uniquely unconditional love and admiration Poppy had for me. He was better friends with my sister; they spent countless hours together, far more than I did or ever could in the last decade or so, caught in high school and studying and softball and a million other things and going to college in Michigan. But in his eyes, I was remarkably clever, extraordinarily promising and bright. He believed in me. He understood me. He couldn’t wait to see the incredible things he inevitably expected me to do—not because he wanted certain things for me, but because he felt that any path I took could only possibly be great.

 

While I don’t remember—I was too young—I have been told many times of how Pops and I would walk up 72nd street, the block I grew up on, as I recited the streets in order from memory. This story was always recounted in the way I remember my early childhood—shrouded with a kind of awe of having an intelligent child or grandchild, bolstered by the belief that I was gifted and special. Long after I stopped being so confident in my intelligence, or more so, in my ability to actually apply it to anything meaningful or useful in the real world, in my ability to overcome my shortcomings and anxieties, Pops continued to view me in this way. He thought I was so smart, certainly way smarter than I am. Even after the specialness of me started to dull, I inevitably seemed less special in the overwhelmingly competitive and advanced academic environments I was in, I always knew Pops still viewed me as special and precious. My parents had to deal with adolescence and the difficulties of raising a child and teenager and young adult and just being a human being that diminish their shining qualities in lieu of the money they ask for and belongings they leave strewn in your living room. Sometimes my parents got annoyed at my for being lazy or fucking up or making decisions they didn’t agree with, but Pops always supported me, not just because he loved me but because he really believed in me. He thought I was smart enough to figure it all out, even if other people in my life thought I needed to be pushed in certain directions.

        

Pops is definitely deteriorating. At this point my best prayer / thought / wish is to hope he goes as peacefully, comfortably, and happily as possible. I wanted to say something special, to try to explain how much he meant to me, but I didn’t feel ready to find the words. I expected to have Poppy into my adulthood. I expected to have him as I started my first job, to start my life as an adult with him in it, to introduce him to an imaginary boyfriend that has yet to materialize. I didn’t expect this to be so soon. No one expects the cat with nine lives, the chronically ill old guy, to actually die.

 

12:11 PM

​

My parents don’t understand me, not in an angsty, teenager, poor-me sort of way, but in the same anxiety-distorted way I feel many people don’t understand me sometimes. It's not malicious, when people don't understand me, and when I don't understand other people; it's like trying to communicate with someone in a foreign country, slowing and enunciating the English words and staring back dumbly at the foreign garble of sounds, the only clarity of the conversation your mutual apologies for failing to mount the barrier of language, of yet another thing separating us as different, and not the same. 

 

I think my brain just operates differently than most people. I’m starting to think Poppy might have seen this clearly in me too.

 

***

 

January 4, 2020 (11:40 AM)

 

Pops is still asleep, and we don’t really think he ever will wake up again. Hoping for peacefulness for everyone involved most of all.

 

 ***

​

January 6, 2020 (9:17 PM)

 

Poppy Shell died last night. I found out this morning. But simultaneously, it also feels like he already died. I had said my goodbyes, he was unconscious, and for days, I didn’t even go to the hospital as per the wishes of my mom and grandma, so I could remember him healthier, they said. So it feels like the initial grief of death hit a while ago.

 

I got my haircut today. A few days ago I asked Pops what I should do, and he said a little lighter, so I did that. Except I cut a lot of it off. I didn’t really care about being careful on cutting too much like I normally am because it’s curly and frizzy anyway, and it’s just hair at the end of the day. I was excited to get my haircut, because I really liked this hairdresser the last time I saw him. His name is Aztec—how fun and quirky!—and we had cool conversations about his arm of horror movie tattoos and encounters with ghosts and his mother in California and siblings in other states and how his hair totally changed after chemotherapy for his pancreatic cancer a few years ago.

 

This time, I found out that since that last time, in October, his mom has passed away. We talked about grief and loss, about watching someone die. The uncomfortable wish for and eventual relief in death when someone is ill with no hope of a different end, how life seems to lose its value when our time is so obviously coming to a close. It is weird to say we wanted him to die, but how could I not? He wanted to die; he didn’t want to live through more pain; why would anyone want that? I didn’t tell Aztec that he had died today because I thought it would illicit more sensitivity than I wanted. It doesn’t really feel like today. He’s been in a bed for weeks, progressively losing function of his liver, kidney, and whatever followed once palliative care began. He’s been asleep for days. I don’t know where he was because I guess he wasn’t gone, but he wasn’t really here either. I hope wherever he was, it was better than the eighth floor Mount Sinai West.

 

That was nice, because I could talk to someone else about loss and skip the “I’m so sorry”s and other things people say to you when someone dies. It’s nice that people are sorry, that they reach out, that are sending you whatever wishes or prayers or words that give them strength, but after so many condolences, there still isn’t a right thing to say. What are you going to say—it’s okay? Aztec and I both knew this, and so we could talk about our recent losses, the peace that came with death, without having to feel pitiful and unequal, without having to attempt to explain the inexplainable.

​

Then Aztec was blowing out my hair and his comb caught on my cartilage piercing. I luckily avoided the garish ear tear of my nightmares, but the hoop pulled partially from my ear, curving from a perfect circle to a wobbly C. He acknowledged that he snagged it–oops, sorry, I even knew you had an earring there!—but then pretended not to notice that his mistake had actually, in fact, moved the earring and facilitated the persistent throbbing radiating from the left side of my head, as if ignoring the disfigured hoop solved the problem he had caused. I could have said something, but in situations like this, I shrink. What was I going to say? I sat silently as he finished styling my hair, my ear stinging as if newly pierced, thinking about how my earring was out of place, how badly I wanted to look at it in the mirror and fix it, how each second he spent finishing my hair felt like an eternity, and it all just felt so incredibly unfortunate.

​

In retrospect, this episode actually provoked an infection so severe and unrelenting that I finally had to just take out the earring. I called my grandma, mourning the loss of my beloved cartilage hoop, realizing how crazy it was that I could feel sadness for a piece of metal in my ear. I then felt both selfish and absurd that I had called, of all people, my grandma for sympathy about the loss of a hole in my cartilage when she had just lost the most important person, place, or thing in her life, and I knew that was why I had called her too, because she would understand, and even worse, because she would express for me sympathy nonetheless.

 

 ***

​

JUST ANOTHER RECONCILIATION

​

It’s been over two weeks since I worked on this project. When things like this happen in real life, most of the reconciliation happens in the moment. Reconciliations on paper don’t quite feel as important as the meetings with the liver doctors and kidney doctors and finally, the palliative care doctors.

 

My grandpa died eight days ago. It both feels like much longer and much shorter.

 

He already feels a world apart, and I guess he is. He’s already traversed the divide between living and dead.

 

It’s hard not to remain transfixed on other worlds from my firm place in the world of the living. I’m not even sure if there is a world of the dead, or if it only exists in the minds and hearts of the living. I don’t know if something follows life, or if the utmost extension of life is how we are remembered and kept alive after we are gone. It’s never been in my nature to believe in an afterlife, in divine and religious and non-scientifically proven beliefs. But I can’t say they don’t exist either. I actively try to resign myself to the fact that this is an unanswerable question.

 

I have to decide what to write for my semester-long writing project. I wish I could ask Pops about it. In your last days, I asked you what I should do with my life. You told me to follow my dreams, I’ll be great at whatever I want to do. Sweet and touching is your faith in me, as always, but ultimately, unhelpful, because I’m not sure what my dreams are. You don’t hear or read about people wanting to follow someone else’s dreams, but I wish you had a dream for my future so I didn't have to dream my own. There are too many options and I don’t feel ready to be an adult, to be employed, to graduate college. I am paralyzed with the thought of decisions that lurk in my future. I wish you had a dream for me that I could follow, because then I would know I was doing the right thing. I would be guided by someone other than myself.

 

I hate decisions.

 

I started writing because I wanted to reconcile the world around me, life and death, et cetera. I was thinking about morally iffy celebrities, mostly, and growing up. I thought I could write about it in a way that helped me find clarity, and I also wanted to write something to submit to a competition and win money, because making thousands of dollars for just writing words seems like a cool thing for me to do, quadruple my bank account, slap it on the resume for a little prestige effect—why not? I planned to write all winter break, really diving into it. I went to LA with my friends and turned 21 and battled with the constant inexplicable anxious thoughts overwhelming me in my head . And then I came home, and everything dissolved because I realized my grandpa had liver cirrhosis, and there was never a time when it seemed like something he could survive, and I do not, and find that I actually can not, hope for things I objectively know are not possible.

 

It’s kind of ironic that I started out reconciling life and death theoretically, and wound up ultimately having to reconcile it in real life.

 

Another irony I recently realized: in third grade, when asked what I wanted to do when I grew up, I always I wanted to be a teacher and a writer. I loved my third grade teacher, particularly because of the emphasis he put on writing, and I guess this really manifested. But since then, I’ve thought about a million other different jobs—lawyer, FBI agent, detective, lawyer, politician, consultant, lawyer, forensic psychologist, graduate school..? The options are kind of endless. I was really overwhelmed applying to jobs because I didn’t even know where to start. And so when one job was easy enough to recruit for, apply to, interview for, and ultimately receive an offer from, I took it. This was the only job I applied to, despite hundreds of open search tabs and potential job brainstorm lists and even drafted cover letters. I am excited about it for a lot of reasons, and over time I have thankfully only grown more confident in and excited about my decision.

 

But when I did choose to accept the job, I really just did it because it worked out. I could take a job that probably would make me happy, would pay me money, would delay my career decision-making for a year, or I could dive back into the application process that had been so daunting I found myself paralyzed despite the ever-increasing number of job posting tabs I had open.

 

When I accepted the job, the first thing I did was pull up my internet browser on my computer and pressed command Q. Quit. A truly euphoric moment—finally letting go of the countless unfinished tasks, the reminders of what I had to do and still wasn't doing I left myself. They didn’t matter anymore.

​

This was a few months ago, before Poppy was sick. He was so happy about it. I was happy—I would get to spend more time with him, being home in New York. I don’t know why I think about specifically that moment now, recalling something as significant as closing internet windows. All of these things really mattered to me, the decisions that made my heart race and head spin thinking about decisions that I would have to make—eventually, you have to make them or life, in some way, makes them for you. We spend our lives making all these decisions, agonizing, with no way of knowing if we ever choose right, but they don’t really matter when we die, and maybe they never did.

 

My grief for my grandfather is not over, nor is my ongoing effort to be happy and healthy, to organize and calm my scattered, frantic mind. I don’t end this with a solid conclusion, because it’s my life, happening to me right now. I happened to start a project about life and death and, in a cruel, tragic way, I got lucky by the story that practically fell in my lap. But as I've said before, life is just weird like that.

 

I miss Pops, and I will continue to. I am sure I will continue to struggle, as I do. His death didn’t cure me, but it also didn’t destroy me. Weirdly, I kind of do feel like an adult now, and I guess a big part of adulthood is just realizing that shit is still hard, and we live and die and take different medications and try different therapies and do things to try to find something more, chasing what we think we should be doing, but sometimes maybe there’s no point in trying to find something more. My grandfather, more than most people, lived his life doing what made him happy, disregarding the societal or economic constraints that most people feel constrained by. And for me, someone who finds herself fearing that she’ll never stop thinking enough to actually be in the moment, never stop being too anxious to just live, I’m working on truly being happy. Some of his last words to me left me wondering why he didn’t have a specific career he wanted me to pursue, thinking about why he told me he wanted me to find someone but never asked why I hadn’t already. I think he was just telling me to try to be happy, to find a job and people and life that make me happy.

​

As for reconciling the world around me? There are always things to worry and ponder about, and there always will be. Life is precarious, because we never know what will happen, we will never fully understand what does happen, and we do not know when we will die. As we know, the only certainty in life is death. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking and worrying about things that frankly, have no consequence in my life, maybe even more so than those decisions that do hold weight in my life. All my problems aren’t immediately solved by these realizations, of course, but I’m armed with the certain knowledge that working on coming to terms with the inherent truth that everything in my life is uncertain except death, and there are a lot of things that I will never know or understand.

​

Every day of the last few weeks of my grandfather’s life, I sat for hours in his hospital room, talking to him while he was awake and when we wasn’t, often gazing out at the expansive view south of fifty-ninth street and feeling uncomfortable, like there is something almost mocking or wrong about having such a great view in a hospital, in the room my grandfather would never leave. I walked the mile or so to and from the hospital most days. Most vividly, I remember the feeling of the cold New York City wind stinging my face as I walked past familiar places. The world is different now, without him. But the sting of the cold, just like the sting of remembering him, reminds me that I am alive.

​

***

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