I thought of many ways I could start this.

Here’s one:

Death circles me. 

Actually, it’s shaped more like a wonky star–usually distant, sometimes almost predictable in its pattern, other times spiking straight towards me, shocking and sharp. 

It’s not my death that I watch approaching. It’s the death of someone so intertwined in my heart that their absence is everywhere I look.

My first exposure to death came quite young, so young I don’t know when it was. Mennonites take their children to funerals–and burials. I respect this. I think death is hard enough without making it taboo. 

The first death that affected me was someone I never met. She was very close to my age; one day older, to be precise. She was killed in a tragic accident when she ran into the path of a moving vehicle. 

She was four. 

So was I. 

It was a lot for my little brain to wrap around the idea that someone my age could die, and I remember the need I felt to understand it. I had so many questions, except I didn’t know how to ask about what I was really trying to understand, so it mostly manifested in me asking things like, “What did she look like?” (There were no photos, because religion.) “What color dress was she wearing when she died? What color dress did they bury her in?” etc etc.

Eventually my mom let/helped me send faxes to her mom, and I got answers to some of my questions–if not to what I really wanted to know, which was “How could someone my age die, and what was it like for her?” I still haven’t gotten answers to that. 

My life continued, and the inner points of the star spiral stayed pretty far away. Death only interested me as a concept–the mystery of it. I grew up to my full five feet zero inches, and I got married, and no one close to my heart had died. I felt lucky about that, and also a little apprehensive. 

My grandparents all did die in the years after I got married, but unfortunately for me–or them–or neither of us–or both of us–they weren’t close to my heart and the only real sorrow I felt was for my mother at the death of her parents.

Then in the fall of 2021 I miscarried the first child we conceived. It was very early in the pregnancy. It broke my heart a little bit. But miscarriages are a strange sort of death. The hole created by that loss is internal more than external. It hurts. But it’s different. 

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That was one way I could have started this.

Here’s another, which I wrote several weeks ago:

I’m sitting at my kitchen table, wrapped in several layers of reality. 

The top one you could see: me, in my pajamas and my swamp-witch bed-hair, forcing myself to eat my scrambled egg/pickled onion/feta cheese/honey/red pepper flakes tortilla wrap while figuring out the wordle of the day. 

The second layer is invisible but omnipresent: The Responsibilities. Or rather, the awareness of them. My child, still in need of being dressed and combed and delivered to her grandmother for the day. The check-ins with my bookkeepers I have scheduled today. The fact that my house is currently using its last trash bag and last roll of toilet paper, and I don’t have a plan for dinner. And then stretching out further, the plans for tomorrow and the rest of this week, and the deadlines coming up the rest of this month—but I try to keep those in my calendar and out of my mind until it’s time to do something with them. 

This morning there’s a strange heavy third layer—one that came out of my phone when I picked it up and read a message from my mother telling me my cousin died yesterday. 

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Here’s a third way I thought about starting this:

We weren’t close. 

She was three years, one month, and seventeen days older than me–which isn’t much at all when you’re thirty-one and twenty-eight, but is enough to cause a gap when you’re eight and five and you have a sister who is also eight and she has a sister who is six. We were not each other’s automatically designated friends as children, and somehow as we got older, I connected with several of her other siblings instead of with her.

I don’t think I remember any specific conversations with her. I’m sure we talked to each other; I remember playing with her and our sisters. She was just there, as much a part of my childhood as my older sisters, only a step further removed. I probably could have gone the rest of my life without talking to her or even seeing her again without really noticing. We weren’t close.

I didn’t expect her death to feel like such a close, piercing point of the wonky death star.

I didn’t expect her death.

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Here’s another start:

“Your life is just starting!” sounds like something you could easily say to a sixteen-year-old. 

Except that in the case of my cousin, her life was half over when she was sixteen years old.

I can’t logic my way out of this–or over it–or under it.

I can make lists of why it’s objectively heartbreaking:

• This is the second time her husband has lost a wife and mother of a daughter and a son to cancer–like once isn’t enough for several lifetimes.
• She was so young, about a week away from her thirty-second birthday.
• She has two curly-headed children under six years old who will desperately need their mother to help them deal with the loss of their mother.

But the truth is that objectively, equally terrible, tragic, and heartbreaking things happen to humans all the time–and I don’t feel objectively sad about this. I feel deeply, personally sad about it.

I can make lists of why I shouldn’t be, e.g. the whole ‘we weren’t close, I probably wouldn’t have noticed if we never saw each other again’ section. I can feel guilty because this is not my grief, she had people who were close to her and must be hurting so much more; and I’m probably just being overly dramatic and making things about me that are not about me.

But it’s still there. 

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Here’s yet another way I could have started this:

Seeing someone I played with as a child lying in a coffin felt like walking into a wall. 

Actually, when I was a medium-sized child, her family moved into a house with an indoor pool and many sliding glass doors opening into the pool room. One day when we were visiting, I was running (in the house? What a feral child) and I thought a door was open when it was not. It knocked me flat and I remember the feeling of total disorientation, lying there on the floor, which quickly turned into an enormous headache.

Seeing someone I played with as a child lying in a coffin felt like running into a closed glass door that I thought would be open.

My head still hurts–except it’s not my head.

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Here’s a sixth way I considered starting this:

Yesterday was a good day. One of the first days in a long time where I didn’t feel like I was either sprinting or spiraling. I worked some, and rested some, and the grief felt lighter–I felt like I could do things again, start things again, and I didn’t hate everyone who wanted something from me. I sang to my child, and I felt peace.

This morning I dreamed I was back at the after-funeral dinner, except this time we were sitting at tables outdoors, on the edge of one of those Colorado mesas where you can see all across the valley to the mountains on the other side. Darkness was falling, and there was a cold storm coming, black clouds spreading out across the sky from behind us out over the valley–but in the east above the mountains there was a pocket of crimson sky, growing smaller and smaller. Just before the clouds covered it entirely, a blinding light flashed out from it–and then the storm broke. 

From where we were we could see lightning striking in the valley, plunging the towns that had been lighting the land into darkness, coming towards us, closer and closer. Wind scattered paper plates and napkins, and people were gathering things and going inside, and I heard someone say that the family needs to stay until someone announced to everyone else what was happening–and I knew, with that unquestionable dream knowing, that what was happening was the end of our world. 

And then I was thirteen again, and my daddy was gathering our family together and saying we’re going home. I thought I needed to go back inside to get my stuff, but then I realized I had everything with me and I stopped, caught between relief that no one would be able to stop me from leaving and sorrow that I wouldn’t get to say goodbye to anyone. 

I looked out across the valley and I saw light flashing up from an electrical power station, and I saw hands grasping it, pulling it apart–enormous hands, like the power station was the size of a dollhouse, and I realized the hands belonged to a child. An enormous child, but no more than three or four years old.

“It’s not God doing this,” I said. “It’s a child.”

“What makes you think God isn’t a child?” said my dad.

And then I felt the suffocation of waking up, the unfinished dream falling away, and when I opened my eyes, the grief was heavy in my throat.

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I thought of more than six ways I could have started this. 

I didn’t think of any ways to finish it.