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And now this man is gone. He existed on the earth so briefly. His life was happening, an ongoing event, concurrent with mine and yours and billions of others. Now it isn’t. Our little threads keep going, twisting and turning, overlapping and knotting, twining and wrapping all around each other. But we are less, collectively. One thread, this man’s life, cut off by a combination of factors I don’t know. But I do know one of them, perhaps the main one, was despair.

Death is in the room with us. Death is sitting next to us. Death is walking in and out of the door. Death is on the corner. Death is in the car. Death is in the silence and in the laughter and in the meeting of eyes and in the looking away.

I don’t know what the lesson is, or if there is one. I’ve watched death happen, seen the moment when the lungs empty and don’t fill again. It’s not really a moment, though. It’s moments, strung together, breaths becoming shallower, blood pressure dropping, heart slowing. It took longer than I expected. The body letting go even as the consciousness holds on.

Death seems insurmountable and abrupt. A swift end, a slammed door. Maybe that’s how it is, sometimes.

But sometimes it is looming and silent, padding in soft, a slowly expanding shadow.

And sometimes it’s the mind that betrays us, hands us over. The body fights. The body clings to life. The body may be full of the possibility of days and years, but the mind has already laid down under that shadow.

We are strong, as a species. Adaptable and clever. Quick with our hands, quick with learning, with tools, with patterns, with communication. Quick to puzzle out answers, quick to imagine possibilities.

But despair, a disease, creeps in below the level of our quickness.

I don’t know what the lesson is. I don’t think there is one. Perhaps just a reminder to myself, written here. Death is in the room. Try not to look away.

Then I realized: it’s not a what, it’s a who.

Him. The one I married, the one I made these children with, the one I moved to Puerto Rico beside. He’s not here. And now I’m here, with our children (so much older, so quickly!) and we’re going back, we’re retracing our steps, revisiting our past, and he’s not with us.

My day-to-day life doesn’t feel void of a person or empty in anyway. It feels full (sometimes too full) and it feels rewarding and also stressful and overwhelming but good, and whole. I feel complete, as a person. I have moments of loneliness. I carry grief but it’s a marble in my pocket. Sometimes it gets heavy and I sit down, take it out, cry. Then back in my pocket it goes and I move forward.

When we left Puerto Rico in 2020, it wasn’t to move away. The plan, such as it was, was to go on an extended road trip over the summer. We’d planned to make lots of stops, visiting friends and family. With COVID we shifted, decided we’d do more camping, visit national parks, explore the country, stay mostly outside and away from people. It was very early still, in the pandemic experience, in what we understood of it.

We rented a big van and took off. 6 people, 26 states, 8 weeks. It was chaotic and unhinged and desperate but I couldn’t see that at the time. Most of our marriage had unraveled in 2019. Early in 2020 I thought we were knitting ourselves together again, but we weren’t. I was just holding on to those last few connected threads. During that road trip they snapped apart, too.

The first week of September I called it. It was a cool gray morning. We were in Wisconsin. My skull felt like it would explode. I thought my brain was melting. I put my hands on each side of my head to try to hold it in place. I think I was really close to a mental breakdown or something similar, but I didn’t know what to call it, didn’t have the language or context to understand what was happening. I was the strong one, I was the caretaker, I was the one who held things together. It couldn’t be me falling apart. But it was. I was lost. I was drowning. Blankness and noise at the same time.

I stood in the parking lot beside the van and looked at him and said, I can’t do this anymore.

There was a mythology he’d created and I’d bought into. I was trying so hard to believe it. It seemed like believing it, really, was the key to everything. The key to holding our family together. The key to saving my husband from whatever was happening to him. The key to getting through the chaotic shitstorm our life had become. The key to stability, the key to peace, the key to making it work. You had to believe it, for it to be real. You had to really believe it, and then it would be real and it would work and we would be okay. And if it wasn’t working, and things weren’t okay, it was because you didn’t make it real by believing enough.

And I knew it was my fault. My fault that it wasn’t real, that it wasn’t working.

Because he believed it. He was earnest, he was zealous, he would talk for hours as I stared out the window and we drove through New Mexico, California, North Dakota, Kansas. The sound of his voice wrapped around me and the space grew tighter and I tried so hard. But to believe it, to believe him, I had to turn off so many parts of me. I had to disconnect from my intuition, doubt my intelligence, ignore my analysis, dismiss my feelings. I did it carefully, little by little, because I’ve never wanted to lose myself in someone else. But I was so afraid to lose him. It seemed like the price I had to pay. I thought if I went slow, razor-thin, skimming a bit here, a piece there, then I could hold onto enough of myself.

That morning in the parking lot I couldn’t connect the beginning of a thought to the end of it. I couldn’t find a pattern in my own world, not a single one. I couldn’t touch that place of existence and identity. There was only noise, blankness, noise, blankness, noise, blankness and me grabbing at everything and touching nothing. The only thing I knew was there were two ways forward: to plunge into the noise and release the final bits of myself, let myself melt away. Or scream and scream and scream and scream until I screamed out the noise and heard my own voice again.

So I screamed, as loud as I could. And it came out so soft, almost a whisper: I can’t do this anymore. I could hardly hear myself. But it was enough. It was just enough.

We call it hiking church.

We both grew up in evangelical Christianity and subsequently left it as adults. So hiking is our church, and let me tell you: We preach to each other out there. It is therapeutic, it is uplifting, it is relieving, it is connecting, it is healing. We take turns sharing what’s on our minds. Work stuff, relationship stuff, parenting stuff, family, life, anxiety, friendship, whatever. Three or four hours gives you a lot of time to talk things through. Usually about halfway through the hike we move from sharing about our personal lives to a bigger discussion. About the world, culture, the future, psychology, politics, the environment, religion, hilarious ideas for skits we could do if we had the time and energy. The important stuff.

Hiking church is special. It’s an important weekly tradition now. It gives me space to process the week with someone trustworthy, and that in turn helps me feel ready to roll into the week ahead. I’m a big fan of routines because they help us protect what nurtures and supports us. The world is full of urgency. These hikes, in the woods, are full of peace.