Thread by @ECMcLaughlin

I don't talk about this very often but I lost someone close to me very unexpectedly when I was 35.

One morning she was there, emailing about her new home and the trees on her street, and the next day she had a brain aneurysm at 37, and was gone.

She was one of those people who altered the life of everyone she came into contact with. Changed people. An alchemical force.

There was no denying her once you knew her.

When she died, I lost my bearings for about a year.

I could not function with or understand how quickly it had happened, nor how to process the loss, the unfairness or it, the intimacy of who she had been to me and what became of me in her absence.

It isn't wrong to say that she was around quite a bit for a time thereafter--her scent, her voice, her laughter, the cigarette smell in her hair, the noises she made when she brushed her teeth--all of it.

And then the visitations slowed, except occasionally when I'd dream of her

But lately, she is here all the time, reminding me of death and absence and loss and beauty, and promising me that I am only half-way done, that there is so much more to come, that she is on the other side but watching, that she knows why she left and I did not.

This may all make no sense, other than to say this: death is all around us.

The grief is looming thick and large.

And those we've lost and those we will lose leave an indelible imprint that can't be erased.

Every absence echoes

Walk gently, friends, and love your people hard.