I Went to Maine to Bury One Grief and Came Home Carrying Another

I’ve been putting off writing, and I’m not entirely sure why.

Actually, that’s not true. I know why. Every time I start thinking about what I want to write, my brain quietly suggests dissociation instead. Very helpful. Great system. No notes.

So today I made myself a mimosa with fresh tangerine juice and forced myself to sit down at the keyboard. Whether this becomes anything, who the hell knows. But apparently something in me wants out, even if it keeps hiding behind laundry, Walmart orders, dogs, and whatever is on the stove.

June’s funeral was a few weeks ago, even though she died last November, right after Thanksgiving. Because she and my dad have a burial plot in Maine with June’s family, we had to wait until spring. The ground is too frozen there for burials in winter, which makes sense practically and feels insane emotionally.

It made her death a slow burn. She was gone, but the funeral still wasn’t really behind us. More like funeral number one was behind us, and funeral number two was waiting patiently in Maine like grief with a calendar invite.

I was happy to honor her wishes. I would do the same for my dad, Patrick, my sister, or anyone who trusted me with that kind of responsibility. But it was rough. On all of us, I think.

For months, I have been a ball of emotion, exhaustion, distraction, and whatever the technical term is for “I’m fine as long as I don’t sit still long enough to know I’m not fine.”

A few months ago, I read The Alchemist, and the question that stuck with me was: what is my heart saying?

Annoying question, honestly.

Because my heart has been saying a lot. Loudly. Rudely. Repeatedly.

It is saying I do not want to work anymore. It is saying I am tired of being an executive assistant. It is saying I am tired of commuting. It is saying I am very tired of getting up in the morning, although whether that is spiritual exhaustion, Epstein-Barr, poor CPAP compliance, or simply being a middle-aged woman expected to keep functioning like a corporate appliance is still under review.

My job is honestly lovely, which makes the whole thing more irritating. I work for a huge company with kind people, excellent benefits, real perks, and bosses who are decent human beings. My workday is seven hours, which is something I had never experienced in over thirty years of working. They give us lunch money. Snacks. Bonuses. Healthcare on site. Bloodwork without leaving the building. The whole civilized adult employment package.

And still, my heart says: I do not want to fucking do this anymore.

The commute is a huge part of it. Three days a week, I leave my house at 6:30 in the morning and get home around 6 at night. Drive to the ferry. Ride the ferry. Walk to the office. Reverse the whole thing at the end of the day. By the third 5 a.m. morning in a row, I am seriously considering quitting, joining a monastery, or becoming a dog walker, despite the fact that one of my own dogs recently snapped a six-foot leather leash in half.

Diana, for the record, remains insane. She is beautiful, strong, reactive, exhausting, and apparently powered by whatever they put in illegal fireworks. Trainer number three is the best one yet, but even the best trainer cannot magically make a crackhead German Shepherd ignore another dog when her entire nervous system has decided that today is the day she must scream at the world. Last week Patrick was walking her and she pulled so hard she snapped a six-foot leather leash in half. Thankfully, she didn’t hurt the other dog, but it scared me. It also confirmed what I already know, which is that we need a yard, or I need to stop working, or both. Preferably both.

So yes, my heart has been saying a lot.

But under all of that, something older was speaking. I just didn’t know it until I stood in that cemetery.

Before the trip to Maine, Uncle Paul had fallen. Then he was in the hospital. Then rehab. Then back to the hospital with pneumonia. Kara and I were already worried because the last time we saw him, he was frail. Too frail. The kind of frail that makes every illness feel less like an illness and more like a negotiation.

So we were carrying that, too, when we went to Maine for June’s burial. Family does not usually give you one grief at a time. It stacks them. Efficiently. Like Tupperware.

We went to bury June, but she was not the only person in that cemetery.

Paul’s mother, my Aunt Gloria, was my mother’s sister. Near her grave was Paul’s.

My cousin Paul.

Paul was very special to me when I was young. We were cousins close in age, and I remember having deep conversations with him about life. Not kid conversations. Not surface conversations. The kind of conversations you remember decades later because someone saw you clearly for a few minutes, and that kind of thing matters when you are young and trying to figure out who you are.

He was nineteen when he died.

He was a cadet at Maine Maritime Academy, away on the State of Maine training cruise, docked in Funchal, Madeira. For most of my life, I knew the outline of the story, or what I thought was the outline. There had been trouble. A brawl. A nightclub. Something overseas. Something terrible. Paul died.

That was the family version in fragments.

Then I saw his grave, and suddenly fragments were not enough.

I wanted to know what the hell happened.

So I did what I do when my nervous system has no interest in peace. I researched. I found old articles, U.S. articles, Portuguese articles, clippings that repeated each other, and clippings that contradicted each other. I found official language that made everything sound smaller than it was.

A brawl. A melee. An incident.

Those words bothered me because they made his death sound mutual. Messy, yes, but mutual. Like everyone involved was equally responsible for the chaos. Like Paul was simply one more body in a violent night, one more participant in something that got out of hand.

But the more I read, the less that seemed true. There had been an earlier incident at a club involving other cadets. Some were refused entry. There was drinking, anger, damage, some kind of confrontation. Locals were furious. But Paul seemed to have been trying to get back to the ship when the worst thing happened to him.

And there was a woman with him.

The articles gave her name. She was a cadet, too. She was in the taxi with him when a group of angry locals approached. I kept looking at her name and thinking, she knows something no article can tell me. Not because she had all the answers, but because she had been there. She had been inside the night before it became a headline.

For weeks, I tried to find her gently, carefully, without barging into her life like a grief detective with bad boundaries. Eventually, I found someone who seemed likely to be her. I sent a short message. I expected nothing.

She answered, and then she wanted to talk.

I’ll call her Carol.

And she was lovely. Not fake lovely. Not polite lovely. Truly lovely. The kind of person who answers a stranger because she understands that some questions do not go away just because forty years have passed.

She told me she had just met Paul that day.

Somehow, that made it worse and better at the same time. Worse because she had been pulled into the worst night of his life almost by chance. Better because it meant there was still room, before the horror, for an ordinary beginning.

Her female cadet friend had introduced them. The cadets had the day off, and Carol and her friend had gone sightseeing. They tried to rent a scooter or a moped but couldn’t find a place to do it, so one of the locals lent them a scooter.

That detail stopped me.

In the middle of this story that ends in water and terror, there was a borrowed scooter. Two young women riding around Madeira in the sun, stopping at bars, looking at the scenery, having the kind of day that probably felt like freedom.

They went back to the ship, changed, and headed out again. That was when Carol’s friend introduced her to Paul.

They all went out together.

Carol said she and Paul were sitting outside the nightclub drinking blue curaçao drinks. She did not know what happened inside. She had been drinking in the sun all day. Paul disappeared for a short time and then came back. She didn’t know where he had gone.

Then they left and went to another club.

Later, when they headed back to the dock, they got into a taxi. That is when the group came.

Carol told me she remembers that after they took Paul out of the taxi, the taxi continued all the way to the boat with her.

I keep thinking about that ride back. She was young. She had been drinking for hours. She was in shock. She had just watched something happen that her brain could not process. And then she was delivered back to the ship without him.

When the crew asked where Paul was, she said she didn’t know. At first, she was trying to protect him. She thought they were in trouble for being out. She thought maybe if she said less, she was helping.

But everyone else was already back on the ship. Everyone except the two of them. The crew knew locals were looking for retribution. They knew something was wrong.

After some prodding, she told them what happened. She told them Paul had been grabbed.

And then they found him.

The articles say different things. Fell. Was pushed. Drowned after a beating. Pursued. Attacked by four or five individuals. Found by divers from the ship.

There are so many versions of violence after it happens. So many ways for language to step around the body.

But the part I keep coming back to is what happened afterward.

She was not allowed to talk to the press. She was not allowed to go to the funeral. But a few months later, my Aunt Gloria asked to see her.

So Carol went.

I cannot stop thinking about that meeting. A mother whose nineteen-year-old son died in another country, sitting across from the young woman who had been with him in his last hours.

There are so many ways that could have gone.

Aunt Gloria could have needed someone to blame. She could have asked impossible questions. She could have handed Carol a burden no young woman should have had to carry.

But she didn’t.

She told Carol it was not her fault. She told her not to let it affect her life. She told her Paul would not have wanted that. She told her to go on and live a great life because that would make Paul happy.

That is grace in the truest sense of the word. Not easy grace. Not soft greeting-card grace. The kind of grace that costs something. The kind that comes from a mother standing in the wreckage of her own life and choosing not to pass that wreckage to someone else.

They exchanged Christmas cards for a while.

Carol finished school. Then more school. She got married. She lived her life. And for many years, she lived in New Jersey, about ten miles from me.

Ten miles.

All that time, this woman who carried part of Paul’s last night was living just down the road. I drove through towns near her. Worked near her. Ate near her. Lived my life near her, never knowing.

Maybe things happen when they are supposed to.

I don’t know if I believe that entirely. Sometimes I think things happen because life is strange and cruel and occasionally generous by accident.

But I do know this: I went to Maine to bury one grief, and came home carrying another.

Except now I am carrying it differently.

Before, Paul’s death was a family story made out of fragments. A grave. A name. A terrible thing that happened far away. Now there are blue drinks and a borrowed scooter and a girl who liked him. There is a taxi ride back to the ship. There is a mother who met the survivor and chose mercy.

There is still no clean answer. Maybe there never will be.

But there is more of him now than there was before.

And maybe that is what my heart was saying all along. Not just quit your job. Not just move. Not just get a yard before Diana kills us all. Maybe underneath all that noise, my heart was saying there was someone here who had been flattened by the telling. Someone who became a word too small to hold him. Someone I had loved, and lost, and somehow lost again by not knowing enough.

So I went looking.

I found Carol.

And through her, I found a little more of Paul.

I don’t think I’m finished

.

We used to go there every couple of years to visit my Aunt Gloria, June’s sister. Gloria had grown up and gotten married in New Jersey, then moved to Maine after her third child. She had six children in total, and Paul was closest in age to me.

Maine had been part of June’s childhood too. Her father, my step-grandfather, was born and raised there, and every summer he took June and Gloria back for a few weeks. There was a camp he had gone to since he was a boy, with cabins and a dining hall, fishing and swimming, and relatives who still lived nearby. June once told me those summers were the only time her father seemed happy. The only time his strictness loosened. The only time the grumpy man she knew became someone else for a little while. I understand that now. Some places hold the version of a person they could only be there.

But that is not what I meant to write about.

I was sitting in the front row at the cemetery, in front of June’s casket, next to my dad and my husband, when I saw Paul’s gravestone. He was nineteen years old when he died. For years, I thought he was twenty, but I had the math wrong. He was a year younger than me. His picture is on the stone, dressed in his Merchant Marine uniform, frozen in time. Almost exactly as I remembered him.

The last time I saw Paul alive was the summer after I graduated high school. Dad, June, Wanda, and I went to Maine for a few weeks before I left for college. June had recently stopped drinking, so things were not as awful as they usually could be. For a little while, everyone seemed lighter. Or maybe I was lighter because I was about to leave.

We were at Aunt Gloria’s house, and I remember Paul and me sitting outside on the swings, talking about life like life was something we were about to enter, not something that would one day ambush us.

Paul was going into his senior year. He had been voted captain of the football team. He played football, baseball, anything anyone wanted to play. He was one of those people who seemed good at being alive. Kind, smart, athletic, curious. The kind of person people describe as well-rounded because there is no easy way to say he had everything going for him without sounding like you are begging fate to prove you wrong.

Growing up in Maine did not seem that different from growing up in the one-horse town I was trying to escape. Paul wanted out too. We talked about wanting to live in cities. Travel. Meet new people. Do new things. Become whatever we thought we were going to become. I remember thinking, good for him. He was getting out too.

A few weeks after I graduated college, I found out Paul was dead.

At first, the story was unclear. He had been in port in Portugal on a training trip with the Merchant Marine. The ship had stopped in England, Ireland, and Portugal. Maybe there were other stops planned after that. I don’t remember. What I remember is that it took time for the truth to come out. Or maybe not the truth exactly. Maybe just versions of it.

The school was not exactly forthcoming. The wire stories used words like “brawl” and “melee,” words that make violence sound foggy and mutual, like everyone was just swallowed into chaos and no one can really be blamed.

A melee. That word bothers me. A melee is what newspapers call something when they want to blur the edges. A confused fight. A disturbance. A mess involving a lot of people. It sounds almost weather-related, like a storm rolled in and everyone got wet.

But Paul was not the melee. Paul was my cousin.

From what I’ve found so far, the ship had docked in the Madeira Islands, in Funchal. The cadets were allowed to leave the boat. There were curfews, but they were encouraged to see the places they visited. That was part of the point, I suppose. Travel. Culture. Experience. All the things Paul and I had talked about on the swings when we thought the world was waiting to be discovered.

There were hundreds of students on that ship. Some of them went to a nightclub. One account said the bouncers or employees would tell the cadets they could come in one at a time, then lock the door and beat them before letting the next one in. Eventually, some of the beaten students went back to the ship and returned with reinforcements. Thirty, maybe fifty cadets. They forced their way inside, picked up anything glass, and started throwing it. Damage estimates varied. The numbers varied. The accounts varied. What does not seem to vary is that the nightclub employees were furious.

A few hours later, Paul was returning to the ship in a taxi with a female cadet. They were near the pier, near the place where the cadets entered to get back to the ship. The men were waiting. They had sticks, pipes, possibly knives. They were looking for the cadets who had trashed the club. Maybe they recognized the uniform. Maybe they recognized the gate. Maybe Paul was simply a young male cadet returning to the wrong place at the wrong time.

They pulled open the taxi doors. They dragged Paul and his date out. They hit her in the face, then shoved her back into the car when they realized she was a woman.

They kept Paul.

That is the part I can’t get past: he was almost back.

The taxi driver took off and called the police, who did not arrive quickly enough. Divers later found Paul in the harbor. The official cause of death was drowning, but the autopsy also said he had suffered severe head injuries. One article said he would have died from those wounds even if he had not drowned.

Some accounts suggest Paul may have been at the club earlier but was not involved in the fight. Others say he had not been there at all. The version I grew up hearing was that he had been protecting the woman he was with. Maybe that was the family trying to make sense of it. Maybe it was true. Maybe both things can be true in different ways.

What seems clear, the more I read, is that Paul was not the one who started it. He was not one of the cadets who went back with reinforcements. He was not the broken glass, the damage estimate, or the brawl. He was nineteen years old, on a date, trying to get back to his ship. And because other people wanted revenge, he never made it.

There were lawsuits later. His parents, Aunt Gloria and her husband, tried to hold the school accountable. There were questions about discipline, supervision, shore leave, curfews, and whether the whole thing had been a powder keg waiting for one spark. Those questions mattered. But I also understand why institutions might want to make Paul part of the larger mess. If everyone is part of the mess, maybe no one has to stand too close to the body.

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But families do not remember people as legal claims. They remember them on swings, in uniforms, before the headline.

My Aunt Gloria was never the same after Paul died. I don’t think any of them were. How could they be? Your son goes away on a training trip, full of promise and future, and comes home as a body flown back from another country. That is not something people get over.

They may keep living. They may raise the other children, go to work, attend weddings, cook dinners, mow lawns, send Christmas cards, and learn how to say his name without collapsing every time. But they do not get over it.

This weekend, sitting in front of June’s casket, I looked over and saw Paul’s grave, and it broke my heart all over again. Not just because he died, though that would be enough, but because for a moment I remembered him alive. The summer heat. The yard. The swings. The easy confidence of a boy who had not yet been turned into an incident.

He was going to travel. He was going to leave Maine and see the world. He did, just not long enough.

The papers kept reaching for words like brawl and melee, as if those words could explain what happened or make it less unbearable.

But Paul was not the melee.

He was nineteen, almost back to the ship, and he was supposed to come home.

I keep my writing free because I want people to be able to read it.

But if anything here has meant something to you, made you laugh, made you feel less alone, or made you think, paid subscriptions are open as a way to support the work.

No pressure, truly. I’m grateful you’re here either way. Or you can buy me a coffee!

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I lost my soul dog. I lost my job of fifteen years. I lost my stepmother. I lost two friendships I had mistaken for permanent. My uncle, my mother’s last living brother, has been deteriorating in body and mind, and this week he had what must have been his sixth fall. He’s in the hospital now, then likely back to rehab, where every visit seems to cost him a little more cognitive function. Getting old is no fun, which is a polite way of saying it’s fucking brutal.

After Zee died, I rescued a dog who had a severe injury that just happened to be quiet the month we adopted her. Three surgeries, $15,000, and one amputated hind leg later, Ariel is doing well. Thank God for that, because I’m not sure my nervous system could have handled a different ending.

We also got a dog from a breeder who was supposed to be “the best trained dog we ever owned,” and the joke was absolutely on us. Ten thousand dollars later, we can’t walk her on a leash without her trying to kill every other dog within a two-mile radius. So yes, technically I have two dogs. Emotionally, I have one miracle and one lawsuit with fur.

After losing my stepmother, my eighty-six-year-old father was suddenly alone. He didn’t want to come back to New Jersey after twenty-five years in South Florida, and honestly, can you blame him? The weather here sucks ass. But my sister and I have been more involved in his life than we have ever been in all our years of being alive.

He has very little patience and basically no technical savvy at all. He didn’t know how to use the dishwasher. He didn’t know how to do laundry. There is grief, and then there is explaining the delicate cycle to an eighty-six-year-old man who already thinks the world is personally attacking him.

Meanwhile, I started a new job. One month in, I needed time off for my stepmother’s death. Since then, I’ve been sick more in the past six months than I was in the last six years. Colds, exhaustion, and now a weird throat infection that feels like my body filing a formal complaint. Apparently I also had mono — EBV — and didn’t even know it, which may explain my unquenchable desire to sleep twelve hours a day.

I’m blaming public transportation, because someone has to take the fall, and the Port Authority has had it coming.

At least I have sick time. At least I have a job. But I don’t feel like I’m showing up the way I should. Honestly, if I worked for me, I might question my work ethic.

And now, as we conclude the year from hell, next up is my stepmother’s burial in Maine this weekend, because the ground is finally thawed. Eight hours in a car with my dad, my stepsister, and my husband, which will be a test of patience, blood pressure, and possibly federal law. Then an Airbnb with the whole family, which sounds less like a peaceful memorial weekend and more like a really bad dare.

Today I heard the song, Running on Faith.

I used to think faith was an optimistic word. Like keeping the faith. Like, I’m going to keep believing, keep rolling down the highway, and eventually I’ll get to wherever the hell I’m supposed to be. Because I have faith. Even if the engine light is on, the windshield is cracked, and I’m almost out of gas, faith says, keep going.

Except faith doesn’t play fair. Faith is an annoying word that keeps telling you to suck it the fuck up when you are already fully sucked up.

Somewhere on the highway, a tire blows out. You realize you let AAA lapse by accident. You’re stranded in the middle of nowhere with no signal, no plan, and no proof anyone is coming. Just you, running on faith.

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That’s what I hear in that song. Not optimism. Not certainty. Not some glossy version of survival where the sun breaks through the clouds right on cue. I hear someone tired. Someone who has reached the edge of logic and found nothing there but one more day.

That’s the part that gets me. Because sometimes you are not running on hope. Hope is too clean. Too bright. Too confident. Hope acts like it knows something. Faith is different. Faith is what you use when you know absolutely nothing.

So when I say I’ve been running on faith, I don’t mean I’ve been floating around believing everything happens for a reason. I mean I am tired. I mean I am still moving. I mean there are days when I look at the wreckage of the last year and think, Fine. One more mile.

Not because I know where I’m going.

Because what the fuck else can I do?

I keep my writing free because I want people to be able to read it.

But if anything here has meant something to you, made you laugh, made you feel less alone, or made you think, paid subscriptions are open as a way to support the work.

No pressure, truly. I’m grateful you’re here either way.

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I know that.

If you listed everything that happened, the silence, the indifference, the way he stood by while she erased us, any sane person would say hate is the appropriate response.

But I don’t.

I don’t hate him.

And God, sometimes I wish I did.

Hate would be easier.

Cleaner.

Sharper.

Hate would mean I could finally stop crying when I think about all the times he could have opened his mouth and didn’t.

All the times I waited to be chosen and wasn’t.

All the times he pretended not to see.

I don’t hate him.

That is the part that breaks me.

Because it means some sliver of me still loves him.

The part that remembers the good pieces.

The whistling.

The stairs he carved into the hill.

The man who once loved my mother so much he carved ELILYA into cement.

Elle. I love you always.

Sometimes I think about how young he was.

Twenty-four when he married her.

Thirty-two when he lost her.

The woman who sang her whole heart at him, who looked into his blue eyes like every song had been written for him, was gone in one night.

If I am still gutted decades later, what must it have done to him?

Standing in the snow with two daughters clinging to him and the ghost of the only woman who ever sang him into being.

No wonder he remarried.

No wonder he grabbed June’s steadiness like a life raft.

That doesn’t erase what he did wrong.

It doesn’t erase what it felt like to be his daughter.

But it makes me ache for him too.

And that ache is the problem.

It is why I can’t light him up the way I can light up the others.

Trish.

Artie.

Dawn.

Dot.

June.

They earned the fire.

He just faded.

I only know this book is not revenge.

Not against him.

It is what happens when silence finally loses its grip.

I don’t hate him.

But I am still writing this.

Because someone has to tell the story.

And I am done protecting the silence.

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I keep most of my writing free because I want people to be able to read it.

But if anything here has meant something to you, made you laugh, made you feel less alone, or made you think, paid subscriptions are open as a way to support the work.

No pressure, truly. I’m grateful you’re here either way.

In the dream, Artie got walked out — not laid off, not promoted sideways, not allowed to retire gracefully with a fake press release and a steak dinner. Walked. Out.

Apparently he violated policy. Something about misuse of systems, or maybe someone finally counted how many days he actually came into the office in 2025 and realized the answer was zero.

Either way, he was out. And not quietly.

Then Mitch retired.
Heart issues, I think. But also shame, maybe.
His goodbye email was two lines and signed with his full name like a LinkedIn post. I didn’t reply. Nobody did.

Trish, already long gone, resurfaced in a comment under the press release.
End of an era. So proud of all we built. Grateful for the memories. #FriendsForLife.

Everyone knew exactly who she meant. And what they did.
Still, no one commented.

Dot and Dawn were let go too.
“Role redundancy,” the email said.

I laughed so hard I dropped a K-Cup. Diana didn’t even flinch.

Dawn tried to turn it into a personal brand, posting a photo of her boxed-up desk supplies with the caption: New chapter begins. Grateful for growth.

Nobody liked it. Not even her sister.
Oh wait. She’s dead.

And then, because this was a dream and dreams don’t mess around, they shut down the entire Easton office.

Trump called the company a national security threat and said they were “a disgrace to middle management and a direct threat to America’s morale.” Even people who hate him had to admit… he wasn’t wrong.

Artie was led out in handcuffs.
Still wearing his badge and a look of smug confusion, like he couldn’t quite believe accountability applies to him. The charges scrolled across the news ticker: obstruction, coercion, falsifying records… but all anyone really cared about was the footage of him tripping on the curb as they loaded him into the car.

He faceplanted into the asphalt. A nearby K-9 unit named Karma, misunderstanding the flailing as an attempted escape, lunged. She clamped down on his calf with the righteous fury of every woman he ever talked over in a meeting. Artie howled. The internet rejoiced. The clip went viral. Someone added a laugh track. Another added slow-mo and a remix titled “Bite the Hand That Pays You.”

And for the first time in a long time, the coffee didn’t taste like severance.

I have always wanted to give people the benefit of the doubt. I used to think that made me kind-hearted. Lately I am less sure.

Years ago, I had a neighbor I felt sorry for. She had two difficult children, a dog that was always “getting loose,” and the kind of household chaos the whole neighborhood could feel. She screamed at those kids constantly, at the top of her lungs. They were outside without shoes, without coats, wild and unattended in ways that made you uneasy because it did not feel like the occasional mess of family life. The dog was not walked properly, got loose constantly, and seemed to use the neighborhood as its bathroom because no one could be bothered to do the basics. I used to bring him back because I was honestly afraid he was going to get hit by a car. Every time, she would say, “I don’t know how he got out,” which, in hindsight, was almost funny in how predictable it was.

One time, after I brought the dog back again, the little girl asked if she could call me Daddy. It was funny for about half a second, and then it really wasn’t. I had brought that dog back so many times and suddenly I was a father figure? Even then, I knew something in that house was off. Not imperfect. Not going through a rough patch. Off.

At the time, though, I still felt sorry for her. I told myself she was overwhelmed. I told myself marriages break up, people make mistakes, life gets messy, children are hard, some kids need more than others, and maybe she was doing the best she could. I wanted that to be true. I prefer that story. It is easier to live with.

Then I found out those were not her biological children. She was fostering them. What changed for me was the realization that this was not simply a woman flattened by circumstances she never chose. It looked less like a life that happened to her and more like responsibility she had signed up for, while still moving through the world like the greatest victim in it. My sister Kara knew that house was crazy too. When I found out the kids were not hers by birth, she was just as stunned as I was. We both had the same reaction: you chose this?

That was the detail that changed things for me. Not because foster parents should be saints, and not because children who come to you through the system are any less your children. Quite the opposite. If anything, children who come into a home through struggle or state systems often need even more steadiness, not less. What bothered me was the resentment. She did not seem like someone crushed under a life she never saw coming. She seemed angry at the needs of a life she had chosen. The children and dog were the ones living inside the consequences, and she carried herself like the injured party.

That experience made me start rethinking the whole phrase “doing the best they can.”

Because sometimes people are. Sometimes a person really is hanging on by a thread and life is still kicking the shit out of them. I think about the person whose card gets declined in a checkout line while the stranger behind them is already impatient. Maybe that person is irresponsible and disorganized, sure. But maybe their life has just come apart. Maybe they have been betrayed, abandoned, blindsided, or humiliated and are using the last of their strength to stand upright in public. Maybe the cashier is watching a financial inconvenience and the person in line is living through a collapse. We do not know. Not knowing should make us gentler.

But I have also learned that not knowing can make us dishonest if we are not careful. Sometimes people are not doing the best they can. Sometimes they are doing what is easiest, what is most convenient, what benefits them most, and they are counting on the rest of us to tell a kinder story about it.

That may be the part I have had the hardest time learning.

I like to give people the benefit of the doubt, and then, as usual, I end up feeling like an idiot when I find out they did not deserve my sympathy at all. I want there to be more to the story. I want there to be some hidden pain that makes their behavior sad instead of ugly. I want to believe there is something I do not know that would make me soften. And sometimes that instinct is a good one. Sometimes it saves me from becoming cruel. But sometimes it just means my sympathy has been underwriting someone else’s bullshit.

I do not want to become hard either. That is the other danger. It would be easy to take stories like that and decide everyone is selfish, everyone is full of shit, everyone is gaming the system, and anyone struggling in public probably earned it. But honestly, is it that simple?

It probably is not. Both kinds of people exist, and from the outside they can look surprisingly similar. One person is in disarray because life has gutted them and they are barely holding the pieces together. Another person is in disarray because they are careless, exploitative, or fundamentally unwilling to do the hard part of what they signed up for. One person deserves enormous tenderness. The other deserves clarity, boundaries, and a lot less interpretive generosity. The problem is that from the curb, or the checkout line, or the neighboring house, you do not always know which is which.

Maybe that is the real lesson. Not that compassion is foolish, and not that judgment is always right. Just that they are not the same thing. You can acknowledge that someone may be going through something and still refuse to lie to yourself about what their behavior is doing. You can make room for complexity without explaining away harm. You can stay human without becoming blind.

I still want to assume the best. I probably always will. I just do not want grace to turn me into an accomplice to my own stupidity.

We do not always know what someone is carrying. That should make us kinder. But it should not make us blinder.

The partner had only just joined CA, the consulting firm I’d hitched my survival to more than once, the place that specialized in reminding me loyalty was a one-way street.

They were so eager to have him that Artie, my (a-hole) boss at the time, asked me to help cover him and make sure his first few weeks went smoothly. I arranged the giant welcome flowers when he accepted. He was the next Chief Medical Officer.

And then one rumor was enough to erase him.

I liked working with him. We clicked. We got things done. Then one day, he was just gone.

Not the kind of gone where you get cake and a card. The kind of gone that shows up as a whisper in the email system. A calendar invite from the Disciplinary Committee. An HR note scrubbed clean of warmth or detail.

Rumor was someone saw him out to dinner with a subordinate. Rumor was they kissed. He was married. That part was never in the official version, but it hovered in the margins of every conversation.

I remember saying to a friend, stunned, “Out of all the restaurants in the city, someone saw that? Were they stalking him? Who reports something like that?”

I felt bad for him. I really did.

Back then, I could not imagine turning someone in like that. I could not imagine betrayal being its own kind of sport.

Then I watched it happen to me.

After seven years of supporting Artie, covering for him, doing the work, getting the kind of reviews other people at the company would have gladly backed up, he stopped giving me feedback and started whispering things that were not true about my performance. He had me train a woman as my backup, watched her laugh at his jokes and wear the right heels, and then quietly slid my job across the room to her because he liked her.

Help keep the Nespresso hissing

It was not strategy.
It was not merit.
It was preference dressed up as inevitability.

And something in me changed.
Not all at once, and not into someone better.

If I had seen him leave dinner with her in those heels, I would have reported him in a heartbeat. It would have been petty, and it would have been perfect. He treated me like shit. I would have been happy to return the favor.

That is not my most evolved thought, but it is an honest one.

For a long time after that, I tried to live by the kind of wisdom people like to quote when the world disappoints them: let them.

Let them whisper.
Let them sanitize cruelty and call it process.
Let them show you who they are.

At first it felt clean, almost noble. A survival trick. Step back. Watch. Do nothing.

But eventually, “let them” started to feel like a lie I told myself so I could sleep.

Because watching them work their machinery made something ugly rise in me. Letting them dismantle someone else felt too much like rehearsing how they would one day dismantle me. The more I practiced staying quiet, the louder the ledger in my head became. Debts. Slights. Small humiliations. Tiny acts of disrespect that did not disappear just because I refused to name them.

So I learned two things at once. You can let people show you exactly what they are. And knowing exactly what they are does not always kill the part of you that wants them to pay.

I used to think looking away made me better. Now I think it mostly made me easier to erase

.

They were not.

I arrived with very sincere writer optimism and a name that, in hindsight, may not have helped. I think my handle was Ghosts, Dogs & Dead Mothers, which at least one person found off-putting. Fair enough, maybe. But I had just written an 80,000-word book centered around my dead mother, and not long after that my stepmother died too. At that point I had, in the most literal and least poetic sense possible, two dead mothers.

That sounds harsh written out. It also happens to be true.

So I started where most people start on Substack: posting into the void, following a few people, hoping for a little reciprocity, trying to figure out whether I was bad at this or just early. I wrote things I thought were funny. They were not especially well received. Then I wrote a piece called I Chose This Life, and for the first time something shifted. Someone read it. Someone liked it. Someone restacked it. It did not go viral, because almost nothing does, but it got seen. More importantly, it got read.

That was all I wanted.

Not fame. Not internet domination. Not some fantasy of becoming a literary brand. I wanted readers. I wanted to know the words landed somewhere other than inside my own head.

That was also when I met H.

He subscribed quickly, commented generously, and seemed to understand the strange mix of writing and platform mechanics better than most people do. He talked openly about the algorithm, about reach, about how writers could help each other find audiences instead of waiting around to be discovered by magic. He offered editing help. He read some of my work. He encouraged people. He connected writers. He made the place feel less random.

That matters more than people admit.

For all the jokes about Substack being a glorified email list, it can also feel like a little frontier town built by insomniacs, mourners, essayists, novelists, obsessives, and people who do not quite fit anywhere else. When it works, it really works. You find people whose work you admire. They find yours. You restack something because it moved you, or made you laugh, or said the thing you have been trying to say for years. You start recognizing names. Then voices. Then patterns. Then people.

I found writers there I genuinely loved. A few were new enough that I got to be the person saying, “You should read this.” I connected some of them to H because he was good at helping people get traction and because he had built real relationships. That is one of the nicest things about a good online community: it can make generosity feel useful.

Then the same system that creates that closeness can also distort it.

A lot of the writing I care about on Substack does not come from some clean, polished, content-brain place. It comes from grief, shame, memory, family damage, addiction, longing, secrets, all the things people are usually trying to manage in private. That is part of what makes the place feel alive when it is good.

H published one of those pieces. It came from a real wound, one of the hardest experiences of his life. I know what that kind of writing feels like. You do not do it for fun. You do not do it because you have identified some clever market opportunity in suffering. You do it because something in you needs to be said, or named, or dragged into the light. Maybe you want healing. Maybe you want witness. Maybe you want someone else to feel less alone. Usually it is some combination of all three.

And then, while H was suspended, people started talking.

Not carefully. Not kindly. Not even honestly, from what I could tell.

What began as speculation quickly took on that nasty online energy that always seems to appear the minute facts are missing and people are bored, hurt, or eager to be right. Suddenly there were insinuations that the piece had been shared for attention. That people had been pressured into participating in some kind of emotional spectacle. That the network around him was really a “cult,” as if writers restacking one another is proof of mass manipulation instead of a normal way small communities work.

I have actually been in a cult. This was not a cult.

This was a loose group of writers trying to help each other get read.

Was there sometimes pressure to engage, to restack, to support, to reciprocate? Maybe. But pressure is not coercion. No one was forced. No one was punished. Mostly it worked the way relationships usually work: the people who gave the most energy tended to get the most back. That is not sinister. That is just how groups work.

What made the whole thing worse was the cruelty.

There were comments on that personal piece that were so ugly, so disproportionate, and so weirdly gleeful that I found myself wondering how many people keep burner accounts solely to be inhumane with less consequence. It is one thing not to like someone’s style. It is one thing to be skeptical of online dynamics. It is another thing entirely to watch someone write from an obviously painful place and decide that this is your moment to mock them.

That part I will never understand.

And here is the thing I keep coming back to: I do not actually know why H was suspended. Most people talking about it do not know either. That did not stop them from speaking as if they did.

What I do know is this: Substack moderation is opaque, inconsistent, and often absurd. I know that because I have been suspended too, and not for anything remotely dramatic. I have been temporarily blocked from posting for sharing links to my own work in threads where people were literally asking to read other people’s writing. Asking. Inviting it. Still, after a few replies, I hit some invisible limit and got locked out for hours, then longer. I filed an appeal. I got the usual vague language. Maybe it is a bug. Maybe engineering will review it. Maybe someone will respond eventually. Maybe not.

So when people act like a suspension must mean someone did something monstrous, I am not convinced.

Sometimes it means a platform has bad systems.

Sometimes it means automation is stupid.

Sometimes it means the machinery underneath our little literary neighborhoods is not nearly as thoughtful as the people using it.

And maybe that is what unsettles me most. Not just that people can turn on each other so fast, but that a platform built on intimacy can so easily become a place of paranoia. We are encouraged to be personal, vulnerable, confessional, and deeply human. We are also sorted by algorithms, throttled by filters, and left to interpret silence from a support system that barely exists. In that environment, people start making up stories to fill in the gaps. About suspensions. About motives. About each other.

It is a terrible way to treat writers.

I still love parts of Substack. I have met smart, funny, generous people there. I have found real readers there. I have been surprised by kindness there. But this whole episode reminded me how quickly online community can become moral theater, where nobody knows the facts but everybody has a theory, and the most vulnerable work somehow gets recast as performance the minute other people feel uncomfortable with it.

Maybe that is the risk of writing honestly in public.

Not just that people will misunderstand you, but that they will decide misunderstanding you is more interesting than reading carefully.

I think one of the hardest things about going through a truly catastrophic stretch of life is finding out which people can handle the reality of it and which ones turn your absence into a statement about them.

Since August, my life has not exactly been light. I lost my job of fifteen years. Leia needed her leg amputated, and then we found out she had cancer. My mother got sick in Florida and was diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer. My sister and I went down there, and my mother died a week later. Then came the funeral in New Jersey, with the burial delayed until May because the ground in Maine freezes. I had just started a new job. My eighty-six-year-old father stayed in New Jersey through the holidays, then decided to go back to Florida and live alone, which has made me more involved in his life than I have ever been. I commute three days a week by ferry, which sounds charming until weather turns it into an obstacle course.

In other words, I was not exactly sitting around with abundant emotional bandwidth, forgetting my friends for sport.

During that same stretch, one of our friends, Kay, lost her boyfriend suddenly. He died while she was with him. It was brutal. She was devastated. We tried to be there for her as much as we could, but around the same time, my own life started collapsing in on itself.

Another friend, JJ, had met Kay through us and gotten very close to her. At one point they were close enough that JJ asked Kay to be a bridesmaid in her wedding. But JJ strongly disliked Kay’s boyfriend, and after he died, she did not strike me as particularly gentle or empathetic. One time she complained about Kay’s “drama” and mocked the fact that Kay had bought herself an engagement ring after he proposed before he died. Their relationship had been complicated and semi-secret because his divorce was not final, but none of that changed the fact that Kay had lost who seemed to be the love of her life. JJ’s response felt cold, judgmental, and shockingly lacking in empathy.

The more I think about it, the more I can see that this was not new. When JJ got married, there were endless wedding-related obligations that somehow felt non-negotiable. Everyone was expected to show up, no matter what else was going on. One of the most telling moments was when Kay had to pull herself together and host JJ’s bridal shower the same day she had put her dog down that morning, because we all knew JJ would not understand if anything interfered with her plans. That was the pattern. Her needs were treated like emergencies. Other people’s pain was expected to work around them.

There were other signs too. Once I had to cancel a weekend trip with JJ and two other friends because my parents were unexpectedly going to be in town. They were in their eighties, and I did not want to miss the chance to see them. The other two friends were understanding and sane. JJ was furious. She wanted me to tell my elderly parents I already had plans. She could not absorb the idea that something real had taken priority over her disappointment. I remember thinking, with no elegance whatsoever, what the hell is wrong with her. Still, because this is what women do, because this is what conflict-avoidant people do, because this is what I do, I made a separate trip with just her to smooth it over. It was fun, but the pressure felt ridiculous.

Then there was the book. Years ago, in one of those warm, optimistic conversations that feels meaningful while it is happening, we started a tiny book club. It was the four of us. We only read two books, but in the course of all that, I said I wanted to write one. Kara said she wanted to help me. JJ volunteered to be our editor. We were genuinely excited. Or at least I thought we were. But once I actually started writing, her enthusiasm evaporated. She was always busy. She had to finish her own book from her thesis. She never outright said no. She just kept dodging. I finished my book and asked again. Nothing. I sent it a couple of times, thinking maybe she had forgotten, like an idiot. She never really asked me about it. In hindsight, that stung more than I wanted to admit.

JJ had already been at the same company for several months before I left. Her role had nothing to do with mine, and I never blamed her for taking the job. After I was laid off, I did ask her a few times to look up who was reporting to whom, because I was trying to understand why I had been passed over for a role that really should have been mine. Apparently she later decided that meant I had only been using her. That came as news to me. There were other people I could have asked. I asked her because she was my friend. Or so I thought.

Meanwhile, Patrick and I were not exactly out there building a sparkling social calendar with everyone except JJ. We had barely seen anyone. We saw Kay a few times, mostly on the fly, because she was grieving and because those plans were spontaneous and small. Once we all went to a holiday concert with Kay and some mutual friends. JJ later said she felt left out, but she had also declined that concert when Patrick asked if she wanted to come. There was no coordinated exclusion. There was just life, grief, timing, and people doing the best they could.

Over Christmas, I texted JJ from Key West and she responded kindly. It did not seem like there was some major rupture brewing. Then Kay’s adoptive mother died. She came over to catch up, and she asked if we had spoken to JJ. We had not. I suddenly felt bad. So I texted JJ to say I was thinking of her, hoped she was well, and missed seeing her. No reply.

Eventually I sent a more direct message because I had the sense she thought I only reached out when I needed something, and I wanted to clear that up. I explained, briefly, that life had been incredibly heavy. Her first answer was polite but cold. Then came the real message. She told me she had felt for months that she was of no priority or importance to a group of friends she thought would be in her life forever. She said she did not feel cared about at all. She also said that when she had complained about how Kay treated her, she felt her hurt had been brushed aside because Kay was going through a lot. Then she added that Kay had always trash-talked us and never wanted to hang out with us anyway. She even took a nasty swipe at Kay’s grief, basically suggesting her behavior was excused only because her married boyfriend died.

That was the moment the whole thing changed for me. This was no longer just a hurt friend telling her truth. This was someone unloading a backlog of grievance and using private comments as ammunition.

What struck me most was not just that she felt hurt, but how absolute her conclusion was. In her mind, distance did not mean life had gotten complicated. It meant she had been demoted. Forgotten. Reclassified. Every lapse became proof. Every missed beat meant something. Once I understood that, a lot of older moments started rearranging themselves. The birthday drama. The trip I had to cancel because my parents were unexpectedly in town. The bridal shower Kay pushed through on the day she put her dog down because everyone knew JJ would not understand. It was never just sensitivity. It was a worldview in which other people’s lives were constantly being measured against her sense of priority.

I do not think she was faking that hurt. I think she believes every word of it. That may be the saddest part. In her version of friendship, people are either proving your importance or quietly betraying it. There is very little room for grief, chaos, caregiving, bad timing, or actual life. Recognizing that is different from agreeing with it. It does not make her pain unreal. It just means I finally understood that no amount of context was ever going to compete with the story she had already decided to tell herself.

What I am really mourning is not just this fight, but the realization behind it. I had mistaken history and repetition for depth. I thought history meant sturdiness. I thought affection bought more grace than this. But some relationships are only easy when all they require is upkeep. The minute real life shows up, everything shifts. Suddenly your absence means something. Suddenly your bandwidth is taken personally. Suddenly the friendship feels less like comfort and more like a role you are failing to perform.

Maybe that is the actual lesson. Not every friendship can hold the weight of an actual life. Some can only handle the version of you that is on time, responsive, and easy. The one who answers quickly. The one who shows up on cue. The one whose emergencies never interfere with anybody else’s expectations.

That is a lonely thing to find out.

But it is also clarifying. Because once you realize a friendship feels like work instead of comfort, and like something you have to manage instead of just live inside, you stop trying so hard to win it back. You stop mistaking emotional demand for depth. You stop arguing your case to people who have already written the verdict.

I think I know now what I did not want to know before: some people do not really want the truth of your life. They want a version of you that keeps proving they matter.

And I am too tired for that now.

If you’d like to contribute to my caffeine funding, you can buy me a Nespresso pod. It’s substantially cheaper than coffee at Starbucks.

Buy me a Nespresso pod

Some of you are new here (thank you!), so I wanted to share a few posts that give a sense of what I write about.

I wrote a novel, You Seriously Don’t Want to Know, and I’m currently seeking literary representation. I’ve shared the first chapter here, along with a few stand-alone chapters I posted to get feedback.

You Seriously Don’t Want to Know, Chapter One The opening chapter of my novel. https://www.ejdonovanbooks.com/p/the-dog-the-street-and-the-sky?lli=1

I Chose This Life? A personal piece about trying to make sense of life, grief, and some of the terrible things that happen in it. https://www.ejdonovanbooks.com/p/i-chose-this-life?lli=1

I Didn’t Want to Talk About It A piece about childhood grief, and about something I did as a kid that stayed with me. https://open.substack.com/pub/katekara/p/i-didnt-want-to-talk-about-it?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=179nz2

I also write observational pieces drawn from my life, memory, and the strange connections my mind makes.

Take a Bow About feeling foolish for believing people who were clearly performing all along. https://www.ejdonovanbooks.com/p/take-a-bow?lli=1

The Sympathy Card A letter to a friend of fifteen years who lied to me, watched me lose my job, and then sent a sympathy card when my stepmother died. I threw it out. https://www.ejdonovanbooks.com/p/the-sympathy-card?lli=1

Ode to Chuck A letter to the boss I worked for for seven years, who had me train his girlfriend as my backup, then gave her my job and let me get laid off without hesitation. https://www.ejdonovanbooks.com/p/ode-to-chuck?lli=1

The Cleaning Lady A piece about first-world problems, misplaced emotion, and the strange way grief can attach itself to people without warning. https://www.ejdonovanbooks.com/p/the-cleaning-lady?lli=1

Was It Really About the Wasabi Peas? A piece about being a total Karen at the office, first-world problems, and the absurdity of a corporate machine that can handle transactions in milliseconds but can’t keep almond milk stocked.

https://www.ejdonovanbooks.com/p/was-it-really-about-the-wasabi-peas

If any of these sound like your kind of thing, I’m really glad you found me.

Buy me a Nespresso pod

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Buy me a Nespresso pod

When Sarah Stern disappeared, I became obsessed with what had happened to her. It was close to home. The places they were talking about weren’t abstract to me. I walked them. I knew them.

Let me start from the beginning.

I walk three to four miles a day. We live in a shore town, so I’m usually on the boards, but sometimes I take side streets for variety or to find a little shade. One Saturday morning, I was out walking and there were helicopters all over the Shark River. The Shark River separates Avon from Belmar, and there’s a bridge I walk over all the time.

I remember coming home and asking Patrick, “Any idea why the Coast Guard is all over the inlet?”

We didn’t find out right away. But the next day or two, there were search boats in the river under the bridge. Divers in the water. That’s when I heard a car had been left on the Route 35 bridge and they thought it was a suicide.

Being a way too empathetic person, I felt it immediately.

Later I learned the girl was nineteen. Her name was Sarah Stern. She lived in Belmar. My nephew John was nineteen too. He was at Monmouth University, about twenty minutes from me. I could not make sense of it.

Then I saw videos of her online. She was funny. Happy. She looked like someone with her whole life ahead of her. It made it worse. It made it impossible for me to accept that she would just decide, in one moment, to jump.

The story kept growing. The car on the bridge. The idea that she might have gone to Canada. The money she had come into. None of it added up.

At some point, it stopped being about her.

It became about the bridge.

John used to come over a lot. He would get out of his dorm, away from his roommates and swim practice, and just hang out with us. We would order food, he would play with Zee, and tell us what was going on in his world.

After everything happened, I had this very serious conversation with him. It probably sounded like my Uncle Paul when I was young. Too intense. Too direct.

I asked him if he could ever imagine a moment where he would want to jump off that bridge.

He said things were hard sometimes, but no.

And I told him, completely seriously, if you ever feel like that, call me. I don’t care what time it is. I will come get you. I won’t tell your mom. I won’t tell Patrick if you don’t want me to. I will hide you. We will figure it out.

Yes, I am a little dramatic.

But I meant every word.

A few months later, he texted me and said he was thinking about the bridge.

I didn’t hesitate. What do you need. Do I need to come get you.

He walked it back a little and said maybe he was overreacting. He just needed to get out for a while. So I picked him up, took him to dinner, and we talked, but not in a way that pushed him. I didn’t need details. I just needed him to know I was there.

He told me he was tired. He missed his family. He didn’t like his roommates. Swim practice and classes felt like too much. He didn’t even know if he wanted to be there anymore.

I told him no one was going to force him to keep doing something that made him miserable. He was nineteen. He could choose something else. Just because something looks like the right path does not mean it is.

He left after his first year.

Now he works for his town. He is a volunteer firefighter. He married another volunteer firefighter. He is happy.

And one day, after a particularly bad day at my old job, I told him I was thinking about the bridge.

He didn’t hesitate.

What can I do. I will hide you. I will come pick you up right now.

I told him I would be fine.

But he meant every word.

Buy me a Nespresso

I couldn’t explain it. I still can’t. At some point, I realized I wasn’t talking myself down. It didn’t feel like my voice. It felt separate. Not loud. Not dramatic. Just there, like something stepped in when I couldn’t hold it together on my own.

When I started actually writing things down, it became harder to ignore. Every memory I avoided, something was already there. Not fixing it. Not changing what happened. Just softening it enough that I could stay in it.

When I felt alone or betrayed, when it felt like everything was working against me, there was something that kept me moving. Not a pep talk. Not pressure. It felt closer to love. Quieter. Steadier. Like a hand on my back.

I don’t know what it was. I still don’t. I just know I didn’t stop.

I didn’t mean to write Kevin. He wasn’t part of the plan. The plan was to write what happened and keep it grounded. Kevin doesn’t follow that plan. He shows up anyway.

And at some point, I stopped trying to make him.

I still don’t know if I created him or if he found me.

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In the winter we barely saw them, but Ahole never fully disappeared. He’d text, casually, about how we should really come into his office in the city, how lapses in treatment were “problematic,” how insurance companies needed continuity and justification. Suddenly there was talk of X-rays we didn’t need, urgency that didn’t exist, all so he could keep billing through the winter and maintain the fiction that the house next door was a place of business. It was never framed that way, of course. It was framed as concern… professionalism… doing us a favor.

He volunteered his services at beach volleyball tournaments too — hands everywhere, goodwill on tap — funneling people back to his house for adjustments. They didn’t have insurance, so I assume their co-pays looked a lot like ours eventually did: a handle of Tito’s, a case of beer. Ours, for the record, were officially fifteen dollars. Unofficially they ran closer to thirty, plus garbage cans, mail pickup, house watching, snow shoveling, sidewalk clearing, and — in the early days — even lawn mowing before we finally hired a service. The favors didn’t replace the co-pays. They stacked on top of them.

Big J was a study in contrast. She slept late — ten, eleven — while Ahole was up at the ass crack of dawn, claiming he couldn’t do anything until she was awake. She handled the weeding and gardening, a devoted tree hugger in both ideology and practice. Getting out the door took over an hour, every time: hair, makeup, the whole ceremony. Nature mattered deeply to her, as long as it stayed curated

.

Their side yard had an old fountain that never worked. Ahole talked about fixing it the way some people talk about quitting drinking or learning Italian — always one day.

Ahole’s superiority complex didn’t stop at chiropractic care. It bled into everything physical, everything communal — especially volleyball and mountain biking, the arenas where he liked to position himself as benevolent gatekeeper. He talked constantly about “levels,” about who was serious and who was just messing around, about form and fundamentals and how most people never really learned them properly. When Gino, John, and Patrick played what he called “crappy volleyball,” he’d say he might include them sometime — include being the operative word — as if participation were something he could grant or withhold. It was always framed as generosity. It always landed like judgment.

Mountain biking was the same. He spoke about trails the way some people talk about private clubs, dropping names and difficulty ratings, casually reminding everyone how long he’d been doing it, how much better his gear was, how most people didn’t really understand the sport. He never said outright that he was better than everyone else. He didn’t have to. It was embedded in the way he explained things no one asked him to explain, corrected people mid-sentence, and offered advice that felt less like help and more like a reminder of hierarchy.

Mountain biking finally cracked the façade. One time John actually went with him — a real outing, not one of Ahole’s theoretical superiority lectures — and Ahole fell. Twice. Couldn’t keep up. The terrain didn’t care about his gear, his experience, or the way he liked to narrate himself as an authority. John came back amused more than anything, quietly processing the mismatch between the man who talked endlessly about skill and the man who couldn’t stay upright. Later, deadpan, John said maybe they should do some crappy mountain biking next time so Ahole wouldn’t fall. It wasn’t mean. It was observational. And it landed because it reversed the hierarchy Ahole worked so hard to maintain.

What made it worse was that this condescension was inconsistent — selective. He could be charming, expansive, even fun, right up until the moment someone failed to meet whatever internal standard he’d decided to apply that day. Then the warmth disappeared. The tone shifted. You were either being managed, corrected, or quietly excluded. It took a while to realize that the friendliness wasn’t a baseline — it was conditional.

That’s the thing about people like that: they don’t dominate through overt cruelty. They do it through access. Through approval. Through the constant suggestion that proximity to them is a favor.

The breaking point came over a tree. A weed tree, really — something that sprouted from an acorn or a seed and never belonged where it landed. It sat on our side of the property line, unhealthy, buggy, dropping leaves into our yard and shading our driveway in ways we didn’t want. One winter, Patrick’s brother was visiting and offered to take it down. We probably should have asked first. Instead, we texted to let them know. They sent laughing emojis. I think they thought we were joking.

We weren’t.

The next time they came down, it all exploded. Ahole yelled at Patrick, furious, insisting he had no right. Big J — normally slow-moving, measured — looked like she was about to burst an artery. Kara and John were there, witnesses to the whole thing, and John, bless him, said, “Your house looks so much better without that ugly tree.” Big J snapped back, full volume: “SHUT UP, JOHN.”

That was the beginning of the end.

Eventually we slid into avoidance. Not dramatic, just polite hellos if we happened to be outside at the same time. Then even that felt like work. We changed the Wi-Fi password too — no announcement, no confrontation — just quietly cut off the freeloading. It felt symbolic. Small. Necessary.

Once, after a particularly significant snowfall, we didn’t shovel his sidewalk. Patrick had hurt his back — the irony was not lost on anyone — and his chiropractor neighbor was, unsurprisingly, unavailable. When Patrick ran into him later, Ahole said, completely straight-faced, “What, did I forget a copay or something?” He wasn’t joking. He eventually asked the other neighbors — both in their seventies — if they would shovel for him so he wouldn’t get a ticket. Watching that happen was the moment any lingering obligation evaporated.

After that, we stopped pretending. No hellos. No eye contact. Just parallel lives on the same block. Patrick, however, still wouldn’t let me park in front of their house, which somehow made the whole thing worse. We were estranged, not at war — but he still obeyed the imaginary rules.

While we were away once, Ahole told our dog walker that our dog barked a lot. She looked at him and said, deadpan, “Yes. Dogs bark.” End of conversation. I loved her for that.

We saw them coming and going but never spoke. And then one day, without consciously deciding to notice, we realized we hadn’t seen Big J in a long time. Sometimes Ahole had her car. But she was gone. Weeks passed. Then months. Then maybe a year. Instead, a different woman started showing up — different car, staying over.

Big J, who used to talk endlessly about how swans mate for life, had vanished.

We started joking, because what else do you do, that he’d killed her and buried her in the backyard of his other house. It was just one of those ridiculous theories my brain creates when something feels off and no one can provide real information. But the absence lingered. No Big J. No gardening rituals. No hour-long hair-and-makeup exits. Just an empty space where a person used to be, and a man next door who behaved as if nothing at all had changed.

Eventually I asked the seventy-year-old neighbors where Big J was. This was after weeks of Googling her name and scrolling obituaries late at night, half expecting to find proof and half hoping not to.

They told me she had died. An apparent heart attack.

That was the phrase. Apparent.

There was no obituary. No notice. No public marker that she had existed at all. Which felt on brand. Ahole, being Ahole, hadn’t paid for one.

There was no service that we knew of. No flowers. No cars lining the street. Just absence, confirmed.

A woman who once took an hour to get ready to leave the house vanished without leaving so much as a paragraph behind.

I didn’t know what to feel — relief, guilt, discomfort, some mix of all three. The jokes we’d made stopped being funny retroactively. Whatever else she had been — rigid, sanctimonious, exhausting — she was still a person. And now she was gone.

What stayed with me wasn’t grief exactly. It was the strangeness of how easily someone can disappear when the person left behind controls the narrative — or chooses not to tell one at all.

What unsettled me most wasn’t just how completely Big J vanished. It was how quickly she was replaced.

Not emotionally — practically.

Another woman appeared, then stayed. She drove a different car. She occupied the same spaces. Eventually she was in the garden pushing Big J’s wheelbarrow, possibly wearing her work gloves. I even saw him teaching the new woman to ride a bike once. She looked terrified.

Big J had always handled the weeding and planting, her quiet domain, the thing she cared about most. And now he was out there instructing someone new, as if the role itself mattered more than the person who had once filled it.

The continuity was seamless. Too seamless.

It wasn’t grief I saw.

It was logistics.

I didn’t think he was mourning. I thought he was managing.

And sometime around that same period, the old fountain in their side yard disappeared.

He dismantled it quietly — no announcement, no ceremony — and either got rid of it or moved it to his other house. I didn’t see where it went. I only noticed that it was gone. The side yard looked cleaner. Emptier.

Only later did it occur to me that things that no longer served him had a way of quietly vanishing..

I have a cleaning lady, and by most reasonable standards this should be the end of the story. She is kind, hardworking, and raising her daughter alone because ICE deported her husband. Every two weeks she shows up with a helper or two and, in about an hour, my house goes from looking like it was recently inhabited by wolves to something resembling civilization again. She doesn’t complain about the German Shepherd hair, which is impressive considering I own two German Shepherds and I’m fairly certain they shed their body weight every three days. She uses bleach, everything smells clean, and the house looks great when she leaves. She charges $100 to clean roughly 2,500 square feet of house, which, if you know anything about cleaning services, is basically robbery in reverse.

I realize this is a first-world problem and am actually disgusted with myself for this emotional turmoil. Why can’t I just be grateful and shut the fuck up?

So you would think this is where the story ends. A hardworking person does a great job at a bargain price, tolerates piles of dog hair and barking, and everyone should go about their day happy. Unfortunately, I come with baggage.

Part of the baggage is practical, and part of it is emotional. The practical part is that every single time she comes it is wildly inconvenient, and I hear myself saying that and immediately feel like someone who should probably cut her hair into a helmet and start yelling at teenagers in Target. The problem is that she comes while I’m working from home. Before she arrives, I have to declutter the house so that she can actually clean it. That alone takes several hours because my house seems to function as a staging area for dog toys, baskets of laundry in various philosophical states of existence, mail piles, kitchen clutter, and clothing that has entered the mysterious “in-between” realm where it is not quite dirty but clearly cannot go back in the drawer either.

Once she arrives, I have to move my laptop into the bedroom so she can clean the office. This means abandoning the giant monitors I can actually see and trying to do my job on a laptop screen the size of a Pop-Tart. The dogs, who normally follow me around like furry security guards, have to be locked in the bedroom so they don’t bark nonstop at her helpers, who are afraid of them. The whole thing only lasts about an hour, but during that hour the universe reliably schedules chaos. Someone on Teams suddenly needs something immediately. A meeting I forgot about pops onto the calendar. UPS arrives and needs a signature. A Walmart delivery appears. The dogs urgently need to go outside, the kitchen floor is wet, and I suddenly need to use the bathroom like I just drank unfiltered water in Mexico. Right now, to make matters more ridiculous, our porch is being renovated, so I have to sneak in and out through my tenant’s entrance like I’m escaping a crime scene.

Buy me a Nespresso pod

All of this sounds ridiculous even as I say it out loud, which is why I keep telling myself to get over it. But the truth is that the logistical chaos isn’t actually the main problem. The real problem is the emotional baggage she unintentionally carries with her every time she walks through the door.

She was recommended to me by Trish. If you have read my post “The Sympathy Card,” you already know who Trish is. If you haven’t, the short version is that she worked with me for fifteen years and apparently decided that warning me I was about to be erased from my job would have required too much emotional effort. So every time the cleaning lady shows up, there is a small voice in the back of my head reminding me of that connection.

Then there is Zee.

Zee was my soul dog. She was the sweetest German Shepherd you could ever meet—one hundred and five pounds of loyalty and quiet dignity, with a bark that could make strangers reconsider their life choices. Her helpers were afraid of her, which meant when they arrived I would lock Zee in the bedroom. One day when they showed up, I was helping Zee climb onto the bed. Her front legs suddenly gave out. She yelped, cried, and everything went sideways from there. I sent the cleaners home, called my husband, rushed her to the vet, and she never really recovered.

Now let me be clear: I DO know this was not the cleaning lady’s fault. I know that Zee’s health had already been declining and that the timing was simply terrible. Rationally, I understand that the two things are not connected. Emotionally, however, my brain still sees her walk through the door every two weeks and thinks something much less reasonable.

You killed Zee.

Of course she didn’t. She is a hardworking woman trying to support her daughter while tolerating an amount of German Shepherd hair that could probably be spun into winter coats. She likely has no idea she’s starring in a psychological drama inside my head involving workplace betrayal, grief, and a dog who deserved to live forever.

To make matters more complicated, I recently realized that she had mentioned to Trish that my mother died. That explains the sympathy card that appeared unexpectedly in the mail. For a moment I thought my one remaining friend from that company must have told her, and I almost didn’t believe her when she said she hadn’t. Eventually it dawned on me that the information probably came from a Portuguese-to-English Google Translate conversation with the cleaning lady. It was probably innocent conversation, not malicious at all. But it meant that once again Trish somehow had access to my life.

And now I find myself in the ridiculous position of wanting to fire a perfectly nice cleaning lady who works hard, charges very little, and does an excellent job cleaning my house. My husband refuses to even consider it. From his perspective this woman is a miracle. She arrives, cleans the house, and he comes home to a gleaming, dog-hair-free environment. He does not experience the laptop exile, the Teams chaos, the locked dogs, or the emotional flashbacks. He simply sees a clean house.

Which means that somehow my cleaning lady has become a minor sore spot in my marriage. The worst part is that deep down I know I’m being a little bit of a bitch about it. Not entirely—but a little.

Because the truth is that she didn’t betray me, she didn’t fire me, and she didn’t hurt Zee. She is simply the unlucky person who happens to be standing there when several painful memories collide. Every two weeks she shows up with her mop and her bleach, and I try very hard not to blame her for everything else in my life that still hurts.

There’s an old Madonna song I heard about a month ago that I can’t stop thinking about. Most of her music never really hit me in the soul, but this one did. Not even when it first came out — I probably liked it, but I didn’t really listen. I didn’t understand it.

It’s “Take a Bow.” It references Shakespeare: All the world’s a stage.

Something about that won’t leave me. The performance of people. The masquerade. Lines delivered on cue. Applause where there shouldn’t be any.

The love wasn’t mutual. The loyalty wasn’t matched.

How many people in my life were performing? More than I’d care to admit.

Part of me thinks I’m a fool for believing people. Part of me is just disgusted that anyone could be that cruel. Not just to me — to anyone. If someone did this to Patrick, or Kara, or my dad, even Wanda, I’d lose it. I’d go to war.

But when it’s me, I stand there like I’m watching it happen to someone else. Like I can’t quite believe it’s real.

“How was I to know which way the story goes?”

Apparently I should have known. Before they fucked me over royally.

I was there eight years before my boss even started. I knew the company. I knew the culture. I knew the landmines. When he came in, I helped him get acclimated. I watched his six.

And the other one — the one whose husband died — I knew her from the beginning. She supported me. She recommended me for the role to help him. I was there for her when her husband was dying. I was there after he died.

I gave everything. I’ll keep your secrets. I’ll save your ass. I’ll protect you when you’re not in the room.

And what do I get?

Judas friends. Volunteering me for the cross for the cost of a job.

And I asked. Repeatedly.

This wasn’t one person. It was four deep.

Was the whole seven years a performance? Pretending you liked me. Pretending I did a good job. And the other fifteen — was that just convenience? You aligned with me until it no longer served you.

And the one I trained — I taught her everything she knows about that job. She struggled. Needed constant help. I stuck with her anyway. Then she takes my job. No apology. No regret. Not even a goodbye.

The show is over. Say goodbye.

All the world is a stage. Everyone has their part.

How was I supposed to know where the story was going?

Patrick says I’m not supposed to say that out loud, but it’s not like I go around kicking strollers. I just... don’t like them. Especially little girls. High-pitched voices, nonstop questions, constant stickiness — it’s like being trapped in a nightmare with glitter glue and juice boxes.

Babies? Even worse. Everyone lies and says babies are cute, but most of them look like angry root vegetables. I’ve seen my baby pictures. I was not cute. I looked like a disappointed potato in a frilly dress.

We talked about having one once — me and Patrick. Briefly. I think I panicked.

I imagined doing 100% of the work while Patrick went fishing. Patrick has the weakest stomach of anyone I ever met. If he had to change a diaper, I’d end up cleaning up his vomit. You can’t wake him up when he’s sleeping — he physically CANNOT function. Even if he was willing to contribute, it would end up being more work for me.

And if the baby turned out to be a girl instead of Patrick Jr.? Forget it. I could see it already — the tantrums, the barrettes, the inevitable pink glitter explosion. I’d be stuck for 18 years with someone who hated me for not letting her get bangs.

If I could have given birth to a puppy, I would’ve.

German Shepherd. Female. Already housebroken.

But then there was John.

He wasn’t mine, but he might as well have been.

John was different. John was effing adorable. White-blond hair, giant blue eyes, porcelain skin, and a sense of humor that cracked me up even at four years old. He was sweet, curious, a little weird — my kind of kid. Not loud, not sticky. Funny in a dry way. Like he’d been here before and didn’t love it the first time.

Once, Kara and Gino went to a Yankees game and left him with us for the night. Patrick told John he was “going down” for a nap and John thought it was the funniest thing in the world. The more Patrick said it, the harder he laughed — until we were all wheezing and crying, and the nap never happened.

On Thanksgiving, I used to put him in the turkey roasting pan and pull him around the kitchen like he was on a Macy’s float.

He called me “Ba.”

Still does.

He is, to this day, the only child I’ve ever wanted to be around on purpose. I love him with my whole twisted, dog-loving heart.

He is the sole exception to the “I hate children” rule, which I still stand by.

If someone hands me a baby, I panic.

But if John calls me, I drop everything.

So no, I didn’t have a kid. And no, I don’t regret it.

But if I could’ve had John?

I might’ve actually signed up.

Zee was the bigger dog. It was in her nature. That was why I loved her so much, and why it broke me so much to lose her.

So let’s talk about the smaller dog.

Literally and figuratively, Diana is the smaller dog. Seventy pounds is not a small dog, really, but every other German Shepherd we owned has been larger.

And Diana cannot walk away. From a disagreement, from a fight, from a threat, from another dog, for her own fucking good. She will not do it. Ariel bites her face at least a few times a week. Do you think she runs and hides? Of course not. She charges at her, trying to knock her down off her three legs, which of course makes Ariel go after her even more.

Diana is piss and fire and will die trying. And as much as I loved Zee for not being that way, I love Diana for exactly that reason. Nothing will get her down. You will never take the fight out of her. Until you knock her unconscious, she will use every iota of her energy to get what she wants—or doesn’t want.

Diana usually succeeds, too, with cuts on her face, scabs on her ears, sometimes a random wound we find on her neck later, but she doesn’t fuss about it. She is doing what she wants, no matter what anyone says.

I’m not sure what Zee and Diana would have thought of each other, but somehow I think they would have figured it out. It was like Zee knew what the universe had in store for her, and she accepted it wholeheartedly. Diana is still trying to figure out if she even likes it here, and is fighting to make things the way she wants them to be. Both are actually quite noble.

Zee never needed to prove anything. She already knew who she was. Diana is still fighting for that certainty, and maybe I am too. Zee taught me how to be the bigger dog. Diana is teaching me something else

.

One day when I was walking with Zee, another dog across the street decided he didn’t like her. He went absolutely ballistic—barking, growling, standing on his hind legs while his owner tried to wrestle him back to earth.

Zee gave a surprised half-bark, like, excuse me? and looked at me for direction.

I told her to sit, and she did. She always listened to me.

“Be the bigger dog,” I told her. “Don’t let him ruin your walk. It’s a beautiful day. You’re with your mommy. You don’t even know him. Who cares what he thinks? Maybe he’s just having a bad day.”

She sat there calmly while he lost his mind.

That dog gave me more epiphanies than most people ever have.

How many times has someone barked at you for no reason and you let it ruin your mood? A stranger in a lobby. Someone at the grocery store. Someone who ignores your good morning like you personally offended them by existing. Or, if you live in Jersey, gives you the finger and asks what’s so fucking good about it.

Or someone at work who doesn’t like how you answered an email, or spelled their name, or booked their travel. You fix it, because that’s who you are. You learn, you adjust, and you move on.

But some people don’t bark because you did something wrong. They bark because that’s what they do.

Being the bigger dog is realizing you don’t have to join them. Their noise isn’t yours to carry. You can let them have their moment while you keep walking.

Zee didn’t escalate. She didn’t take it personally. She just stayed beside me, steady and calm, like he was nothing more than background noise.

And eventually, he was.

Then I entered what can only be described as the world’s most over-engineered elevator system.

Six different banks of eight elevators. You type your floor into a kiosk like you’re booking a flight, the machine assigns you a car, and still — somehow — half the people ignore this and just jump into whatever elevator lights up with their number. The result is a crowded metal box that stops at approximately ten floors on the way, with strangers breathing down your neck like we’re all late for the same very important, vaguely unhinged cult meeting.

I finally make it to my floor, heart rate elevated, patience thin — and there is no line for the coffee machine.

Score.

I line up my cup and lid like I’ve done this a thousand times. I press the button. And that’s when I see it — the blinking orange light. The universal corporate symbol for: this is broken, and we will not explain why.

Fine. I pivot. Water it is.

As I ride the coffee-only elevator back down, one thought nags at me: did anyone actually report this, or are we all just waiting for the next snack reconnaissance mission — the sacred daily pilgrimage to refill the wasabi peas container?

Because the wasabi peas are eternal.

Nobody eats them, yet they are religiously topped off (like the hand sanitizer), as if persistence might eventually convert us. They feel less like food and more like an office rule no one remembers agreeing to.

Today when I left the office, the container was empty, which felt almost suspiciously hopeful. I pictured some caffeine-deprived renegade finally snapping — dumping the whole bin into a trash bag and hoping their sacrifice might bring literally any other snack.

By 8:45 a.m., my email to the Workplace Experience powers-that-be already contained an unholy trinity of corporate complaints: a Code Brown in the first stall, a broken coffee machine, and my growing resentment toward the eternal wasabi peas.

Somewhere between the Code Brown and the blinking orange light, I could feel her forming — the office Karen. Not a monster, not a tantrum, just a woman who noticed things that were broken and couldn’t NOT say them out loud.

One minute I was a reasonable adult; the next I was Kate-from-the-35th-Floor, emailing about no almond milk, a broken coffee machine, and bathroom emergencies, wondering if the price of “free snacks” was turning me into an entitled Karen.

All of this while the 38th floor (I was told) — the promised land above us — apparently lives in a nut-filled utopia. People drift up there like pilgrims. Nuts, gummy bears, M&Ms — a full-on snack paradise.

Down on 35, we get wasabi peas and granola, day after day, as if no one eats them because no one wants to clean the container, so it’s easier to just keep topping them off.

So I’m stuck bouncing between two thoughts.

On one hand: this is ridiculous. I am a grown woman spiraling over snacks and almond milk. I get paid; I can buy my own effing snacks. Why do I feel so ungrateful?

On the other: this is a company with tens of thousands of employees and a global logistics machine — and yet, somehow, almond milk at its own world headquarters keeps running out. A firm that can track a transaction across continents in milliseconds cannot, apparently, keep almond milk in a fridge on the 35th floor.

So I’m left wondering if this is really about wasabi peas at all.

I thought I was done. I wasn’t.

For a while, my book was an active being in my life.

I was writing every day. Living inside it. At one point, I genuinely thought Patrick was going to divorce me. I was completely in it — feeling everything as it hit — and it honestly felt like it had to come out. Everything I had been holding in for decades poured onto the page, and that doesn’t happen without reliving it to some extent.

When I finally decided it was done — that I needed to stop tweaking, editing, circling — I missed it.

I missed writing every day.
I missed using every spare moment to get it finished.
I missed the way the past and the present stayed in constant conversation.

It felt a little like losing a friend.

Eventually, I stopped rereading pieces every day and shifted into the strange, quieter phase of sending it out into the world — hoping someone would see what I see in it.

Yesterday, I received deeply thoughtful feedback from someone kind enough to read the whole book. And it pulled me right back inside.

When I think about the book being finished, I feel relief — that I survived the telling of it — but also the sense that it marks a line in my life:
before writing the book and after writing the book.

I carried this for decades.
I got it out.

It isn’t solved. I’m not healed. But I pulled it out of the dark and into the light.

Survival may be the truest resolution the book offers — not just surviving what happened, but surviving the act of telling it. Letting others witness what I’ve been carrying.

And it has been heavy.

There is no closure. There will never be closure. This is a witness’s account of grief, pain, and humanity — not a story that ties itself shut.

There isn’t an answer that would ever resolve it.

My mom, Zee, and Kevin live in my heart — and I believe, in my soul — but there is an agony in longing for them to be real, here, physically with me.

Love with nowhere physical to go.

I want them here.
I want them physically here.
I want the weight, the sound, the presence — the interruption of ordinary life.

I want to walk in the door and hear Zee crying and spinning in circles, deliriously happy to see me.
I want my mom in the kitchen telling me I need to eat something, singing to my dad.
I want Kevin to be my real brother — someone who knows me because he always has.

And if I were offered the chance to live in the timeline where that was real — where they were all still here — I would go in a heartbeat.

I’m not grieving the events as much as what never got to unfold. The life that should have existed. The family that ended before it could really begin.

Kevin would have shared everything with Kara and me — our parents as witnesses to who we were becoming. Another person who would have truly known us. That thought makes me feel warm and hollow at the same time.

Somehow, I was given the capacity for deep attachment. I’m pretty sure that was my mother’s doing. Love doesn’t weaken with time. It just loses its place to land.

Some losses aren’t puzzles.
They’re landscape changes.

I can’t solve this. I can only learn where the cliffs are and build a life that doesn’t pretend they aren’t there.

My heart longs for the family that knew me before I had to become strong. That was home.

This is where I live now.

And still — I find myself wanting the universe they are in.

Buy me a Nespresso pod