Marco looked up at me confused. “Michelle?” he asked.
“Ah, no, sorry, it’s under my husband’s name: Michael.”
When you’ve intertwined your life so thoroughly with another person, and then they disappear off the face of the earth, you always have to be ready for a jump scare — at the DMV, on the phone with insurance, or when buying performance gear for a month-long hike.
It was a deserted Tuesday morning at REI, and I had just been shopping for my upcoming Scandi pilgrimage, 2.0. Moments before my thoughts had sounded something like, should I have gotten these t-shirts in a large instead of a medium? Could I really count on the tiny no-spill containers to, well, not spill? How much weight would this add to my pack?
The twenty-something checkout clerk, his forest green vest clashing with his Hawaiian shirt underneath, scanned the see-through bottles and Patagonia tees.
“Oh, look, you have $67 in points. Wanna use them now?” Marco asked.
“Oh, that’s a lucky break! Absolutely!”
“I won’t tell Michael if you don’t,” Marco said with a wink.
“It’s our little secret, Marco. Pinky swear?” I tee-hee’d.
“Michael would see an email receipt, do you want me to print it instead to keep our secret safe?” he cracked.
“Brilliant idea! Yes!”
We belly laughed, delighting in a moment of conspiratorial connection, pulling a fast one on unsuspecting Michael.
Who would have thought, ten years ago, that this would be my life?
Marco doesn’t know Michael is dead. I didn’t tell him. Why would I? It was a perfect little moment: warm, funny, completely ordinary. And although I’ve had conversations with other REI clerks about loss (mostly in the shoe department), poor Marco did not need his own jump scare at the beginning of his shift. Plus I don’t want to alert corporate REI that I’ve been piggy-backing off a dead man’s member number for a decade. They might take my points!
My late husband, non-earthbound as he is, is woven into my days in a fashion that baffles my black-and-white thinking. He’s not here, so, you know, he shouldn’t be here. But he’s everywhere. His name on the REI account. His password on our movie streaming service. His picture on my office bookshelf. Loss is strange that way. It doesn’t erase people, it just changes where they live.
Driving home with my bag of loot, I kept thinking: this is not how I pictured loss going. I could never have imagined it would be like this. Not the convo I just had with Marco. Not the pilgrimage. Not the book I just published. Not my new work family at Experience Camps for Grieving Kids. Not the Treehouse I was steering towards. Not the ways Mike likes to wink at me from the other side.
Not any of it.
We think loss makes the future unknowable, and we’re not wrong. But so does almost every other change or decision.
Think about it. When we embark on the journey to parenthood, we commit our entire life to a child who doesn’t yet exist. But we do have a picture in our head: maybe they’ll have my husband’s sky-blue eyes or love Tolkien’s books or swim the 1650 just like me. Then this actual human arrives, with deep green eyes, strong negative opinions about swimming, absolutely zero interest in reading, and you think, oh! This is who showed up. And within about ten minutes, you can’t imagine anyone else. The picture you started with is completely beside the point.
We do this all the time. We pick colleges based on brochures and a whistle-stop tour. We switch jobs for the promise of career advancement or a better work environment. We move cities, believing a different climate or culture or commute to work will improve our lives. All of it a leap toward something we cannot actually know. And somehow, we call that normal.
But the other side of loss? That we treat as a special kind of murky darkness. Or, if we do picture it, we see a smaller, weaker, more unsure version of ourselves. Someone beaten by the game of life.
Not someone giggling with Marco at the REI.
We’ve always taken these leaps into the unknown, loss is just more like a shove than a jump. But there’s still possibility on the other side of it all. I couldn’t have pictured the life I’m now living in my worst moments, nor my best ones. It arrived because I kept moving forward, stubbornly believing that, just like the college freshman or new associate or out-of-state transplant, this future had something to offer me.
We think we’re planning — with the dreams and goals and timelines — but we’re mostly inspiring ourselves. And while we should keep doing all of those things, don’t be surprised if you end up somewhere you never saw coming. Because the truth is, our imaginations simply can’t keep up with all the possibilities available in this technicolor reality called life.
Like I said, I’m starting to pack for another month-long walk across Scandinavia. The intent of my first pilgrimage back in 2024 was to walk off the final dregs of my grief. Instead, it ended up being a return to parts of me that got buried during the grind of adulthood: the voracious reader, the insatiable learner, the patient, content observer. Grief, that sly fox, brought me home.
Truthfully, I have no idea what I’m going to find this time around. But I’ve learned that doesn’t matter. I don’t have to know where I’m going to keep moving forward.
Looking forward to whatever I find,
P.S. I’ve made another video for the Loss Canon: The Books that Got Me Through. If you’re into books and/or videos, you can watch it right here:
I haven't read an essay from you in a while, but I'm glad this was my first one back. Really resonated with a lot of it and this one quote in particular is SO real.
"Loss is strange that way. It doesn’t erase people, it just changes where they live."
If you haven’t found this Substack, you might want to add it to your grief canon. https://thefarewelllibrarian.substack.com/p/stop-all-the-clocks?r=r2ej&utm_medium=ios