Part III: A handful of glitter

I honestly don’t recall what our early exchanges were about. I know that the later ones were often quick exchanges about grief precipitated by something I had seen, read, or heard. Lyrics from a song. Quotes. Things which, to me, just telegraphed an understanding.

Our conversations were episodic and usually brief. We went stretches without talking. I paid no attention to their length or frequency. Our relationship was just a buffet table I was happy to keep open if they were ever interested in filling a plate.

At one point a few years ago, my friend started to develop an interest a birds and then in photography. As I may have mentioned a time or ninety, I happen to be borderline obsessed with each of those two pastimes.

So, I threw out the idea of getting together to go for a bird walk sometime. They live in an area with eagles and osprey and all kinds of other things to see. It sounded like fun to me. A pastime I liked. A person I liked. A nice way to spend an afternoon with someone getting into the hobby.

My friend didn’t seem to have any interest in taking up the proposal.

I thought nothing of that. I wasn’t bothered by it. I didn’t take it personally or see it as a statement about our friendship. I just took it as an offering made to a person with batteries compromised by grief and understandably managing finite energy.

I had no expectation their answer would change at some future point. Frankly, it didn’t matter to me if it did. If we were to be online friends only lightly acquainted and occasionally in touch, that would be fine. If that acquaintance was a net-positive for them in what I knew was a hard walk loaded down by full pails of mercury, I would be delighted to be a part of it.

Being friends with someone wounded by a deep loss is to understand that a gerund has been formed. A gerund is when a verb becomes a noun - like the word “grieving” in the phrase “grieving mother”. The “grieving” isn’t a verb; it is a noun. It is a state of being not an action.

Together with “mother” the two nouns form a compound noun - grieving mother to describe who a person is now.

I think people who are grieving deserve to be surrounded by people who accept them unconditionally in that compound form. That is who they are. It isn’t a transient state between who they were and will someday be again. It is who they likely will be evermore to some degree. I think they deserve to be accepted in the fullness of that person transformed.

So, the two of us, this friend and I… we carried on this online acquaintance over years. At one point, we did a Zoom call or two to talk about something computery; we moved from DM to texts but often still DMed. We’ve texted sparingly.

Then, a few months ago, after some conversation over text, she invited me to an event.

It was scheduled for yesterday.

I was touched. I felt honored. To me, it reflected a trust that, for me in that position, would be difficult to extend to people. After disappointments and additional hurt caused by people who were trusted, I would have a hard time widening my circle to new people. Instead, I would likely pull that drawstring tight around me until it had little room for even people who hadn’t given me reason to keep them outside of it.

Over the course of our online acquaintance, it has been important to me to be worthy of that trust. The invite made me feel good. Whether attending came to pass or not, the invite itself made me feel good.

Separately though, I also thought the extension of it had been of a moment. It had been offered at a moment in time. Per all of the above, forward plans to the grieving are commitments to expend energy. I would have thought nothing of it if as the date approached, it wasn’t something my friend had wanted to see through. Opting later to not do so would require no cancelation. I treated it as tentative pending revisiting later maybe. I didn’t even put it on my calendar.

And then it crossed my mind and slipped it again for two months.

About a week ago, my friend reached out via DM in a group message to a few of us reiterating the invitation.

The event was a performance to be held by the students of the CREC Ana Grace Academy of the Arts.

It is named for Ana Grace Márquez-Greene.

My friend is Nelba Márquez-Greene. Ana Grace’s mother.

Some of you may know her from Twitter. I adore Nelba.

The invite was to come to the school and attend the performance with her.

I replied saying I needed to just confirm childcare - which I then quickly did.

As the beginning of this week rolled around though, being fully forthcoming with you and honest, I thought about canceling.

I know, I know… you are undoubtedly thinking “What. The. Actual. Fuck? Did you not just write all of the above.”

I know.

The last couple weeks have been such a clusterfuck though. They have been a running array of obstacles which are amply evidenced by this being the first thing you have read from me this week. I am so behind. And that mounting backlog has been weighing on me with a somewhat excruciating and constant nag.

Going to the event would require a fairly long drive each way – and that, therefore, would probably require breaking up the two legs with an overnight in between.

If I were to not go, I would have a solid stretch of time from Wednesday through this morning uninterrupted to dig out and write and finish something or multiple somethings for y’all.

I thought about it. Considered it. I mean, I really didn’t have the time, did I?

However, when our batteries aren’t compromised by a diminished capacity from something like grief, it isn’t that we “don’t have the time” for things. While there might not be enough time to fit in everything, we choose what fits and what doesn’t. We make time for the things that matter to us. To cancel, would be to choose to have this not fit - to choose to have it not matter enough.

And truth be told, to me, in terms of personal importance, it was THE priority around which other things could either fit or not. It was the priority for my day yesterday. For my week.

I didn’t cancel.

Then, having both confirmed and committed, I planned on driving up Wednesday to stay somewhere nearby. The event started at 9:30 yesterday. I’d be close upon wakeup; and then I’d drive the few hours home after. But then things went a little sideways on Weds and I ended up staying somewhere with still most of those three hours of driving between me and the school.

So, yesterday morning, I got up with the sun and made the trip.

It was a drive made with a heaviness of import. Not a somberness. An importance. A trip to a visit with a significance of meaning.

When under that kind of weight, I like driving. It gives me time to consider it, Meditate on it. It positions me to receive the experience fully.

On the way up, I thought back to a time back before the school had been built. There had been some kind of ceremony. A groundbreaking or dedication or pouring of the first concrete. Nelba had posted pictures of it.

Those kinds of events are always sort of soaring and aspirational. They are about what a place is to be… the impact it will have... the good it will do... the ways in which people will be helped by it and their lives bettered and changed.

The two of us talked briefly after she posted the pictures. I knew that the majority of the comments would be about how touching a tribute the naming of the school was; how nice it was to be honoring Ana Grace in that way. They would be about the construction of a memorial of sorts.

Imagining myself in Nelba’s position though, it seemed to me that while all of that was true and kind and nice to say, the experience of the ceremony itself would leave me with a sort of joyful ache. When someone is in grief over the loss of someone beloved, for every ‘with’ there is a ‘without’. For every joy there is ache. For all of the swelling heart-full happiness of a ceremony at a bare field upon which a school will someday sit, there is a drive home without that person in the car.

For all of the positive, the healing, the comfort found in the making of your child’s legacy lasting and visible and physical in something you can see and touch and visit, someday there will also a ‘without’.

Someday, in a gleaming performance space, there will be neat rows of folded chairs set up on a light pine floor sealed beneath urethane and then painted with a logo bearing your child’s name. The room will be full of parents. You will be one of them. But unlike the others, your child’s name will be on the building and not inside the program.

It was that thought that was on my mind for much of the drive. The joyful ache. The ‘with’ and ‘without’. It occurred to me that, if it were me, the balance between those two – between the joy and ache – would depend on where I was at that moment. How heavy the ache. How able I was to feel the joy even in the presence of it.

This was to be my first visit to the school. It would obviously not be Nelba’s. She has been there often. She is active in supporting the faculty and staff and teachers. The importance of the place and the sensation of visiting it is different for her for both the most obvious and important reason but also, to much a less important extent, due to her having already walked through those doors many times.

I had been thinking about it from the perspective of someone walking in for the first time awake to the full emotional weight of the place’s existence. But I was heading to meet someone I knew but hadn’t met for whom the place is now familiar and more than mercury.

As Nelba explained, she had wanted to attend the performance and had invited a handful of people to join her because it was her birthday and the school is where she felt Ana Grace most.

The performance was lovely. Little kids dressed in costumes singing and dancing and playing instruments. Children of five and six and seven with all of their precocious perfectness. The one in the leopard-print who had the dance number down cold and stepped through it with panache and flair. The little boy who either forgot the steps or froze and stood there unmoving until a teacher sidled up close enough for him to lean into her side and take her arm. It was adorable. All of it.

Afterwards, we took a tour. It is a breathtaking place. It is a polished and beautiful edifice of steel and glass. The halls are basked in a full sunlight pouring in through windows that look out over fields and grass and trees. It is a place made pretty by beautiful design.

Inside though, that is where its specialness really lives. There is a singularity of spirit. The administrators and teachers share a sense of purpose. It hangs in the air, palpable. You can literally feel it. It is a vapor. A cellular respiration. It is exhaled by educators and students in a place staffed by good people with good hearts committed to doing going things for children who deserve the gift of all that.

The school serves a regional population. Many of its students come from disadvantaged homes in disadvantaged, underserved areas. The school is an oasis of sorts. It is a shining place set among the wide green of a Connecticut field bordered by old growth trees. It is a place of learning and growth and development for 818 children - some of whom arrive from outside lives less healthy and nurturing.

After the tour, Nelba said something that stuck with me for much of the ride home. She was talking about having initial trepidation about naming the school after her daughter.

“I am very picky about what my daughter’s name is used on.”

There is a full subtext to that statement which I had never even thought about but understood in a bolt from just that line.

After tragedies which were very public, there is a rush of often well-meaning efforts to honor the memories of the people lost. The naming of things. Memorials. The commissioning of events in their name. Fundraisers. 5K’s and charity walks. Foundations.

To the people on the other side, they are often – but not always – earnest attempts to remember and honor the person lost. Sometimes, they are exploitations. Usurious attempts to leverage a person’s memory to play on public empathy to get attention or make money.

In all of those cases though, the parent, in this case, Nelba, suddenly has to not only manage their own grief but also be a sort of gatekeeper and guardian of their child’s legacy. The preservation of it. The ways in which it can be made to live on in a form that is true to who they were. Their spirit.

The joyful ache… if it is to have any joy, it will come from the ways in which the very best of your child was somehow made to live on in some new living form.

This school. It does that. It joyfully does that.

The people tasked with building the school took to the assignment as custodians of a spirit. The people who now tasked with running it and working in it fully embrace the task of carrying on the spirit of the six-year old girl whose name is stenciled on the performance space floor and whose face is painted, smiling, in a mural in the library.

They have done that. They are doing that.

Combined with the population the school serves, it is a place where young lives are truly changed in ways both visible and not.

A few years ago, I sent Nelba a song I had heard. In it, the singer describes grief as being like glitter.

It gets everywhere.

It does.

It gets everywhere.

It can’t be vacuumed up and no matter how much time passes, there will still be speckled little particles in the threads of rugs and cracks of wood floors. When the light and viewing angle are just right, you still see them. They glint and reflect and remind.

Grief is like glitter. It gets everywhere. That is true.

But it is also true that grief is the memory of love.

Those glints - those tiny particles which are made briefly as bright as stars by rays of light - they are also reflections of love. They are reminders of its existence. They are a comfort of sorts that it still exists and continues and persists.

When Nelba said she wanted to be at the school named after her daughter on her own birthday because it is where she felt her most, I think it is because of the endless twinkles that are just everywhere in the place. The students themselves carry the glitter on shirts and pants and costumes. They whisk the particles up into the air with their voices and laughter and music.

It is a special place.

On the way home, I was thinking about all of this. The day. The visit. My friend. The experience of her life now a compound noun.

Grieving mother.

I thought about what that must be like and what it would be like for me to visit the school in that position. How I would feel about the place.

I can tell you, for me, it would feel like a cathedral. A place of comfort and peace and calm. A place where I was at peace even in sorrow. It would be a place where no matter how heavy the burden of two pails of mercury balanced or not across my shoulders, I was, for at least that moment, at rest in the presence of a spirit that I remember for the way it twinkled and shined.

I could sit there on a bench in the halls for hours just listening to the life of the place as the afternoon sun dipped low enough to shine almost horizontally through the tall glass. From that angle, the air stirred by movement of students would sparkle with light upon glitter.

That is how I imagine it would feel for me.

Last night, Nelba posted a picture from one of those halls, the light streaming, her dwarfed by the soaring wall of glass fronting the building on one side and the wall of polished wood on the other. She is smiling and looks happy and was. I am so very glad for that.

Last night, she texted me to say that my presence was a gift. I replied that to be present was a gift.

It was.

It was something precious and special. And now it is something cherished which I will carry and long remember. It will be like the taking home of a small amount of that glitter.

It gets everywhere.

It is the memory of love kept alive somewhere.

Sometimes, we take it with us on our clothes and skin; and then, when the light hits it just right, we see it and remember too.

Yesterday was special.

It was a gift to be present.

[One closing note: Yesterday, during our tour, we stopped in the library. It is a beautiful room tasked with serving 800+ students. Nelba mentioned having been offered a fee to speak somewhere and agreeing only if the party agreed to instead donate the money to the school to populate the library shelves. They agreed. Still, there are shelves that could fit a few more books and room to add a few more bookcases. I have no idea how many people will read this but if even a fraction of us donate even a few dollars, we could fill those shelves, those bookcases. To help make that possible with me, people interested can donate to the Ana Grace Project.

A direct link to the donation page: https://www.paypal.com/fundraiser/charity/3537132

A link to the organization’s full page: https://anagraceproject.org/ana-grace/

Thank you for reading. This was important to me.]