When someone at work would ask me where I was going for vacation, my answer never really sounded too enthusiastic. As the time got closer and closer to the trip, I found myself having to come to terms with why I was not as enthusiastic as I probably should be to be going to Seattle for a week. This would be my first real, non-work related vacation that I have gone on in well over a year. We would be staying with Amani for the first half of the trip, a person I love with as much heart as I have left in me. I love the Pacific Northwest. I should have been vibrating with excitement to be there. The Sunday before we were to leave, I sent a text to Amy because I knew she’d be the only one to understand this particular hesitation.

The last time I was in Seattle was with Chris and we were happy and life was great and we were still friends with the couple we were staying with in Seattle. What if I run into those people?

“Those people” refers to a couple we were friends with who turned out to not be good and honest friends. I am still furious with the two of them for how they treated Chris, who played a minor yet innocent part in their melodramatic marriage woes. Even though Seattle is a big place, I worried about the awkwardness of seeing these people. Amani lives in the same suburb as them and even though the chances are slim to none, I was still feeling anxious. I was also contending with memories of Chris and I gleefully exploring downtown Seattle together. We both considered this to be our first real vacation. Previous trips were either camping or bargain getaways to Vegas. We had starting thinking about traveling to the places where we might want to live one day and Seattle was at the top of that list. We spent hours talking about how we wanted to visit this place and now we were finally doing the thing. All of my memories of us are bright, technicolor images of us smiling at the camera, smiling at each other, smiling at everything. Ridiculous, painful, joy. Now I was going back to the city that started the quest for a new place to live, with a new family.

Synapses were about to be re-mapped.

There is an act in the play Almost Maine about a woman who has travelled to Maine to see the Aurora Borealis. She sets up her tent in an open field that belongs to a man named East. He comes out to ask her what she thinks she’s doing camping on private property. She’s surprised by him and his questions because she’d read somewhere that people in Maine let hikers camp on their property. She explains to East that she’s there to see the Northern Lights because it is believed that the lights are the spirits of the dead walking with torches to heaven. Her husband has just died. She’s there to see him off and say a final goodbye. During her exchange with East, they keep passing a paper bag back and forth and every time it leaves the woman’s hands, she gets distraught. The bag contains her broken heart. By the end of the scene, East dumps the bag and begins the process of fixing it.

This is the play that Michael has chosen for his students to perform in the Fall. When he chose it, he asked me to read lines with him, which swirled up a hornets nests of feelings of the countless hours reading lines with Chris. The day we left for Seattle, Amani sent us a text about the possibility of seeing the Aurora Borealis and I thought about that scene and what it would be like to see those lights. Though, after being up for almost twenty hours, neither of us were up for a midnight excursion to hunt down the Aurora. So our first day in Seattle was spent lounging and recovering at Amani’s. I sent Michael and the Cabbage out over the next two days to explore Seattle without me, while I stayed with Amani. She was hosting a grief camp, Grief Out Loud. While Michael and the Cabbage did a lot of the things that I did on my first visit, I sat with my grief and bonded.

One of the last activities Amani had us do was to write a letter to ourselves from a person we are grieving. It was the kind of activity that made me look at Amani and tell her “I hate this.” It was so easy for me to write pages and pages of a letter in my own voice about how disappointing I am without Chris. I could go on and on about how I’ve done everything wrong, how I am the absolute worst, a failure. Instead I sat there with my composition book (the kind that Chris seemed to always have an endless supply of) and tried to hear Chris’s voice. What would Chris have to say to me now? I thought about his generous personality and that there was a reason why everyone loved him. In my letter, I allowed Chris to speak kindly to me. He didn’t tell me I was doing everything right. I couldn’t be that kind to myself, but I did allow him to tell me that he understood the choices I have made. There was a condoning of my choices.

I am always with you.

Love, Chris

I ended that letter and put a lid on my grief. Michael, the Cabbage and I left Amani’s for a condo in downtown Seattle. We spent the next two days doing all the touristy things that Chris and I didn’t do, like travel up to the top of the Space Needle. We went to museums and on a boat tour of the harbor. Raw fish was consumed daily. We walked many many steps and talked about what it would be like to live there. This is a discussion I’ve had with Michael every time we’ve visited the Pacific Northwest, a discussion Chris and I had thousands of times.

Some things change but some things don’t.