Yeah, so it’s been 513 days since I wrote a word here. To tell you the truth, I had run out of them.

We’ve had a line of losses in recent times. The first and worst blow was the sudden devastating loss of my only child. Then my brother, after a horrendous experience with stage four lung cancer (he never smoked). Then the shocking sudden death of our beloved brother-in-law, who was very much a brother. Then my mother’s long lasting suffering from what began as colon cancer ended with her passing in December 2019. 

Grieving takes so much work. I mean to tell you that losing a child is something that you have to face with all your might. Nothing in the world is harder, nothing takes more energy, more strength, more resilience, more flat out fucking courage. 

But it takes a toll. It is work. It might as well be digging potatoes with a spade in the hot sun for 18 hours a day. Lifting, carrying and stacking 75 pound bags of rice in 98% humidity from first light to last. It takes that kind of physical toll.

And that doesn’t even touch the emotional toll. The psychic cost. The desperate search for understanding, for answers to unanswerable questions. The “What if I had done…” thinking, the “Why didn’t I see…” accusations. Trying to find a way to have life make sense again. The effort it takes to find a reason and way to move forward when your main purpose in life has vanished. 

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And you have to understand that the loss of Blaine was immeasurable. He was such a special soul. I’m not interested in trying to convince you. I just ask you to believe me if you didn’t know him. If you were lucky enough to really know him, you don’t need more evidence. His gracious presence is reflected in the photo here, which is not edited by a filter or trick of light. That is just the glow that he gave off into the universe.

I’m still doing this work. I don’t see how it ever ends. The subsequent losses add to the task list. Oh, Curt, I wish I could talk to you about this! Dave, I just finished a book I know you would love. Mom, I finished that quilt I started last time we sewed together! Why did you leave?? Where did you go??

I work so hard to remember things, resurface experiences and feelings, put all the pieces of the story in order. Blaine, what year did we go on our Chicago trip? Remember how we couldn’t use the L??? The US history trip? What year was the World Chess Open in Philadelphia? Blaine, remember that crazy night and morning in Hershey, Pennsylvania?! How much we laughed every time we reminded one another? Was that when we made our motto “We’re not on vacation, we’re on an adventure!!”

Those conversations are monologues now. It’s so lonely. Sometimes I think I need to write them all down. But why? What’s the point? Who would care?

I can’t decide. There isn’t enough room left in my brain to sort it all out. I can sit here and go over and over the same questions in my mind hour after hour, day after day, and weeks later I am appalled at my lack of progress. 

The closing up and cocooning that came with Covid exaggerated everything. But it made me see we have made progress after all. As it turns out, the North Beach is the perfect place to pandemic. The variable sounds of the ocean are both exciting and reassuring. The changes the sky goes through where a continent and ocean meet are exhilarating. The trees have become my steady companions whose presence heals me. I wish we were nicer to them.

Moving to a brand new place where you don’t know a soul when you’re 70 is a challenging thing to do. But the pandemic has shown me how many wonderful friends we’ve already made here because I miss them so much. We are still newbies but we’re starting to feel we fit in. And that’s a healing thing.

I think we’re developing a sense of belonging. I’m beginning to understand that the work of grief is finding a way to belong when things that belong go missing. 

My wish for now is that we truly belong on the North Beach.