Two Years. 730 Days.

Two years. 730 days.

That is how long my brother Steve has been gone. Gone. Not here. Still present. Not fully gone.

I still remember that day with a crystalline clarity I kind of wish would fade. Steve had been in the hospital for a little over two days at that point.

Sitting at the Shedd Aquarium with my sister and Oliver watching the dolphin show. Booking a ticket back to Maine at Liz’s encouragement so Mom and Dad wouldn’t be alone.

At the Field Museum. Walking through the Sue/T-Rex exhibit with Oliver. Text message. Steve is gone. Upper level of Field Museum, calling funeral home. In case you are wondering, cell service is not great inside that behemoth of a building.

That day is set in stone for me. Immovable in its own way.

But what followed, what follows, is this evolving mix of memories and presence and healing and holes. Steve had this laugh that I can still hear like he is next to me. It was beautiful and full of life. It lives still. Somehow. In ways I still cannot fully apprehend.

He was one of the most intelligent, gentle, curious humans I have ever known. He loved his people (especially the small humans!) with a generous, extravagant love. I so wish he could see them now, the not so small humans they are becoming.

I miss my brother. I feel his presence – even if I don’t know how to explain it – in so many cracks even still.

And yet.

I find myself living in spaces where the norm is often to choose business over the humans, to choose efficiency over the messy, beautiful reality of relationships. To choose individual security and freedom over the dignity and thriving of another. To choose one’s own comfort and preference over genuine connection and community.

And yet.

I long for the authentic, extravagant love and curiosity Steve embodied. I long to live it. To give it generously, wisely, freely, whole-heartedly. I long for the joy that filled his face and exploded when he laughed. For me. For us.

Two years. 730 days. Today. Life is too short. Too dear. I do not want to waste a single moment.

Reflecting on my 50th year

On December 20th, 2021 I officially started celebrating my 50th year. For over a decade I have deliberately celebrated the whole year on the fives (my 40th year, my 45th year, my 50th year…you get the idea) complete with a theme and all. To understand why I began this experiment you have to go back to a curb in the suburbs of Portland, OR in May of 2009.

I was visiting my dear friend Liz Colligan and we were sitting on the curb watching her boys play. I started to “share” (a.k.a. complain, whine, bemoan) about the challenges of getting older when my life didn’t look the way I thought it would. One of Liz’s best gifts was her ability to speak truth with searing eloquence and love all at once. And in that moment she lit into me.

For context, I came to visit and sit with my friend because she knew, we all knew, that her wrestling with breast cancer was coming to an end even if wasn’t quite done yet. There were no more treatments, no more options. And she said to me in that moment that she would give anything to grow old.

To watch her boys grow up.

And right there on that curb, while my heart broke for the loss I then only anticipated fully knowing, I vowed I was done complaining about getting older. I was going to figure out how to be content with, and maybe one day even celebrate, whatever my life held in the moment.

So began this grand experiment of challenging the assumptions of what I thought my life was supposed to look like. I celebrated my 40th year by doing things I had never done. That first experiment was almost all discipline, with only slivers of joy and growing slipping in through the cracks.

 I celebrated my 45th year spending time with people who were dear to me. That year was filled with really hard things (my brother’s cancer got dramatically worse, a job I loved came to an abrupt and unexpected end…). And yet.

 And yet it was a year filled with dear ones who loved me extravagantly and beyond reason. It was filled with growing and letting go and finding a deep rootedness. And it was filled with joy.

 For my 50th year, I decided I would celebrate by saying yes to every adventure that came my way, big or small. And it has been the best experiment so far! The specific adventures were awesome. But learning that there is still possibility and the unexpected, in the company of dear ones, has been a gift I didn’t even know to anticipate. There has been joy and fun and solitude and community.

 And there is hope. Hope that this is just the beginning. Hope that I am continuing to become a more authentic, joyful, kind, open, brave version of the person I’m meant to be (see the caterpillar blog for more on this). I can see that woman sitting on the curb full of angst and grief over what wasn’t going to be. And there has been loss and hard, hard things over the years in between. But there is becoming and growing and adventure even so. And I am learning, even still, to count it joy to grow.

 To grow older, grayer, wiser.

 To grow. To become. To hope.

A verbal birthday card that won't get heard - 3.16.2022

Years ago I led a small group and one night I forgot a birthday card for one of the girls. That night the verbal birthday card was invented. Each of us told the birthday holder what we appreciated most about her. It became a powerful tradition of marking the day of a dear one’s birth by naming the gift that they were. It was awkward and vulnerable and beautiful and intimate all at once.

Steve would have been 43 today. All day long I’ve had this strange longing to speak a verbal birthday card to him, to tell him what I loved about him. What I love, what I miss, still.

I loved how he loved grand surprises. Like showing up at Disneyworld unannounced. Like being Santa. Even when it was no longer a surprise because he did it so often.

I loved his heart for justice, for the oppressed, for the refugee, for the marginalized.

I loved that he could engage deeply and thoughtfully on everything from educational theory to justice to theology to Brandon Sanderson.

I loved that every time he quoted a movie or show it ended up sounding like Jimmy Stewart in “It’s a Wonderful Life”.

I loved that he could get my mom to go on road trips for the sole purpose of being able to listen to an entire Harry Potter book on CD rom.

I love that every time the small humans saw him, from the time they were tiny, they would yell ‘STEVE!!!’ and run to hug him. They never said his name quietly and they didn’t walk.

I loved celebrating his birthday with dinner at Greek Islands that always included calamari and Arni Fournou (and mine at Wishbone).

I loved that every 4th quarter of a school year he would have his 5th graders do five-chapter dissertations complete with hypotheses and literature reviews.

I loved that he willingly read and edited my dissertation drafts ad nauseum, making me a better thinker, a better writer, a better practitioner. I would not have ended up the second Dr. Kafkas without him.

I loved how whole-heartedly he loved those who were dear to him. He so loved the small humans (and the grown ones) and they loved him back in equal measure

I’m not generally the sentimental sort. But today I am so very grateful for the gift of knowing him. All day long I found myself reflecting on the extravagant gift I have in the dear ones that fill my life. Steve is still teaching me to pay attention to what really matters, to the humans. To recognize and celebrate the gift. To not wait for a less busy moment, to not get distracted by the noise. To do it now.

Grief is weird

Grief is weird. Such an unpredictable, winding road. This isn’t my first journey on said road. Yet it seems the mercy is that the memory of the switchbacks along the way dulls in the rearview mirror. I know that my experience of this road will move and shift around the next corner. But for now, from this vantage point, what I know is the hole that is left. Absence. The loss of what won’t be.

Three different times this last week I went to call or text my brother Steve. Only to stop myself at the last minute when I remembered, remembered that he is gone.

My brother died 75 days ago.

I have impressively held it together these last 75 days (she says sarcastically). Dealing with services and estate details and the things no one else wanted to handle. Even getting a tattoo in his memory. Not losing it once.

Then this last week happened. Texts left unsent, one-sided conversations. Fantasy Football drafts. And me in tears, missing my brother. Exhausted in every possible way. Losing it, finally, it seems.

If only there was a way to navigate through grief and loss other than through the beautiful, sacred, necessary messiness and uncomfortable vulnerability of it all!

the distance between who we are & who we're becoming

Today my mom posted the following on our family WhatsApp chat.

“Flatten the curve” sounds like a new YMCA fitness program!!

Now those of you who know me, know that the Y has been both my vocation and my job for over twenty years now, it is the organization and people that have grown me up. And my mom is no stranger to the Y either. She has been a member of her Y in Maine for over four and a half decades now. Sometimes I think she gets the Y better, more deeply than I do. She will call me after a visit to her Y and give witness to the beautiful, inspiring, entirely mundane and yet wholly sacred moments she has seen. She sees the possibilities of what we, the Y, not the building, but you and me, what we can become and do as if it is the most real thing there is.

So when she said “flatten the curve” is the newest Y program it got me thinking. Now for the record of history, I write this as we as a country have entered into an unknown land. Schools are closed, restaurants are closed, we are working from home and social distancing in an effort to stop the racing spread of a virus for which there is no cure. Today Ys across the country closed their buildings, for now there are no group exercise classes in the gym, no kids learning to swim, no community being nurtured over coffee in our lobbies. And we are left with the question of who we are when there are no doors to open.

So back to “flatten the curve”. What if in doing our part to flatten the curve we relearn what it means to be be a movement, a collective force for good that meets needs, not because it is convenient but because it is necessary?

What if this is one of the moments for us as an organization where we become, yet again, what we were meant to be all along?

And I don’t wonder this lightly. Because I have come to know, in the deepest part of who I am, that becoming is always costly. It always demands loss and the sacrifice of comfort. And yet…

And yet…this becoming also brings brave, collective leadership. It brings ingenuity and grit in the face of very real danger (read COVID-19!). It brings a deep, steady knowing of who we are.

Here’s what I’ve decided. I don’t want to wait until we are through this to begin to become this. What if while we are all doing our part to collectively flatten the curve of this awful virus we chose to flatten the curve between who we are and who we might become? What if in all of this, we learn to care for one another as if your dignity as a human means as much to me as my own? What if through all of this, we decide that the well-being of the least of these means more to us than our individual freedom and comfort? What if through all of this, we become the community we have been longing for?