You Probably Don't Know Who I Am

I do, actually. And she loved you very much.

March 2022

Tomorrow marks a month since my snow globe was vigorously shaken and thrown against a wall. It has been both the longest and shortest month of my life. And I have to say that being hopelessly disconsolate, eternally grateful, and endlessly loved, is an exhausting speedball of human emotion. I have found some comfort, however, in one particular form that I wasn’t expecting.

Immediately after she passed, I started getting contacted by friends and family members of Kara’s that I don’t know personally. Perhaps I know of them - recognize their names from the occasional “like” or comment on her Facebook page. But oftentimes I know who they are through Kara’s tellings of childhood memories, work stories, or tales of reckless young adult abandon.

Mostly, they’re reaching out to offer condolences or support. For which I am grateful. But then if their name sparks the memory of a Kara story, which it often does, I recount it for them. It has now become a near-daily occurrence for me to communicate a humorous, loving, or otherwise positive memory of them, to them, almost as a proxy for Kara.

And while it might sound like a kind or generous thing to do given what’s on my plate at the moment, in actuality, I’m getting a lot from these interactions. To start with, having the privilege of providing her loved ones with some ease or semi-closure, even if only in the smallest of degrees, is a wonderful feeling. As if in a way I’m helping her to give some fond farewells that she wasn’t afforded the opportunity to do herself. Which gives me a little something I can warm my hands to.

But it also regularly goes both ways. They might tell me that since Kara and I got together that it’s the happiest she has ever been. Or how much she truly loved me or was proud of me and what I’m doing with my career. And it’s those sentiments that seem to be about the only things capable of hanging a sun in my sky right now. So I’d be lying if I said that hasn’t been just as much of a reason for these communications as any perceived acts of altruism on my part.