A young woman stood in the doorway of my office, her face pale, her breathing ragged.  She stared at me without speaking.

“What?” I said.  “What is it?”

“Colleen is dead.” She whispered. 

“Eh?? How? When??

Colleen had not reported to work that morning and her supervisor had been trying to reach her.  Calls and texts had gone unanswered until he reached her husband who gave him the news.

Colleen had been working for the company for a little over a year. I had little professional interaction with her since she was in a different department, but as the human resources manager, I tried to get to know everyone on the floor.  I chatted with her regularly.

I gathered management to fill them in and figure out how to tell the others that we started gathering in small groups to offer them some quiet to process and the usual corporate America platitudes and the number of our EAP.  The office has never been so silent. 

How could this be, after all?  Colleen was at work just yesterday.  She was FINE.  A group of people from her department had texted each other during the evening because the commute had been icy.  She told them she had shoveled a bit but was going to sit down. “I’m that out of shape LOL” she wrote. 

She would sit down and suffer a gastric aneurysm.  Her husband, an EMT, was on a shift and wouldn’t return until morning, when he would find her dead body on the sofa.  She was 31 years old.

Thirty-one-year-olds don’t die alone on a snowy evening.  Colleen was a girl yet newly married, sweet, almost innocent.  She loved animals, posting photos of them online, rescue charities, pictures all over her cubicle.  When my cat died, she drew me a card and made everyone in the department sign it. I have it posted in my current office in memoriam.   She wore leggings at Halloween with jack o’lanterns and black cats.  At Christmas she was a walking tree, tinsel drifting behind her.    A newly married woman, she was keen that everyone find love. Promising to find me a date, she smiled gleefully.  “I’m on it!”

We went to her funeral as an office.  Her devastated parents, Irish immigrants, weeping as they walked behind Collen’s coffin.  Her husband, still too numb to emit any emotion.  Since the office remained open with a shoestring crew, we all hurried back, still raw, red-eyed, hugging coworkers we rarely spoke to. 

“Makes you think,” someone remarked.

“Yup.  Life is short”

“You never know.”

“Gotta appreciate every moment.”

The platitudes kept coming.  Well-meant, but empty, as we search for a meaning to such tragedy.  We grasp at what can make sense of it, what can make us more comfortable, because the notion that life simply IS, with no inherent meaning or purpose, seems too hard to bear.

“You all say that now,” sniffed an older sales guy.  “Tomorrow you’ll forget and nothing will change.”

People shrugged complacent agreement and returned to work.  I walked to my office, shut the door, and wept.

I wept for Colleen too sweet to be gone so soon.  For her husband, for the trauma he may never recover from.  For her parents, living with a pain I never want to know.  Mostly, however, I wept for us, the remaining.  For our loss, not so much of Colleen, but of the meaning of her life.  That we were so quick to abandon the attempt and move on.

Colleen, I promised, I will try to honor your life as best I can.  I’ll be kinder to my dog.  More patient with people who move slower than I should like or think differently than I think.  I’ll be less dismissive, less hasty.  I’ll listen, really listen, completely and actively, holding that space for anyone who has need.  Moreover, I will remember that every moment is sacred.  Every single moment.  I can give my days meaning, whatever that meaning may be, whether it is acting in the service of others or renewing my own depleted stores.  It’s less about what I do than how I do it.

Have I been successful over the nearly ten years since her death?  I’ll give myself a passing grade, maybe 70%.  Far from perfect, but perfection was never the goal.  Each time I falter, I remember her gentle spirit, get up and show up again as best I can. 

I’m on it, Colleen.

Years ago, I was in an online chatroom on AOL – that’s how far into the past it was.  A group of newish parents had formed an email group to share experiences and offer support at a time when a new mother could feel very isolated.  I had made several good friends and had introduced a friend from my real life into the mix.  Most of the participants were women, but there were a handful of men including the friend I had brought on board.  Jamie had been a college pal with whom I had reconnected in the early days of internet searches.  He was funny, gentle, the sort of guy women called harmless.  All women were nice ladies in his book, worthy of respect, even admiration.  Certainly he managed to see my better qualities at times, frequent in those days, where I saw only lack.

He was a good guy and a better friend.

He and I were chatting online back in those AOL days when another friend joined us.  She was one of the moms from the parent group, Lynn, a tough-talking 40 year old from Queens NY, generous and sharp, with a tongue like a successful bookie.  THe three of us bantered for a while, and at some point, Lynn called me a bitch  I don’t recall the context, but I’m sure some iteration of the F-word was included.  This was normal, however, just how we talked, she and I.  It passed without notice.

Then, after some tart remark from me, Jamie typed, “oh shut up, bitch.”

“Whoa” both Lynn and I sent simultaneously.  “What??”  Jamie asked genuinely confused.  He had done nothing wrong, nothing different from Lynn. He meant nothing different;  he was just being “one of us girls.”

Except he wasn’t one of us and for that reason alone, his words had an unintended sting.  A slap that both Lynn and I felt instinctively.  

That wasn’t his fault, but his actions regardless of his personal intentions hae the additional load of history.  Of years of misogyny.  Ta-Nehisis Coates in his book, The Message, wrote in reference to whiteness and other concepts of historical supremacy:  “Without your consent, you are complicit in a great crime.”  I felt that in my soul when I read it and felt it for Jamie at the time.  He couldn’t understand the impact of those words in the context of hatred and violence that we as women sense so viscerally.

Thirty years later, I watch videos of an ICE agent shooting a woman in her car.  The videos are everywhere, from multiple angles, with multiple explanations.  In my algorithm, there is mostly outrage over the killing of this young white mother, who is nearly the same age as I was when Jamie jokingly called me a bitch.  She had dropped her children at school and landed in an immigration raid somehow.  By purpose?  I’m not sure.  Nor am I sure it matters. We have the right, no the obligation, to help our fellow humans in distress, surely.

She sits in her car, jawing at the agents along with her wife.  Suddenly several masked agents surround her, trying to open her car door, moving around the front of the car, gun drawn.  She backs the car up slightly, turned the wheels to the right and tries to pull away.  

The agent fires three times into the open window.  

THe car speeds off then and crashes into a car parked to the side, its driver mortally wounded if not already dead.

Then in the agent’s own video, we hear him growl, “Fucking bitch.”

His POV video was released as an exoneration.  He was terrified, fearing for his life as she wielded her SUV as an immanent threat.  The poor man had previously been struck and dragged by a car and was traumatized.  He was rammed, wounded, racked with pain.

He might have sold that too, except that “fucking bitch” belied every other word expressed.  

That was the fucking bitch of a man in fury, not pain.  That was not the breathless gasp of someone in fear or the exhalation of relief for a life spared.

That was the Fucking Bitch of a man scorned.  A man whose frustration had been slated, who had gotten a little of his own back.  

That Fucking Bitch wasn’t his first.  He’s said it plenty of times before.  He said it when the high school girls turned him down.  When some woman at a bar didn’t smile back or accept his offer of a drink.  When he was up for a promotion and the chick with the big tits got the job instead.  In those two words, he sums up half the world’s population.  

For me those words once again hit hard.  But also for me, only a slap, not three bullets to the face.  

Making this solely about misogyny is to diminish the scope of the cruelty of this administration which cuts deeper than gender or ethnicity or skin color. It’s a vision of a world articulated by power, a world as Steven Miller puts it: “that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.”  In his world, those with the power act with plenary authority, with absolute immunity, answerable to only their own sense of morality.

In a movie I watched with my kids as a young mother like Renee Good, A Bug’s Life, the lead Grasshopper tells his minions about the ants they are terrorizing “”You let one ant stand up to us, then they all might stand up! Those puny little ants outnumber us a hundred to one and if they ever figure that out there goes our way of life.”  

Mr. Miller might do well to heed that warning.  For surely we the people, do outnumber them.  Don’t we?  We who want to live in a world of global cooperation and interdependence.  We the people who want a world of peace, liberty, equality, who want to welcome the tired on the Statue of Liberty, the hungry that need to be fed.  The voiceless.  The everyman.  Time for all of us ants to stand up.

Many years ago, I dated a guy who was taking salsa classes.   The group would occasionally visit a small local dance club to celebrate everyone’s progress. Lest anyone be left out, the class had agreed on a certain protocol, a line-up as it were.  You would dance with one partner, then move to the next in line at the music change.  When my friend would see that a particularly less than graceful partner was next in line, he would take himself out of the queue and get a drink or walk off towards the restrooms.   Why would you do that, I had asked, picturing the partnerless dancer standing awkwardly on the floor.  “I don’t dance with the tough ones” he replied.

That response pierced me, drew a little blood.  Indeed, we did not continue to date for much longer after that – not because of the remark exactly but certainly due to his acceptance that such is a good way to live.  Maybe it is.  It is for him.  I sense however that I am resolutely numbered among the Tough Ones.  Certainly I related much more with the hapless salsa ladies standing along the periphery awaiting his welcoming hand.  In his defense, he may have felt that his ability to lead such a dancer would be duly hampered to no one’s benefit or enjoyment.  Additionally, the rejected partner had ample opportunity to find another more aligned or even sashay off by herself, salsa convention be damned.  

Sometimes we can defy societal norms, face the cold wind of rejection with courage.   Even the tough ones however aren’t always so tough underneath. 

I see all around me many of these tough ones.  I work with the elderly, so many of whom are sick and struggling with few resources and even less support.  Their friends have died off and their families are busy or worse, have written them off.  Often there is evidence of the behaviors that may have led to the loss of familial affection.  Modern psychologists especially of the social media variety often commend adults for cutting off their toxic family members.  Protect your peace, they exhort. We are admonished to treat people in the manner that they treat us, give them their just desserts.  

How terrifying.  What is it that I deserve?  What do any of us deserve?  What if no one ever danced with the tough ones?

My first job after university was teaching at a tiny private Catholic school.  The students came from mostly middle and upper middle class families that were more involved than not.  Nevertheless there were always those students who struggled be it academically, socially, emotionally.  The principal of the upper school was an tall imposing former nun named Liz who despite running a school continued to teach one or two classes every year.  She always took the lower level history classes, never the honors or college placement levels that the other administrators taught.  In many ways, those are the easier classes, smaller and populated by motivated students.  When asked if she’d like to take on one of the honors courses, she always replied, “No thanks, I like the fringe elements ”  

Liz danced with the tough ones.  She moved with them, bent when it was necessary, employed fancy footwork to motivate and inspire.  It didn’t always work and plenty of toes were probably squashed, but she cared about every one of those kids and they loved and respected her in return. 

It’s easy to see children as deserving care even if they can be difficult.  How much harder is it to give to those who perhaps do not deserve your efforts.  Maybe it is less about what people deserve and more about what we want to give into the world.  The same guy who wouldn’t dance with the tough ones called me several months after we broke up.  We had ended on very reasonably amicable terms despite my feeling the sting of rejection.  He needed favor that would require me taking a little time off at work.  It wasn’t like there were no other options for him although they would have been far more burdensome.  I thought about refusing, knowing if I asked anyone, they would have immediately told me to do just that.  Don’t be ridiculous, they would say, he doesn’t deserve your help.

I did it anyway.  Not because I’m so special or because he was particularly deserving, although neither was he particularly undeserving.  But because that is who I want to show up as.  I want to be the person you can call on when there’s no one else left.  When you’re in a bad spot, when it’s going to be awkward.  Even when we aren’t all that deserving of someone’s care, because that’s what grace is.  Grace is when someone shows up when you’re not all that deserving, when you’re difficult or avoidant.  Grace is about dancing with the tough ones, because there are moments when we are all of us the tough ones.  

“You don’t understand, “ he said.  “It was my dream and it’s over.”

The drunk bespeckled college boy swayed at my doorway, a tiny Swiss army knife in his hand.  To what end, I thought hazily, having been awakened from a deep flannel-clad sleep.  I squinched my eyes against the bright hall lights at Jamie the now dreamless fellow student with whom I had gone to the campus movies several weeks prior.  We had watched The Right Stuff, a movie about the early space program.  At 18, I was purposefully disinterested in the space program and astronauts and frankly Jamie. 

“I’m never going to be an astronaut!” He sobbed as he poured himself into my room.  “Did you really think that was an option?”  I was cranky at being disturbed, my brain awake enough to be logical but not yet capable of tact. “I mean, I can see a couple of obstacles right off the bat”  No no no, his sobbing morphing into moans as he slumped over on my bed.  “I need to prove to my dad I’m not a loser.”  Gentle snores rose up in the dark.  I tucked him in and laid myself carefully onto the covers of my absent roommate’s bed and tried to sleep.

Jamie woke up several hours later, disoriented and apologetic.  He scurried out the door and my life until a semester later, he happened upon me crying (soberly, I would like to state) over a romantic mess I had gotten myself into.  He brought me back to his room and gave me a soda – pop, he called it.  “Pop?”  I stared at him in distaste.  “This is New York, son.  Sugary, carbonated beverages are called soda.  You’re not in the Mid-West anymore.  “ “I’m from Buffalo” he reminded me.  Same thing, I had responded.  Heartbreak did not dampen my sarcasm by one drop.

Thus began one running gag among many for over 40 years of friendship.  That night, he put his arm around my shoulder, listened to my tale of woe, and made me listen to bad ‘80’s music.  He walked me to my bus and saw me safely home.

I had found myself a big brother.

In my many iterations of pretend families as a lonely only child, there was always an older brother.  My actual parents were  responsible adults – they had important things to do!- and no time for playing around.  Amuse yourself was the response to my queries about possible interaction.  So amuse myself I did with fake parents and siblings like so many characters in a play.  Among the siblings there was always the one close in age who tormented me while looking out for my in teasing, conspiratorial manner.  A partner in crime, unfailingly male.  A brother.  I wasn’t fond of girls my own age;  besides boys were supposed to protect you. 

This was a notion that caused me no small amount of pain in the future.  But never with Jamie.

Over the subsequent years we remained in close contact as friends. He married.  I married.  We both divorced, his more acrimonious than mine.  We raised our children, struggled through their teenaged heartbreaks, struggled through our own.  In later years, he remarried and found a measure of joy in his new family.  Through all that we grew as friends and as people.  He came for Thanksgiving to my home, I drove 7 hours each way to western New York when he was hospitalized with a rare spinal infection.  The man was a medical marvel, suffering multiple surgeries, bouts of pneumonia, bronchitis, varied infections.  If someone sneezed in Boston, we joked, he would catch a cold in Buffalo.

When therefore he left working at 60 on disability, it was no surprise.  His weight impacted his mobility;  his joints unable to bear the pressure began to crumble.  He was waiting on knee surgery when a routine colonoscopy revealed a mass in his lower intestine.  Doctors quickly scheduled surgery.

“I’m scared,” he confessed in a bourbon-laced late-night text.  “I have a bad feeling about all this.”  Stop being such an old woman, I chastised with my characteristic sarcasm masking my own concern.  You’re going to be fine and you won’t be alone. 

He wasn’t fine.  After the surgery,which showed that he didn’t have cancer, he developed an infection and died having never regained consciousness.  He also wasn’t alone; his wife and grown daughter stayed with him.  But he died before I could get there; he died before I could say good-bye.

I know there were 43 years of hellos and this one last good-bye was not going to define our relationship.  I had shown up for him at his loneliest moments when he needed someone.  I had shown up when he needed a little sympathy and a little tough love.  He showed up for me too.  He never criticized my choices even when he disagreed with them.  From him I got full-hearted love, never tough.  For four decades he was my most consistent cheerleader, not doubting for a moment that I would do something amazing with my life without caring whether I did or did not – because all my doings would never dampen his love for me.  Every call he ended with “Love ya, honey.”

In a world where we set conditions on human interaction, where friendship is commoditized and love needs to be Instagram-worthy, Jamie understood the unconditional nature of truel love.  He warmed those in his inner circle with his light and let us light his way in return during his darkest moments.  We don’t always acknowledge the gift of trust such vulnerability bestows but Jamie was as open with his pain as he was with his pleasure.  He showed me what real family meant so that I could grow as a friend and a person.  For what time remains to me without him, I hope I can honor his life by loving more unconditionally than I have and thereby keep him alive in some small way. 

Love ya, honey.