The Luminist

I’m not a dog person. To all you dog lovers, I promise this is not a moral failing. I’ve just never had an affinity for our furry canine friends. No past dog bite, no growling incident, no slobber on a silk shirt to trace it back to.

I’m just not that into them.

Which, as any dog lover knows, makes every dog on this planet drawn to me like a bad boyfriend post-bender. The Finleys and Bellas, the Baileys and Teds — they all want to sit on my lap, lick my face, jump up with sharp claws and leave a mark. I am inordinately interesting in my authentic disinterest.

So when a house-sitting gig in New Orleans came with a dog attached, I said yes to the house (ten days in a city I love, 30,000 steps a day around Audubon Park, my favorite daughter sighted regularly), and quietly dreaded the rest.

Her name was Olive. A black lab. I’d met her before, racing around the fenced yard of my regular Uptown airbnb.

Naturally, I had a plan. Morning walk. Food in the slow-down bowl. Meds tucked into cream cheese. Water refilled. Poop scooped. Done.

Except a dog is not a to-do list. Olive had not received the memo.

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On our first morning walk, we had just settled into a brisk pace when I was yanked sideways. I looked down the leash to see Olive in a full commando crouch: low to the ground, creeping forward, in theory sneaking up on a bushy, twitching tail… the squirrel long gone before she got anywhere close.

This turned out to be Olive’s favorite way of making her way around the park. She didn’t care about people or ducks or even other dogs. But every time we saw a squirrel (frequently!), she’d abruptly stop and crouch, doing an awkward but earnest impression of a stalking panther.

A white-haired gentleman stopped to watch her. “Look at her getting lower and lower!” He was delighted. So, weirdly, was I.

This was the first place my plan fell apart. I could not keep a consistent Fitbit-monitored pace: I had to slow down for her. Olive operated on squirrel time, not my time, and all I could do was surrender.

Together, we entered a timelessness I don’t know is available to me in my regular life.

I started seeing things I would have missed if I’d been able to maintain my typical march. The guy playing harmonica alongside his boom box. Another making tea on a concrete bench with his camping stove. Swans, white herons, maintenance workers fanning out across the golf course at dawn with leaf blowers and weed whackers like a small, safety-goggled army. I spend plenty of time in nature at home, but many times I’m so far up in my own head I might as well be in a windowless room. With Olive stopping and starting like a game of freeze tag, my head was not an option.

She also turned out to be a social credential I didn’t know I needed. Strangers don’t talk to strangers in most cities, but they’ll talk to a dog, and sometimes even to the person holding the leash. “Is that a puppy?” (Nope, just a maniac.) “My dog is friendly! Is yours??” (Great, I’m just the sitter, so I truly cannot say.)

And then there were Olive’s actual people — the FOOs, Friends of Olive — who recognized her yellow collar and stopped to say hello. “She’s such a sweet dog!” one woman in a sun hat told me, and I nodded, because I couldn’t deny it.

So the results of my dog experiment are in: I was right all along, I am not a dog person. Ten days with Olive confirmed it, not cracked it. That thought I used to have — maybe someday when I’m older and less nomadic, I’ll get a dog for company — is gone.

I didn’t fall for the dog. I fell for the life the dog made me live. The walks I wouldn’t have taken at that stop-and-go pace. The things I wouldn’t have seen moving at my usual speed. The strangers who stopped to chat because of the tail-wagging creature on the end of my leash. The routine of another living thing depending on you in the early morning quiet.

To trying a new gear,

Sue

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I was so happy to be back in my own bed. I snuggled beneath my fuzzy blanket, glanced at my teetering pile of books on my night stand, plugged my phone into my super-secret drawer outlet, and stared at the ceiling, the faint smell of chlorine from my evening swim still on my skin. I kicked my legs like a toddler with the thrill of being home.

Home did not return the favor.

At 1am, I was yanked out of blissful slumber by an automaton voice amplified by a chorus of beeps: “Fire! Fire! Fire!”

Before I fully regained consciousness, I was standing upright, pajama pants swooshing around my legs from my super speed. Was the sound coming from the smoke detector above my bed? The one in the hall? Downstairs? All of them?

I slid open the pocket door to my bedroom, sniffing for smoke. Nothing. I flipped on every single light in the entire house as I scoured for the source. Thirty seconds felt like three hours, and then the voice and its greek chorus finally ceased.

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I have an issue with smoke detectors. I’m glad they’re there to (potentially) save my life, but it’s a devil’s bargain: traumatize you while keeping you safe. Set fire to your soul with false alarms.

For years I’ve traced my hate/hate relationship with these plastic demonic hockey pucks to, of course, the big line in the sand: Mike’s death. They obviously evolved from being necessary evil to enemy for life when I was the solo parent trying to protect the kids, aka give them a sense of normalcy when our entire life was a dumpster fire. The inevitable unexpected beeps — due to low batteries, power outages, ghosts — set me over the edge at a time when I had no reserves. No middle of the night help. No Mike.

But while walking the neighborhood waiting for revisions to this post to pop into my head — a key part of the process — I realized that narrative isn’t quite right.

I’ve been conveniently blaming the loss of Mike because that’s what I do. His death is the magnet to which the spiky metal shards of life are drawn. Bad day? Must be the grief. Can’t sleep? Widow stuff. Levitate out of bed at 1am over a false alarm? Obviously because I lost my husband.

Hmmm. Not this time.

I’ve blocked out the exact year (2010? 2013?) but I can picture our old house on Stones Throw Drive, and the night the carbon monoxide detector put on an avant garde performance. I did the same sort of levitating move before Mike even had the chance to react, and raced for the source of the sound: our daughter’s room. My running turned to flying when the carpeted bedroom floor met the hardwood hallway, and I did my best Jimmy ‘Superfly’ Snuka impression — followed by a face plant that knocked one of my (fake) front teeth right out.

You can guess what came next: split lip, chin bruises, banged elbows, a 2am rendezvous with the local firemen. All for a false alarm.

An hour later, everyone was piled into the big bed, the kids’ breath evening out as they drifted off, Mike’s arm sprawled protectively across me. But I couldn’t sleep. I was working too hard to not let my shaking shoulders bounce the bed. To not let anyone hear the sobs that heaved through my chest.

The healing process started and stalled and restarted. The bruises and the split lip began as a good story for work, but left a lingering green that no makeup could quite cover. The giant purple-yellow contusion on my hip ensured that for a few weeks I had to plan my approach into each new seat. And then there were the hours spent in the dentist’s chair, reinserting that wayward tooth. I asked the guys at the office, “Explain to me why you’d ever get in a fist fight? I think I know what it feels like now to get punched in the face. How could this be worth it? I totally don’t get it.”

But even after the physical injuries had healed, I stayed more fearful, more gun-shy, than I had been before. A month later, after biting into a taco and coming out with one less front tooth, the temporary having lost its gluey oomph, I finally had to fess up to Mike, “I’m having a really hard time getting over this.”

He nodded and took me into his arms.

I can’t remember how I dug myself out of that. Good care from him? A change of seasons? Space? An end to the ongoing dentist visits? Dunno. Time passed. I functioned again.

But those high-pitched beeps embedded themselves in my psyche… or perhaps somewhere deeper. In whatever part of the brain skips the thinking and goes straight to FULL BODY PANIC. I’m afraid of plenty of things: spiders, airplane turbulence, driving on windy roads, dentists. But there is something claw-like about smoke detector beeps and their hold on me. The talons are ten inches deep.

So there I was in the Treehouse, in that eerie quiet after the spectral voice ceased its FIRE! soliloquy, heart galloping in my ears.

After one more lap around the house, I climbed back into bed and opened up a book, since there was no way in God’s green earth I was getting back to sleep any time soon. So I might as well read… While, of course, intermittently wondering what the hell is wrong with me.

The next day, I made an executive decision. I could not do this two nights in a row. So I climbed up on my ladder and decapitated each and every hard-wired smoke detector from the ceilings, put them in ziplocs, then placed them in time-out in the garage.

That night I slept like a baby.

The next day Richie came over, and together we followed the YouTube video’s advice: blow air into the detectors and see if bugs come out. Two of the four produced a shower of gnats over the mudroom’s pristine white counter.

“Damn, Gina!” we said simultaneously.

Then we tag-teamed the re-installation, him up on the ladder, me handing the gnat-free units up for placement.

I’ve slept soundly (fingers crossed) ever since.

So, what do I do with this?

The only thing I can do: learn to accept that I’m gonna take on water every time a smoke detector beeps. Period.

Not because Mike died, though that didn’t help. Not because I’m broken or dramatic or need to try harder. But because one night I flew down a hallway to protect my kid and my face hit the floor, and then my brain filed that under NEVER AGAIN in a drawer I don’t have the key to.

Some fears don’t resolve. They don’t become an opportunity for growth. They don’t transform into wisdom. They just... stay. They get filed.

When this whole scenario happens again, which it undeniably will, my brain will do its encore performance: Mike is dead. My teeth are broken. My babies are unsafe. Curtain up, curtain down. I’ll watch it, score it like a bad talent show — zeros for everyone! — and move on.

I don’t have to love my triggers. But I do have to love, and accept, me.

Sleeping soundly until next time,

Sue

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The Willamette River splits Portland in two, giving ‘Bridge City’ its moniker, and hosting a stretch of park named after a governor from the 70’s. My mind is on east coast time, so at 7am I’m fully awake and strolling Tom McCall Waterfront Park, the river a flat shade of gray reflecting the morning clouds of the Pacific Northwest. I am the only tourist on this stretch, but not the only human. A few joggers, a cyclist on his way to work. But we are far outnumbered by people dressed differently from us. People who slept here.

The giant garbage bags. The blankets draped like capes. The mobile shower units up the way, idling like school buses. A volunteer steps out of one, a bag of clothes in hand — someone’s old ones, I assume, exchanged for fresh. Another man is still asleep on a bench, his worldly belongings arranged around him in a tidy grouping.

I hug the riverside of the path and keep walking.

I am fine, I tell myself.

Except my body doesn’t believe me.

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Here’s the thing about me and travel: I’ve been a lot of places. Chile. China. Greenland. Kuwait at least ten times. The UAE a handful. I’ve navigated airports where I couldn’t read the signs, roads where I wasn’t sure of the rules, places where the culture was so different from mine that I was essentially operating on instinct. I might have been wary, but I was never afraid. Generally speaking, I was energized, curious, aware.

In other words, I am not a nervous traveler. I have a well-worn internal compass, pattern recognition engine, and street smarts seeded in 1980’s London when I would walk back to my study-abroad dorm across Waterloo Bridge at 3am. I know when to make eye contact and when to look away. I know when to broaden my shoulders and assume a ‘don’t mess with me’ glare. I know when the other side of the street is the right side of the street.

All of which was completely useless in Portland, Oregon.

I stayed at the iconic Heathman, a historic Portland landmark with a library on the mezzanine, stacked floor-to-ceiling with books all signed by their authors. It was a leather chair, quiet nook heaven. Evidently this is where writers stay when they come to town, and this newbie author wanted a piece of that. I loved it straight away.

That afternoon I visited the Portland Art Museum. It reminded me immediately of the National Gallery of Art back home — the same combination of an old-school, regal-bricked wing sidled up to a glass-enclosed, modern one. The best of both worlds, Portland’s heritage and its reach toward something new. The shiny Rothko Pavilion had opened just a few months before. This was news to me: Oregon was Rothko’s home. I’ve chased this abstract painter around the world from NYC to Norfolk to London, never realizing his origin story began in the Pacific Northwest. The museum holds a concise collection not only of Rothkos, but artists he influenced: Frankenthaler, Calder, Truitt and more.

I stood in front of a Rothko for a long time, letting it do what Rothkos do. My heart rate had finally settled.

Then I walked outside.

A man was lying on the sidewalk. Not sitting. Lying. His belongings in a bag beside him, one arm over his eyes against the afternoon light.

And just like that, I was fibrillating again.

The next morning I made coffee and sat next to the window. My 6th floor room looked out over Salmon Street: A jogger. Another jogger. A woman walking a dog with the brisk pace of someone who has places to be. Normal. Fine.

Then I noticed him. A man in a wheelchair, positioned at the corner as if patiently waiting for something... And sure enough, a woman appeared from the apartment building across the street, walking towards him. She handed him something I could not quite see from my vantage through the unfurling spring leaves of the sidewalk tree. But I could guess: breakfast. They exchanged a few words. He nodded. She went back inside.

I stood at my window for a long time after that. What struck me wasn’t just that he was there. It was that everyone had adjusted. The woman with her breakfast. The joggers who ran past without breaking stride. A city that had simply incorporated this. To everyone, it seemed perfectly normal.

While I fibrillated.

I feel bad even writing about this. Somehow I’m defensive and protective of Portland, a city I’d never been to before, know no one in, and to which I will likely never return. I also know I’m walking a delicate line: trying to talk about an inherently political issue without getting political. But seriously, that is exactly what I’m trying to do here. Because it’s what I do at The Luminist in general: notice. The goal of writing about this experience isn’t to judge or cast blame or shout about policies or even search for a solution. I’m writing about it because I can’t stop thinking about it, and I left Portland a week ago.

So to be clear, I was never in danger. No one approached me, threatened me, asked me for anything. Portland was not Kuwait, where the insane drivers alone could kill you. It was not Jordan, where face-covered police check your taxi for explosives as you enter the airport gates. But the situation in Portland got under my skin in a way none of those places had. I think what I can’t get over is the contrast. The relentlessness of it. Beautiful hotel, man in a wheelchair. Soaring museum, man lying on the sidewalk. Joggers with their dogs, blankets on benches. Back and forth, back and forth. In Kuwait I knew what I was dealing with. In Portland, I couldn’t figure out what to expect next.

And maybe that’s it. Maybe what rattled me wasn’t danger. It was the not knowing what to make of any of it:

Am I supposed to make eye contact or not? Do the people living here want me to acknowledge them or politely look away? Are they happy? Are they here by choice? Or are they struggling everyday, exhausted and desperate? How are there so many of them? Where did they all come from? Did they all come to Portland because of the acceptance and community here, or did they start with a house in Portland then lose it? Is this better than any other options they might have had? Beyond the breakfast lady and shower guy, is someone helping them? Do they need help? Do they want it?

And maybe the loudest question of all in my head: how did this become normal??

I flew home to DC with a singular focus: I needed to swim. I needed sensory deprivation. Water over my head, the world muffled, my body finally getting to just... stop receiving. I watched my bubbles float upward as I dolphin kicked on my back four feet below the surface, far removed from the confusing real world for a few relieving minutes.

I don’t have a conclusion to offer you here. You don’t need my verdict, and neither does Portland. I’m far from qualified to give one either way.

I do know that some of the rhetorical questions I asked above actually have answers. I have been doing a deep dive into Portland’s homeless (unhoused??) situation since I got home. But again, a solution or even an opinion is not my goal with this post. It just feels important to write about. And a little risky, but that comes with my chosen territory. I talk about loss for a living after all, a topic that most people, God bless them, would like to pretend doesn’t exist. Whether by nature or nurture, at this point in my life I’m constitutionally incapable of looking away from the hard, confusing stuff, even when it rattles me to my core.

So that’s what I’m doing here: looking closely, noticing what I feel, examining my thoughts as they rush through my head, and then laying out all of my chicken-scratch notes and journaling pages on my kitchen island. Sometimes the pieces click into place, so the initial jumble becomes a completed puzzle.

But sometimes things don’t fit into a neat picture. Sometimes things just stay messy.

To looking anyway,

Sue

Subscribe on Substack to receive The Luminist in your inbox every Saturday — an invitation to notice reality, rather than the stories our minds and culture like to spin.

P.S. I’ve made another video for the Loss Canon: The Books that Got Me Through.

If you’re into books and/or videos, you can watch it right here.

An electrical current ran through me when I looked down at my iPhone’s screen: three missed calls from my daughter Kendall. I punched the call back button.

“Hey, what’s up girl,” I tried to keep my voice casual. Nonchalant. Vaguely disinterested.

We Deagles are well trained. After living the worst-case scenario, we’re quick to lead with, “I am fine” when placing an unexpected call. Or three.

She ponied up the rote response. Then she shouted in anguish, “I lost the ruby ring!”

“Okay, okay, walk me through this, where did you lose it?”

“We were in the backyard, cleaning up after Chloe’s 21st birthday party, and I was throwing the leftover ice out of the cooler, and I guess maybe it slipped off my hand and…and…and I’m never going to find it, Mom!”

The amps on that electrical current had turned into a megawatt transmission, my body buzzing, my heart pounding. This wasn’t just any ring. It was Mike’s. She’d taken it from the safe deposit box and to a jeweler, reshaped it, resized it, made it her own. Her own talisman of her late father, worn lovingly on her finger every single day.

“Okay, put some jeans on because I think you need to crawl around in the backyard on your hands and knees. And someone in NOLA must have a metal detector, right? And where are Rachel and Elina, can they help?”

And. And. And.

God knows what I actually said. We were both crying. Then solutioning. Then crying again.

I couldn’t have cared less about the ring. All I cared about was her broken heart.

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We do this.

We lose the people we love most in the world… then take the tattered remnants of that love and suffuse them into things: rings, watches, necklaces, totems of all shapes and sizes.

We keep them close, comforting ourselves with the evidence that our loved one was once real and here and breathing, and even though they were impermanent, we still at least have this bit of permanence to hold onto.

But, in fact, they’re just another thing to lose.

So, we end up facing a choice. Stash these totems away in a safe deposit box. Keep them in the climate-controlled dark, behind lock and key, protected and untouchable.

Or.

Wear them. Live with them out in the open, letting them remind us of those we love, while knowing they might slip off our finger in a New Orleans backyard while throwing ice out of a cooler.

While we cannot control whether people come into our lives or leave, objects we can control. We can manage that risk. So oftentimes we do. We choose the safe deposit box again and again, because it’s the one place where loss has a solution.

But it’s a false bargain.

Because a life spent protecting against the loss of things is a half-lived life.

I don’t use that phrase out of hand; I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this. About a decade, in fact. Yes, we all have to orient around safety and security to a sensible degree. But when we get too focused on what we could lose, we start to hear ourselves say, over and over again, “I can’t.” I can’t because it’s too risky. I can’t because something could go wrong. I can’t because I might end up feeling (more) pain or losing money or hurting someone I love. I have come up with at least a million reasons for “I can’t”. But after steeling my spine and carefully examining each one, they almost never involve creating opportunities for more joy or growth or possibility or healing.

Living by “I can’t” ensures our life never expands into something more. We think this is a sacrifice we’re willing to make — protect what we have, while forfeiting what we could have had — but in truth no safe deposit box can hold back the relentless force of entropy. So our defensiveness only ensures we will lose things (albeit possibly more slowly), while gaining little.

We simply must embrace the horror of letting ourselves live, and risk, and lose. Else we’ll “protect” our way right out of a well-lived life.

Ten minutes later, I was looking for a paper bag to hyperventilate into when Kendall called me back.

“I found it! It was in an area I searched in before, I swear, but this time I saw it. Maybe the ice had melted? I don’t know! Oh my God!!”

“Oh thank God, thank God, thank you Daddy!” I shout-cried back into the phone.

Then this from Kendall, “I’m never wearing this again! I want to put it in the safe deposit box! I HATE THINGS!”

“I hate things too!” I replied.

But, really, I don’t.

She took to her bed, completely wrung out. The gin and tonic I’d talked myself out of earlier in the evening suddenly became a necessity, so I drove the four miles to the liquor store before it closed, sending a selfie surrounded by bottles as she lay prone in her bed.

“WE ARE TRAUMATIZED,” she texted back.

A truer sentence was never uttered.

She took a long nap. I let the gin infuse my bloodstream, the electrical wattage of the day spinning itself out like an unplugged generator.

When she woke up hours later, she shared her revised plan, “I’m going to get two tiny rings for either side so this thing never slips off again.”

She found Mike’s ring — her ring — this time.

There will come a time in the future where we will not be so lucky. Because sometimes rings just stay lost… and our hearts break. Again.

Our vulnerability, the wet blanket that no one invited to the party, is the guest that never leaves.

I could see a world in which Kendall put that ring back in the safe deposit box. Maybe she would only pull it out on special occasions, like graduation, Christmas, her wedding day. Maybe.

Or, possibly, this: a world where, over and over, she decides not to risk it at all. Instead she comes up with a different totem that doesn’t mean as much to her, and wears that regularly: a bracelet with Mike’s name and birthday engraved in it perhaps. It never belonged to Mike, so she knows she could get it replaced, no biggie. Meanwhile, the ring just sits in the dark box, mostly forgotten. It’s almost like it ceases to exist.

But what would be the point of that? She’d protect herself right out of the feeling of joy it brings her every time it sparkles. She’d protect herself from the warm bloom in her chest whenever she sees a friend admiring it, then gets to share the story of her dad. She’d protect herself from the pride she feels at the weight of Mike Deagle’s ring on her finger, keeping her company as she crushes classes and internships and follows in his powerful footsteps. Just like he always knew she would.

Yes, it’s just a ring. But it’s also a metaphor: the safe deposit box life doesn’t let the light in.

It’s a tough bargain. Still, I’d rather be terrified but giddy every time we see the ruby catch the light, than safe but never basking in the glow.

To fear… and the possibility we find on the other side of it,

Sue

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My book tour travels over the last month got me thinking a lot about home. What home is. What home means to me. The times I’ve felt most at home. And the least.

It was mid-tour and there I sat, overthinking my book talk in a few hours. I was chewing my nails and staring out the plate glass window of Petite Lou Brasserie when my friend Rebecca came into view. She was navigating the Thunderdome of Amsterdam’s bike lanes, car lanes, pedestrians, delivery trucks, and dogs, which the Dutch can do in their sleep.

Rebecca is not Dutch.

I clutched my pearls as I watched her zigzag across the street, then disappear. In the ten seconds she was out of my sight, Apple Maps having sent her to the back entrance rather than the front, my vision blurred, expecting the worst. When she suddenly reappeared, I leaped out of my seat and pulled her in for a hug.

I haven’t known Rebecca for even a year. But catching up with her feels like I’ve been doing it for a lifetime. I not only forgot about my book talk anxiety, I found myself naturally sharing the types of intimate details that only emerge when your body feels that special sauce of camaraderie, acceptance, and validation.

I could tell Rebecca was having a similar experience, because she shared something insane:

“You know, I have not been here before, but Amsterdam feels like home.”

Not only did I NOT scoff at the factual lunacy of her statement, I actually felt a bloom of recognition in my chest.

Wow… Me too…???

***

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***

The traditional definitions of home have never really resonated for me.

When I was a kid, Dad was always taking new opportunities at different steel mills, so we moved house when I was 8, then 10, then 12. Mom made each house feel homey, but even in those days I never got too attached to my front-yard-facing bedroom, or my back-yard facing bedroom, or the bedroom I shared with my sister. Home was where my family was, and it was a movable thing.

Mike and I exhibited a similar kind of restlessness, circling Northern Virginia like a cat bedding down for nap. As our family grew and our needs changed, the postage stamp yard in Old Town gave way to a tricycle-friendly driveway in Reston. When the kids switched schools and we needed to be closer to DC, a McLean zipcode graced our return address. We loved our homes, and Mike decorated them to the nines, but they were serving a need: space to grow, location to optimize. Our togetherness was what mattered most.

The unspoken belief I carried during this season was home is family.

But then Mike died. I became the solo breadwinner, and ended up traveling. A lot.

Work was always the driver, but I took advantage of the transatlantic flights to regularly visit a place where Mike and I had many fond memories: London. A few times a year I’d route through Heathrow from Frankfurt, Dubai, Kuwait, and grab a night or two in the city. But as the years went on and the flights continued, I was less drawn to our old haunts, and more to finding my new favorites. A hip hotel with a great cafe, watching Wimbledon on the jumbotron in a crowd of Brits, getting lost in the stacks of tiny bookstores.

Now I randomly walk around corners in London, and stumble into a memory from 30 years ago, 15 years ago, 3 years ago. The cobblestone streets and regular tube stops, wet and cold as they often are, feel like my family. In London I realized that I didn’t have to just find the cozy sense of recognition and comfort around people I loved. I could find comfort in myself, reflected back to me through a place I’ve known and loved for years.

So even though no one was there to meet me and my rollerbag when I popped out at Paddington station, I started to feel that homey relief whenever I smelled the hot air rushing through the underground.

My definition of home had evolved yet again, probably closer to how most people define it: a place where it’s easy to be yourself.

Then I arrived in Amsterdam.

Yes, I was awed by the architecture, the uncurtained windows allowing a glimpse into Dutchie life, the houseboats worthy of Frank Lloyd Wright (or Popeye the Sailor Man), the bitterballen burning my tongue, the scarved inhabitants giving posh an entirely new meaning. But I’d only been there once before, one year ago. And my friendships with Alice, Nicoline, and Hannah, Dutch natives and transplants, are strong but young. In other words, by either of my previous definitions, Amsterdam should not feel like home. The city itself, beautiful as it is, doesn’t hold the recognition I’ve come to believe is a prereq for that cozy acquaintance.

But I think all that was enough to soften me up for the main acts of Amsterdam:

I shared every meal with one or more of those new friends. The caffeine lunch I had with Rebecca. The sauna-and-sea afternoon with Alice and Nic. The springtime canal walk with Hannah. Flat whites and easy conversation with Mindy. Dinner with my publisher Miranda and editor Jess. Espresso martinis with Leona and her family. And the cherry on top: a lunch I hosted with everyone who lives in, or came to, town.

These are a different type of friendship than I was used to back when I met almost everyone through work or the kids; they aren’t expecting me to be anything other than what I am. And so I can be more me: sometimes nervous, sometimes excited, more and more vulnerable, occasionally giddily proud, all of it.

And then there were the book events, which I had two of, back-to-back. I’ve discovered that I’m always nervous right before the event, but once the crowd quiets (except for that tiny heckler last time) and expectant eyes turn to me, I love it. Why? Because, finally, I get to be the flesh-and-blood version of me, the firehose-of-energy me, the almost levitating me. The version of me I’ve worked towards for the last three years: an advocate for vibrant living after loss. That’s me, Sue Deagle, book-recommending, newsletter-writing, Do Loss authoring, living and breathing my purpose on this planet. Alive, awake, participatory and engaged.

Wow, it’s so good to do more than feel like her internally, silently, while I’m typing away on my iPad. Instead, I’ve been interacting as her, being seen as her.

The outside matches the inside.

I can feel hard-ass Sue fighting the sentimentality of this, but what I found in Amsterdam was a feeling of being fully myself, while surrounded by people who welcomed that self, which my body recognizes as one word: “home”.

Family. An international city where I find it easy to breathe. Friends who cheer me on as I become more myself.

None of these are a white picket fence: the permanent, physical place where we just assume home should be.

And yet.

All of them are home in the sense that, when I’m there I feel like a plant in warm light, happily drinking in the nourishment. They’re the environments I want to return to when I’m worn out by the world, ready to curl up, relax, and receive. “Home is where the heart is” is cute and catchy, don’t get me wrong. But for me, home is where I find myself regularly, easily filled. Home is low effort, high reward. Home is refuge.

This is one of those realizations that makes me want to jump up and down. Because it punches one of my favorite buttons extra hard: FREEDOM. It means that home isn’t something that either you have or you’ve lost. It’s something you get to seek, recognize, or straight-up build. It all starts with noticing when you feel at ease, when you feel nourished, and when you feel like yourself.

When we default to the cookie-cutter definition of something, we flatten out our own experiences like cardboard boxes headed for the recycling bin. We stop paying attention to what we’re actually feeling, believing we don’t have to do any deep looking, because the dictionary’s already given us the description. And so we miss chances to be inquisitive about and creative with our own experience. We accept what is given to us, even if it doesn’t quite fit. (That would be like me insisting Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania was still my home.)

On my last day in Amsterdam, my brain was the equivalent of TV static as I wandered the streets alone. All the energy and ideas, the nerves and excitement, the sheer volume of conversation had put me on tilt. Now all I could take in were the visuals: the giant Stroopwafels, the tourists lingering in alleyways with paper boats filled with fries, the plush scarves, the storefront windows filled with everything from rubber duckies to space cookies to wooden tulips.

Then, one particular storefront sliced through my brain fog. Wait, I recognized this display: beautiful painted tiles. Hannah had given me a tiny one with a delicate painting of Amsterdam when I visited her here last year. My eyes scanned the tiles in the window until one lassoed me in: a delicate orange door, a climbing green plant, a welcome mat striped with blue, and a little bird perched on a sign that simply read: home.

I stepped into the store, the jangling of its bell announcing my arrival. Five minutes later, I stepped back out to those same tinkling tones, my bubble-wrapped totem secured in my tote.

To all the places we call home,

Sue

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Have you ever experienced a heckler at a book event? Yep, me neither… until it was mine.

Two weeks ago, I boarded a plane on a blustery Virginia Monday, bound for the Eagle/Vail airport. The Rockies’ turbulence whipsawed our 27-minute connection flight, but we landed safe in the beauty that only Colorado delivers.

I puttered the day away until it was time for my first Do Loss event. In my rented white Jeep Wrangler, I chilled in the parking lot, breathing deep and shuffling through my clipboard notes one last time. Then I stepped out into the chill early spring evening and strode to The Bookworm.

Event manager Alix had the room set. People trickled in quietly, finding their seats. I began my talk:

Thank you all so much for coming. And a double thank you for showing up for a talk on LOSS. I promise no jump scares, and no group shares. I’m going to tell you why I wrote this book, and share my story, so I might get a little teary-eyed. But I promise to take care of you, and I’m confident you’ll take care of me.

Just as I was getting into the groove talking about the characteristics of loss we wish weren’t true, I heard the door around the corner open, and someone raspily demanding where the book talk was happening. Then the tiniest little old lady — LOL, as I’d come to think of her — shuffled into view. She grasped the arm of her daughter while glacially moving toward an open seat.

I halted. I’m used to giving talks from my corporate days but in those big conference rooms, no one dared to enter late.

The room fell silent. LOL took no time filling that void.

LOL: You’ll have to speak loudly, I don’t wear hearing aids. They always fall out and I hate them.

Well.

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I took a breath, dragging up the memory of where I’d left off, and re-found my flow. Five more minutes in, she speared her tiny hand into the air.

Me: Ma’am, we are going to wait and do questions at the end.

LOL: But what I have to say is relevant right now.

Me: Yes, I understand, but we are going to wait.

She harumphed.

I started again. Five minutes passed. Then her tiny hand shot up again.

ME: We’re taking questions at the end, ma’am.

LOL: But I have something important to add right now! I became a widow at 54 so I know a thing or two about this!

Me: Ma’am, I’m so sorry for your loss. But if you’d just allow me finish we’ll have plenty of time for discussion at the end and we can talk about your experience one-on-one.

She let me continue talking… but she didn’t lower her hand.

I pressed on, trying to find my rhythm again, except now I was tracking her in my peripheral vision. Her wrinkly, pale hand had started wavering slightly in open space. I kept my eyes locked on the rest of the room, drawing them in, trying to rebuild the intimacy we’d had before the interruptions.

I began sharing what I call my ‘search for clues’ as I navigated the loss of Mike, and how veterans I’d worked with in my last corporate job had taught me valuable lessons about community and resilience, always showing up for me.

Then from left field, came this:

LOL: But I’d like to say something about our military!

The room went quiet. Everyone felt it now — this wasn’t a confused elderly woman asking a clarifying question. This was someone who’d decided the rules didn’t apply to her.

I took a breath. I tried to stay calm while tiny prickles of anger ran up and down my spine.

Me: Ma’am, I promise we’ll get to you, but I want to share my story and some important parts of the book. Then we’ll leave lots of time for questions for everyone.

She didn’t interrupt me again. But she still didn’t lower her hand either. It flickered at the edge of the audience, like a warning light on a dashboard. Meanwhile her daughter had gone completely still.

My regular power play — an icy force of will that allowed me to hold my own in corporate conflict, the one that had worked in hundreds of settings — was dying to break the surface. It was practically chanting Shut This Down Hard. It wanted me to make it clear who’s in charge. One withering look would do it. Gauging my next move, I took a furtive glance at Little Old Lady, hoping she wouldn’t take it as an invitation, and really looked at her this time. Then I saw it. Not defiance. Desperation. She was a widow too. She’d said so. It’s relevant! I’m relevant!

Icy wouldn’t work here. Not because I couldn’t do it — I absolutely could. But because it would ruin the thing I actually came here to build: a space where loss could breathe.

I leaned back in my seat, a small surrender.

For Q&A, I started on the far side of the room — the quiet side — and took my time addressing each question, her hand still bobbing and weaving in my peripheral vision. When I finally got to her, she didn’t mince words.

LOL: You’ve been ignoring me the whole time!

Me: Ma’am, I was giving the rest of the room a chance to speak. Please go ahead now. What’s your question?

LOL: It’s not a question. I just want everyone to know about a documentary about Elie Wiesel.

She told us about the PBS special, about how the Holocaust survivor’s story helped her understand her own loss.

Me: Ma’am, that is so helpful, thank you for sharing that. I think we can also share with the others how impactful Viktor Frankl and Edith Eva Eger’s work is based on their Holocaust experiences too. I really appreciate you bringing this up.

In the book signing afterward, LOL’s daughter made her wait until last. I signed books, listened to stories, made recommendations from the Loss Canon. I was grateful for the space; humbled by the connection.

Then LOL sat down next to me, her daughter plopping six copies of Do Loss on the table.

LOL: You’re going to dedicate these books to one Sheila, two Judys, and one Juan. I’m keeping two for myself. Write in the inside cover: “Tools for your toolkit.”

And reader, I did exactly that.

The room was clearing. Alix helped LOL and her daughter gather their six books to head out. LOL turned to me before she shuffled away.

LOL: Are you going to write another book?

Me: Why yes, my next book is about a pilgrimage I took in Scandinavia.

LOL: But what does that have to do with me?

Me: Well, I did originally think the pilgrimage was about grief… Turned out it wasn’t.

She considered this for a moment, then nodded, satisfied.

LOL: I’ll come to your book talk on that.

Once the door did us all a favor and closed behind her, I laughed out loud. At the absurdity of being heckled at my first book event, sure. But even more so at her audacity. And her honesty.

See, she dared to ask the question I think every reader is silently, maybe subconsciously, asking every time they open an email from The Luminist. Every time someone sees a flyer for my book event and decides whether or not to go. Every time a stranger picks up Do Loss in a bookstore. Every time someone watches a Loss Canon video.

What does this have to do with me?

Or all those related questions, like: Will it meet my sadness and confusion when nothing else has been able to? Will I feel less alone? Will it help me figure me out, even just a little, so I can suffer less?

They just don’t often ask it out loud, on repeat, waving their tiny wrinkled hand in the air.

The thing is, I can't give you answers to your losses because I don't have answers to mine. But every conversation we have — on the page, over coffee, at a book talk — brings us closer to learning to live a full and happy life alongside those losses.

And maybe LOL, in her own stubborn way, wanted to contribute her wisdom to that cause too.

To not having the answers,

Sue

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P.S. I’ve made another video for the Loss Canon: The Books that Got Me Through. If you’re into books and/or videos, you can watch it right here.

Kendall and I stood in exhausted silence, inching forward a half-step a time in the glacial line for Barracuda, her favorite taco joint. I’m wrung out from two days of talks at the New Orlean’s Bookfest. She’s wrung out for reasons only a 21-year-old on St. Patrick’s Day weekend knows.

As my gaze wanders, I ask, “Are we on Magazine Street?”

“No! We just went over this. What street are we on?”

Oh s**t.

I swivel my head to the left, scanning for the regulation blue street sign to cheat from. My eyes land on the capital ‘T’, followed by the 13 gobbledygook letters. Not even room for a trailing “street” or “road” to complete the thought.

I turn back to Kendall.

“Ta-chop-ill-us?” I ask, with all the confidence of the last kid picked for kickball.

Her blonde ponytail swooshes from side to side in disappointment.

“Geez mom! Listen, stop trying to sound it out by the letters, word nerd. You just have to memorize it until it becomes second nature.”

She’s right, I am a word nerd, book worm, analyze-it-until-I-understand-it straight-A student. I was a shy kid who moved at age eight, ten, twelve. A library book and my imagination spelled safety; the monkey bars and mean streets of suburbia didn’t. So in my room, in my happy solitude, I learned to decode the world through the careful examination of its constituent parts until I understood the whole.

It’s the strategy that got me through school, through my career, through life. See something. Break it into pieces. Reassemble.

But Kendall never had that option.

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We caught Kendall’s eye issues late.

She was in third grade, watching Connor read his doorstop copy of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, death-gripped on the couch. She stared at him with red-hot lasers of frustration.

“How can you read that when the words are jumping around on the page?”

Mike and I looked at each other.

“What do you mean, Bimi?” Mike asked.

“I don’t get how he can read so fast with all those words everywhere.”

Oh s**t.

We thought the glasses we’d begged and bribed her into wearing since she was two were all she needed. After the diagnosis, we learned the truth: yes blurry vision was an issue, but coordination an even bigger one. The muscles behind her eyes couldn’t figure out how to work together, so smoothly scanning a page probably felt like trying to hit a bullseye with a bow and arrow, while unicycling. Because of this, she couldn’t read when the words were less than 20-point font surrounded by enough white space to drive a truck through. Everything else was a blur.

There was real pain in that blur. Confusion at classmates breezing through fraction-covered worksheets twice as fast. Her peers plowing through Diary of a Wimpy Kid when she was plodding along, a finger holding the words in place.

So we got to work. Doctor visits and eye tests, physical therapy that gave her headaches, a series of frustrating confidence-sapping tutors. And a gradual realization about all the things she’d never be able to do well: take a standardized test with its tiny bubbles, read textbooks at anything but a glacial pace, spell by sounding things out. But worst of all by far was what all these experiences added up to for young Kendall: I’m stupid.

If you’ve been following this newsletter for any length of time, you are likely in the midst of a double-take. We’re talking about Kendall? The Queen of three-point turns, dead-pan delivery of truth bombs, and traveling solo through Europe?

The One and the Only.

I’m not sure how Kendall got from there to here. Even she can’t reverse-breadcrumb the exact path. All I can really tell you is that at one point she was a kid who thought something was broken in her, and then, sometime later, she was a kid on a mission, kicking ass and taking names. She had clearly come up with strategies and processes that worked for her, and wasn’t looking back.

I remember her saying, literally out loud on a couple occasions, “This is how my brain works.” No explaining, apologizing, or justifying required.

She deduced what she couldn’t read. She memorized what she couldn’t sound out. She learned to notice patterns about spaces and places and people that the rest of us skip right over because we’re too busy focusing on the details she could never see.

Back at Barracuda, she tells me the same thing she’s told me twenty times before.

“CHOP-A-TOOL-IS.” Crisp and clear.

I repeat it back. Three times for good measure.

Chop-a-tool-is. Chop-a-tool-is. Chop-a-tool-is.

And I know, with absolute certainty, that by tomorrow morning it will have evaporated from my brain like water on hot pavement. Because that is not how my brain works.

But she knows this street because it’s the location of her favorite dive bar, her regular gas station, her favorite taco joint that we’re standing outside of now. Because it’s one of the most famous streets in New Orleans, where parade floats line up and the port rises with its giant cranes and the Mississippi spills over during hurricanes. She knows it because she’s walked it and lived it and refused to not know its name simply because letters are too busy jumping around to be pinned down by her eyes.

In other words, she’s navigating NOLA’s streets — and 20-something life — her way. The way she built when nobody else’s way worked.

To finding our own ways,

Sue

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“You know... it’s nice to share.” Three-year-old Daniel stood at the foot of my chaise lounge, eyeing my painted parrot bookmark like it was the last cookie in the jar.

I’d been chatting with his parents about jet lag between London and this sun-drenched pool in Mexico when Daniel spotted the bookmark. Though still fuzzy from his nap, he’d locked onto it with the laser focus only toddlers possess.

“Just put your book out at night and the nice hotel ladies will put one in there,” I offered. “That’s how I got mine.”

He wasn’t buying the delayed gratification. His comment about sharing took me a second, but I had to admire the boldness. So I folded the corner of my page, handed over the parrot, and watched his face light up.

“Thank you!” He giggled and pitter-pattered away.

Kendall missed this interaction. She’d just headed back to our room along the jungle pathway.

“How old is your daughter?” Daniel’s dad asked.

“Twenty. She wanted a spring break trip together.”

“Hard to imagine that someday Daniel will want to vacation with us,” he said. “Seeing you two gives us hope.”

Just then Daniel came running back, midnight blue book in hand, parrot bookmark proudly peeking out. He held it up for inspection.

“Perfect!” I said, and he beamed.

I turned to his parents. “Our brains aren’t wired to imagine most futures. But don’t worry — good things are coming, whether you can picture them or not.”

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Sometimes I catch myself saying crap like that and think I should be wearing a turban with a crystal ball in my lap.

But I’m not trying to predict the future, for myself or for anyone else. I’m trying to do the exact opposite.

I’m trying to get us (myself included) to release our death grip on expecting, forecasting, and prognosticating.

Because it never turns out how we think.

Sometimes worse. Sometimes better. Sometimes sideways. But always a surprise.

Meanwhile, our brains run prediction software built from old data — what our parents did, what movies promised us, what society has proscribed as success. When reality delivers something different, we don’t upgrade the software. We declare reality broken.

The irony? Our desperate grip on expectations doesn’t protect us from disappointment. It guarantees it. And worse — it blinds us to the unexpected gifts waiting just outside our field of vision.

“You still have your person, but I don’t have my person.”

This same girl who’s now wants to spend her spring break with me once said those words, her voice flat with truth.

She gravitated toward Mike. Connor gravitated toward me. When Mike died, she lost her person. I kept mine.

I didn’t rush in with platitudes. She was right. All I said was, “Well, someday I hope I can be your person.”

Nine years later, I am. After the pit of teenage despair, we’re close in a way I never imagined possible. Not because I replaced Mike in her heart, but because we built something entirely new. Something that wouldn’t exist if Mike were still alive.

Or would it?

That’s just it — predicting isn’t the point. Living into the plot twists is.

Dropping the scorecards (is it better? is it worse?) frees us to build with what we have instead of mourning what we don’t.

For years after Mike died, people couldn’t believe I was happy. They couldn’t fathom my life as a widow being rich and vibrant. Full of women’s summits, treehouse sunrises, global adventures, and deep conversations with total strangers.

But while I still long for Mike, I learned to stop longing for my old life. Today is too rich to waste energy looking backward.

I honor Mike by evolving, not by preserving us in formaldehyde. The real disrespect would be pretending I’m the same woman he left behind.

Here’s a few ways I’ve changed: I encourage swearing. I’m pro-laziness. I’m anti-squeegee.

All things that would’ve earned me The Look across the dinner table. But I think he’d prefer this authentic version of me to one fossilized in grief, endlessly performing what-would-Mike-approve-of calculations.

So instead of asking “What would Mike do?” I ask “What makes us thrive?”

Like beach vacations with Kendall where we talk for hours, asking questions, sharing laughter. Sleeping in twin beds we’ve smooshed so close together that she can tap my shoulder at night: “Mom, you’re snoring, turn over.” And laugh about it in the morning.

This unforeseen life has become my different kind of great.

All because I stopped trying to force what would bloom from the ashes. I just kept planting seeds, watering what grew, and trusting that life, given enough care and freedom, finds its way toward the light.

In the spirit of full disclosure: I guard this “great” fiercely. This great where Kendall and I walk barefoot on warm sand, deepening our connection with every footstep.

I don’t want anything to change…

But it will.

The kids will build careers, find partners, create families. My place in their lives will shift. There will be periods where I’m not as content.

And I’ll adjust. Because as long as I don’t let myself fossilize with “the way things should be”, different kinds of great will keep unfolding.

This isn’t faith or hope or belief. It’s just openness to possibility. It’s knowing I’ve survived the darkest of times and now live in brightness I never could have predicted.

We spend our lives trying to forecast tomorrow, as if predicting it will somehow protect us from it. But the real magic happens when we put down the crystal ball and look up at what’s actually unfolding right in front of us.

In possibility,

Sue

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After publishing the post a few weeks back about the Loss Canon, I began playing around with deeper dives into my fave books about loss and transition. The result? A new YouTube channel! If you are not into that, all good. But for those looking for books to light your path through hard times, or understand what your loved ones are going through, this is an invitation for you.

I’ll be uploading short videos to YouTube every week discussing the books that got me through some of my darkest times, and the books that I’ve read since that helped me understand human resilience in all its forms.

And here's my very first video, for your viewing pleasure!

Polish? The question catches me off-guard; it feels overly personal given the context. But reflexively my mind reaches into my memories, digging for an answer:

Pierogis, kielbasa, Pope John Paul II. Lech Walesa and his Solidarity movement. My grandmother and her six-foot sister Bertha, their parents born in Krakow before emigrating to Steubenville, Ohio and opening the White Eagle Tavern.

The backseat of grandma’s baby blue 1978 Buick. A towel carefully laid across the leather so my wet swimsuit wouldn’t stain her seats. The earthy smell of Ohio lake water on my skin. My ponytail dripping tiny teardrops down my back. Watching her navigate the parking lot, pulling out onto the two-lane road. Inside, crooner and ‘Polish Prince’ Bobby Vinton on the radio.

My grandmother held the steering wheel with both hands, long tan arms extended, white bouffant perfectly dry, singing softly.

“Oh, oh, moja droga jacie kocham…”

I didn’t know who Bobby Vinton was. In our burgundy family station wagon, it was all Elton John, Simon & Garfunkel, Jim Croce. But this was her car, her station, her language. And because she was singing — this serious grandmother — I sang too. Quietly. The way you match someone’s volume when you understand, without being told, that this is a rare and careful thing.

Oh, oh moja droga jacie kocham

Means that I love you so

Moja droga jacie kocham

More than you’ll ever know

Kocham ciebie calem serce

Love you with all my heart

Return to me and always be

My melody of love

I didn’t really know my grandma. I was old enough to, observant enough to, curious enough to. My quiet, bookish middle-child vibe suited her quest for calm in what had been a turbulent life. I was the only grandkid making solo visits to her and my grandfather’s Ohio home. My observation tower was a high-backed stool at her kitchen peninsula. I watched her cook beets, burgers, perfectly square scrambled eggs, while pressing the under-counter doorbell my grandfather had MacGyvered, hooked to a hose in his hunting beagles’ outdoor cage. She gave them a spray when they barked too loud. I watched her iron sheets, dust her hummels, and in the evening, switch on Lawrence Welk. “And a one-a and a two-a.” But like any self-absorbed kid, I didn’t really know her.

She died when I was 19, only 63 herself — a stone’s throw from where I sit at 57. The remaining wisps of her hair from cancer treatment barely covering her pink skull. My long blonde locks, now in a French braid, caught her eye as I sat at the end of her bed. “Your hair,” she said softly. I ran my hand down the center of my braid, and saw a faint smile grace her lips.

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Forty-five years later, I was on my pilgrimage through Sweden when I walked into a dilapidated hotel, worn down wooden animal sculptures dotting the grounds, in the town of Bracke, rounding a corner and running straight into its proprietor.

Mid-30’s, clam diggers, jet black hair, a slight frame, and a sparkle in her eye. An accent that did not resemble the few Swedes I’d spoken with in those solo days on the trail.

She introduced herself. I leaned in in confusion.

“Can you spell that please?” I asked.

A-g-n-i-e-s-k-a.

“Agnieska? That’s not Swedish, is it?”

She laughed. “Most certainly not, I’m Polish.”

She’d emigrated from Poland, and ended up somehow in this nowheresville Swedish town, taking over a hotel that had shuttered during covid. She was the opposite of my grandmother in every way — spunky, sparkling, take-charge. And yet.

I told her I knew some Polish. A little. From my grandmother. From Bobby Vinton.

Moja droga jacie kocham.

My lips struggled to keep up with the sticky consonants. I said the phrase again, trying to make it sound like what I could hear in my head.

Agnieska cocked her head.

“I think you are telling me… you love me?” She laughed.

“I think I am, even though I just met you!” I replied. “And wait till you hear my Swedish,” I said. “Even worse.”

“I’d recommend against telling the Swedes you love them in your first meeting,” she teased.

“Don’t worry, I wouldn’t know how.”

She had to dash. Dinner was coming, the restaurant newly opened, the hotel still finding its feet.

Over the summer, Connor emerged one morning wearing a wrinkled green shirt with an orange fist painted across it.

”That looks like a bottom-of-the-barrel t-shirt selection,” I deadpanned.

“Yeah, I need to do my laundry,” he replied, not giving a damn that he looked like a colorblind tween on fieldtrip day.

“Roll out the barrel, we’ll have a barrel of fun…” I started singing. In our house this is called a jiddy. It’s the random song that comes to mind after you have just seen or heard something obliquely related to it. Beer Barrel Polka by Bobby Vinton had popped into my head.

I was maybe 23 when I heard it last, at a wedding of a friend I had grown up with. Her maiden name was Pryzbyz — the type of name I only realized was unique when I moved out of western PA. There were 400 people stuffed into that Beaver Falls Catholic Church basement, drinking Iron City beer and eating cabbage rolls.

“Do you know what a polka is?” I asked Connor. “You mean like a polka dot?” he responded.

I sighed.

“No, I mean a polka polka.”

He gave me the flat look of a recent teenager.

“Well, have you ever done the Chicken Dance at a wedding?” From his prone position on the couch, he flapped his arms like wings.

“I’ll take that as a yes. The Chicken Dance is a polka. So, you’ve known what a polka is all along.”

I blink, push my glasses up the bridge of my nose, and refocus on my computer screen.

Polish?

Gmail’s AI Gemini had just popped the question, apropos of nothing.

I check the note I was about to send to my tax accountant, scanning for a Polock joke or a reference to the Warsaw pact. Instead it’s W-2s and estimated taxes and pre-paid coupons. How would Gemini know I was Polish?

Ah, you dolt, it’s not asking about my heritage. It’s pixelated Karen inserting itself, wondering if I want help cleaning up my email.

Nope, no Polishing required.

With a face palm and a faint smile,

Sue

Subscribe on Substack to receive The Luminist in your inbox every Saturday — an invitation to notice reality, rather than the stories our minds and culture like to spin.

Dear listener, pinch me (not hard), because Do Loss: A New Way to Move Through Change is released this Tuesday, March 3rd in the US, and Thursday, March 5th in the UK and Europe! Thanks for supporting my work, and if you are so inclined, purchasing Do Loss.

Also, I’ll be making a few stops around the world in the next few months! I’d love to see you in person. And if you have a fave bookstore that hosts events, let me know!

Thanks for helping to get the word out on a book that I truly believe will help us suffer less, console better, and live more vibrant lives.

Subscribe on Substack to receive The Luminist in your inbox every Saturday — an invitation to notice reality, rather than the stories our minds and culture like to spin.

“Oh my god, I’m a sicko.”

I stared at my kitchen island, covered tip to tail with close to a hundred books. Some face up. Others flopped open. A smattering of author photos staring into space from back flaps. Hardcovers, paperbacks, multi-colored sticky notes jutting from the sides like tiny Buddhist prayer flags.

Hours before, I’d started a project: assemble every book from my library that had anything to do with loss. I had taken off my shoes and climbed onto the back of my couch — one hand clutching the shelf while I leaned back like a window washer on a high rise — pulling and tossing volumes onto the cushions below. Then, armload by armload, I hauled the whole lot from my office into the kitchen, dumping them onto the island in disarray.

I paused. I gaped.

There was ten years and my entire grief education, staring me in the face. Hours of reading and crying and laughing. Of writing notes in the margins. Of talking back to authors: you’ve got to be kidding me, really? Of clapping my hand to my heart in recognition: you thought that same thing?

I buried my face in my hands. Then, I cackled like a cast member in Wicked.

If a visitor gave me the side-eye after seeing my decidedly morbid library — books on the experience of losing a spouse, but also on divorce, parent loss, job loss, pregnancy loss, identity loss, really every kind of change we don’t choose — I wouldn’t blame them. But I also wouldn’t be ashamed. These books, every one of them, were my personal research. They lit my path.

Because loss has a shape. Once you recognize it — the disorientation, the before-and-after line, the strange work of building a new normal — you see it everywhere. True, someone else’s grief for their daughter or mother or way of life wasn’t my grief. But I recognized my ache, my questions, my weird gallows humor, my fleeting rays of light inside their experiences and reflections. That’s what story does. It shows you yourself in someone else’s skin.

So here was a decade of reading. A small fortune in books. A kitchen island that could no longer fulfill its primary function as a place to eat breakfast and read the newspaper. But something was still puzzling me. How did all of this fit together? There had to be a way to make sense of it. So I sorted.

I made my own taxonomy — Classics, Encouragement, Rock Stars, Poetry, Science, Quirky, etc. And once the piles were in place, something clicked. This wasn’t just a collection of books. It was a map of how I’d found my way through. Every category represented a different kind of need, a different moment in the journey. That year I spent reading rockstar memoirs. The year I turned to science. The couple of months I didn’t resonate with anything but poetry. Together they told the story of how a person survives the unsurvivable, and eventually, tentatively, rebuilds.

Surprisingly, nearly 80% of my loss library was story. Even the science books I’d chosen had a narrative spine — researchers who understood that data lands differently when it’s wrapped in a human life. Even the books I’d filed under “encouragement” were, at their core, stories of people finding their way. When I was drowning and flailing, hoping to find something to cling to, I hadn’t reached for the proscriptive. Instead, the descriptive was my salve. It gave me companionship AND ideas to try. Two birds, one (paper-based) stone.

Today, I want to lay out some of the moments of my journey and the books that met me there. I’ve come to call the books I’m about to list the Loss Canon. They are the books I box up with a sympathy card and drop at the post office every time someone I know goes through something hard. I like to think of this like The Poetry Pharmacy — William Sieghart’s brilliant anthology built on the idea that there’s a right poem for what you’re going through right now. These books work the same way. So here’s my starting list. (Don’t worry, there are more. So. Many. More.)

A sample from the ‘Classics’: It’s the OG, of course, Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking — her forensic, almost clinical examination of how her own mind behaved after suddenly losing her husband — is a book for the early but not too early days, once your brain comes back online. For when you’re trying to understand what just happened to you. For when the fog starts to thin and you want language for the thing you’ve been living.

A selection from ‘Encouragement’: Maggie Smith’s Keep Moving — a collection of small, daily encouragements born from her journey through divorce — is exactly the opposite. It’s for the morning you can barely get out of bed. Short. Direct. A hand on the shoulder.

An offering from ‘Quirky’: And then there’s Grief and Hamburgers by Stuart Ross. Yes, this is a real book. And yes, it belongs in the canon. Because some days what you need is not profundity but permission: permission to find the whole thing absurd, to laugh at the gap between how loss is supposed to look and how it actually shows up, to use silly metaphors to describe the most heartbreaking of human experiences.

The Loss Canon is not a college syllabus or a ‘best of’ book list. It’s a medicine cabinet to return to, for yourself or to hand to someone else. It made my own journey possible; just like I wouldn’t be where I am today without my kids, my family, my friends, my job, and walks in Great Falls Park, I wouldn’t be where I am today without these books.

And the book I’m publishing on Tuesday would not exist.

So as a consumer and connoisseur of the Loss Canon, I’m now adding another book to its catalog: mine. Do Loss: A New Way to Move Through Change is part memoir, part companion, part playbook: an offering of my learnings, wrapped in story. Every clue I gathered from the authors on my kitchen island mixed and mingled with my own experiences until, eventually, I knew I had to write it all down.

Do Loss doesn’t fit neatly into my Loss Canon taxonomy. Instead, it’s a combo platter of what resonated most for me in the books above: pragmatic and inspiring, humorous and earnest, encouraging and empowering. It also isn’t just about loss, but about change. Because life has a way of destabilizing us (even when it’s a change we wanted!) and after hundreds of hours of reading the stories in the Loss Canon, I wanted to share some universalities about transition that might help us land on our feet.

I’m honored to offer it to every person who can benefit from an honest conversation about the toughest parts of being human.

So whether you’re in it right now, or you’re sitting across from someone who is, feeling useless and wishing you had the right words, remember this: sometimes the thing heartbreak needs is witness and companionship. Not a five-step solution, but a story. An unpolished account of someone else being broken irreparably, and how they still somehow survived.

As I stood at my kitchen island looking at a decade of reading, what I felt — aside from the obvious questions regarding my sanity — was gratitude. These books had been there when I needed them most. They had shown me myself, and where one day I could be.

And now, along with Do Loss, I want to pass them on to you.

In awe of how loss has shaped me and my life,

Sue

The Loss Canon is an ongoing project — a curated set of books across categories: Classics, Stories, Rock Stars, Encouragement, Quirky, Fiction, Poetry, Science. As a sneak peak, below is a picture of the ‘Classics’. Stay tuned for more installments, and if a book has been a companion through your own loss, I’d love to hear about it.

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