Today, June 30th, is the second anniversary of a dear friend’s final transition. Writing from Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International airport in Atlanta and then on the plane to New York, I am reminded that Em (not her real name) spent a significant portion of final years of her life in airports, on planes, and in hotels. With the desire for deep familiar connections and mutual sense of belonging, she sold her home of 40 years and relocated to live near family. Em discovered that while in real estate location location location is paramount in dictating value, geography of deep human connection operates by very different tenet. Spending have her times air-bound hoping and praying that if she gambled the utmost, her life and her future, she would hit the love and belonging jackpot. Then, Covid 19 ruptured her already broken spirit. She moved and traveled and traveled and moved in the midst of catastrophic viral contagion; putting her very body on the line for love and belonging. When lockdown took hold she was already fraying. Her investment of time and money, will and intent, appear to be all too late. It became evident that she belonged to those of us suffer from bad timing in familial as well as romantic love. And, there was no denying it

In one of our first sharing she spoke at length about her first love, or her first deeply entangled love, the one to whom she had revealed the then fullness of herself. In our discussions it was a narrative she returned to with some degree of frequency. Through a series of happenings (much of which I can’t recall correctly or should not reveal here or anywhere) they were apart for several months. Her absence sent him into a spiral of mental destress and disruptions and he prematurely ended his life. But before those horrific months, Em and Al (not is real name) had connected so deeply and enduringly that 50+ years later it was their story that Em shared in a different nascent moment of deep connection. Em and I were impossible: in years, culture, race, economic and social status we were near opposite ends of these poles. We were deeply aligned when it came to education, both having master degrees that centered disability, hers in education mine in religion and sociology. This alignment spoke of our mutual concern for vulnerable bodies within the problematic society in which we lived. And, so Em’s training and life work made her keenly aware when she herself was becoming and ultimately became a vulnerable body. And she railed against it. Fought tooth and nail to keep the value of her body, though she was aging and aged against her will. She saw herself being silenced and ignored, when she had come to understand herself as The One with answers and strategies for navigating and negotiating space and place in upper-middle and affluent U.S. society. And by the time she made her transition, she was exhausted from the dogged ritual of claiming that she mattered and was entitled to belonging, if not love. What Em shared of what she understood of her life is that love had outwitted her, never being quite where she hoped, leaving her more-or-less defenseless when called to defend her own truth of love, and that she was too self possessed to belong to anything that could not accept or value her fullness of self.

She is well missed. And… Loved. Still.