Your beautiful mind

I know how lucky I am to have met you, changed with you, grown with you. I know how lucky I am that I have pictures and videos and notes to remember our time together. I am beyond lucky to call you my soulmate, my life partner, my best friend, my absolutely everything. For all these reasons and more, the loss of your life is heartbreaking. Soul crushing. Holding the gratitude together with the grief is almost more than I can bear.

There’s no sense in comparing various secondary losses, because the biggest loss of all is that you aren’t alive anymore. The secondary losses each hurt in their own massive and complex ways. Right now I’m thinking about how tragic it is for the world that your mind isn’t here helping you do all the incredible things you once did. I believe you are still with me, that you haven’t left entirely. But it’s very different now that you’re no longer in a body here on Earth with the rest of us. We have to take up your mantle, and I think it’ll take a lot of us to come close to what you could achieve.

The way you think is so unique. The combination of STEM-inspired precision, attention to detail, and logical reasoning with your empathy, curiosity, and compassion for others is truly remarkable. Your creativity and love of the arts added great depth. Your love of learning new things about a wide variety of topics really challenged me to learn more, too. Those things all combined to create a one-of-a-kind perspective, a worldview that few can hope to achieve through serious effort. And it all came quite naturally to you. That isn’t to discount how hard you worked, though. Through finding your path and earning your degree despite the constant setbacks, you proved to the world that you could not be stopped. Each new challenge was simply a bump on the road that, while never easy to tackle, paled in comparison to your resilience and determination.

I have always admired the way your brain works. You constantly taught me new ways to do things, ways to see the world, ways to understand people, ways to keep going when I thought it was impossible. I could really use a whole bunch of that right now. I am beside myself with grief, and since day one, I have been repeating the same phrase: the only person I want to help me through this is you. You were so tender and kind and supportive when I lost my Aunt Leslie, and I just know that you could find the right thing to say to make me feel a bit better now, were that not impossible. 

I was so lucky to be by your side as you shed the perfectionism that held you back as a younger person. The way you worked so hard to allow yourself to play, have fun, make art for its own sake and as a way of expressing yourself was beyond admirable. You’ve inspired me countless times; truly, you are my muse. I hope that I can make you as proud of me as I always have been of you. I love you, and I always will.