An excerpt from an essay I wrote under the same name, “The Other Room” —

Years ago, I read somewhere that death is just another room. I think it was in an Instagram post, where a woman was talking about a friend on an anniversary of her passing. I remember thinking it was a really lovely way of thinking about death. It stuck with me. And when Ava died, that other room transformed from a lovely idea into a reality in my life. Now, somebody I loved was there.

Life will never again be, at least for me, the kind of wonderful and undisturbed, rhymed and reasoned way it was before Ava died on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon. But it will be something else, something with possibility, something ferocious yet worth loving. I miss her terribly, and more than that I miss what the world could have been if she were still in it. What the world once was, and what it can never be again.

Life moves forward. Today, the sun rose. I turn my face toward it. I hug my mother tighter. I tell my friends I love them, often. I welcome grief—let it swallow me whole—joy, too. I follow Ava’s memory into another day under the sun. I feel her all around me. I know she is still here, daydreaming. Now, from somewhere else. Another place, somewhere far away yet still strangely near — 

The other room.