So I’ve decided to become an influencer and turn this Substack into a travel blog.
Just kidding.
I did have a great time in DC with my sister this weekend, though! You know how I like to randomly challenge myself? Well, things were going so well for me on Saturday morning that I decided to see whether I could get all the way from Ashtabula to DC without stopping. Turns out that I can, and also that it’s a bad idea (since not taking a pee break for seven-plus hours ends up feeling pretty awful). But I did it!
I got to spend time in two incredible Black-owned independent bookstores that afternoon, which were both awesome.
Saturday evening, my sister arrived from NYC and she and I got to see Josh Ritter (one of my favorite musicians) perform. It’s definitely on my list of the best concerts I’ve ever seen. He was great, the venue (the Birchmere in Alexandria, VA) was fantastic, and we had an awesome time.
Afterward, we figured out the very best way to see the Mall and monuments scattered around it—via e-bike and e-scooter! We traveled around seven miles and got to bask in the history of the place, which I love so much, but without having to WALK seven miles. I cannot recommend it enough to you.
Emily and I stayed up late talking, then got up on Sunday morning and went to see You Can See Everything. I know that I watched it last weekend, but my second viewing was even better, and getting to experience it with my sister was incredibly fun.
Ashley stayed at my house with the girls, and continues to cement herself as one of my favorite people. She is so great with them, and I cannot overstate how much of a gift it is for me to know Coco and Ivy are safe and happy and healthy while I’m gallivanting all over the place. I feel so lucky that I found her on the Rover app, and even luckier to have her as a friend. The girls’ lives are enriched a great deal by having her around—what a blessing. She was absolutely fine with staying late with them so that I could stay in DC longer with Emily, and that extra time was another gift for us both.
Speaking of Emily, we’ve just got so much in common that I forget about when I’m not with her. It feels so great to just share the same space with her. It’s hard to not live close to any of my family, it always has been. I don’t regret the choice I made thirty years ago to pack up everything I owned and drive to Ashtabula, because Kellie was worth the pain of disconnection that decision brought into my life. It was something that had to happen the way it happened, because it taught me that I could trust my heart. Even if nobody but Kellie and I thought it was a good idea, it was the best possible idea in all possible worlds. But I miss my sister when we aren’t together, and seeing each other is often a very joyful experience.
Speaking of possibilities, I keep thinking about all those other possible realities surrounding Kellie’s death and what they might have been like. It’s easy to come up with scenarios in my head where something would have changed and she didn’t die, or at least didn’t die so early in her life. It doesn’t help me to dwell on hypotheticals, especially when I’m powerless to make any of them happen retroactively. The fact that it doesn’t help me doesn’t stop me from doing it from time to time, though.
I know that I couldn’t have saved her after she fell down, because she was already gone. It literally took seconds for her to die. It could not have been faster. I also know that seeing a doctor faster probably wouldn’t have changed anything. She had those appointments scheduled, but nobody realized how serious her health issues truly were (if she did even have health issues that caused her death instead of something acute that couldn’t have been predicted). Since we have no way to know what actually killed her, due to the bizarre choices made by the coroner’s office, it’s all guesswork on my end. It will always be a question mark, and can never be resolved.
I don’t blame myself for Kellie’s death. I can think of things that I could have done in the time between her hospitalization and her death that I didn’t do, but that’s just a normal part of living. None of us can predict the future, and I’m not going to torture myself with a false narrative that Kellie somehow neglected very serious health issues and knew that she was going to/let herself die.
I know how much Kellie didn’t want to be dead. We talked about it fairly often—she wanted to live as long as humanly possible. Me too. So please don’t tell me she was tired and decided it was time for herself to suddenly die—I don’t believe that for a second. Whatever happened to her on an internal body systems level would have happened regardless of what we did or didn’t do. Whether it was a pulmonary embolism, or a brain aneurysm, or a heart attack, or something else. Regardless.
She died at the age of 49, and that’s hugely unfair. She had literally decades of living left to do. We had so many plans, and it would have been unthinkable if you’d asked either of us the day before she died whether death was at our doorstep. It was unpredictable, it was unavoidable, and I cannot stress enough to you that I don’t feel any solace from the argument that “it was part of God’s plan” for her to die. I don’t blame God, or the universe, or Kellie, or myself. It was just a thing that happened and was always going to happen in the way it did.
I sure wish I knew in advance, so I could have done more living with her on a conscious and intentional level. Or even so I could have kissed her one last time before we walked down that hall. The events of that afternoon are never going to leave my brain, I’m sure of that. But it was always going to happen that day, in that way.
So how do I reconcile my belief in God with my belief that Kellie’s death was not part of some cosmic plan? I’m figuring that out as I go. I am perfectly capable of joy in this new timeline. I like my life, lots of the time. I’m happy more often than I’m unhappy. But I will never feel that any of this joy is worth Kellie’s death. As I’ve written here before, she’s not in a “better place”, because here with me is the best place she could possibly be. And that trade-off is never going to be worth it to me.
I think of it as a new life and a new timeline in a new dimension where I’m without her. There might be other universes where she’s still alive, and I hope there are. But in this one, here’s the life I have been given. This is the situation, no matter how I feel about it. And I’m going to continue doing my best to make the most of the situation. Not because it’s somehow better than my former life, because it’s not. It’s just unrecognizably different in almost every single way. Both things can be true. That’s how I make it through.
Today, I had to go and get a test done at UH Geneva. When I checked in, they asked if Lindsay is my emergency contact (she is) and whether I want her to be informed if I’m hospitalized (I do). After that, she asked if she lives in my household, and I said no, she’s a friend. And then she asked if I also want my spouse, Kellie Butler, to be informed if I get hospitalized. That really threw me for a loop and I wasn’t entirely sure how to respond—I eventually said no, that she’s been deceased for more than six months. I’ve taken her out of the system, but for some reason I still got asked. And since I was flustered, the desk lady got flustered, and then she kept apologizing, which made me feel even worse. It really sucks that these little reminders are everywhere, everywhere, everywhere.
Anyway.
I love being able to spend time almost every single day trying to further process my grief about this unmistakably tragic loss in this medium, and I love sharing it with anyone who takes the time to read these words.
Thank you for being here, whether it’s a good day or not.
Now don’t forget to smash that subscribe button, true mattfans.
XOXO,
Matt