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go on sheddy

last night i found out that a young member of my extended community has passed on. her name is sheddy.

she was in the car when i got scooped from the airport on my first visit to detroit, and in the car at 6am in the morning with breakfast pastries when i got picked up and taken back to the airport after working with detroit summer for two days and beginning my relationship with this city.

my first impression of her was sweetness and easy sensuality – it was undeniable, just in her nature. over the years our paths crossed many times because she was a beloved of people i loved, all of whom just wanted more of her. i came to feel the same way. with time i learned that she was sweet, supportive and humble. her presence was powerful.

i grieve her short life – she’d just turned 28 in february.

i am sitting with the ways grief is more and more public these days, and thus more collective, maybe faster. it now feels like the news of a death has to move so quickly to try and reach people before it becomes a part of the internet. and grief, by it’s nature, is an incomprehensible emotion which renders words useless, empty. the life you long for is outside of the words, and what you can speak to is the absence, the great absence. that is exacerbated on a facebook feed. the individual words feel so small against what has happened.

and yet…i am glad there is a place to turn to for a digital shiva for sheddy, which facebook has been for other griefs over the past couple of years. it does feel oddly comforting, with such a broad network of people now woven and weaving together, to sit in that wider web of those changed in some way by the loss, to see how much love flowed into her life, to comfort each other, read and tell stories, share pictures.

it is a complex, muted sadness, that which comes from being touched briefly by a powerful soul. i am grateful sheddy touched my life, and i hope she is able to go on with only peace.