“Encouraging people is like the greatest feeling in the world.” And he did encourage people. One blogger recalls: “He was able to say …the things I needed to hear in a way that I actually heard them. [H]is support and encouragement changed my life. But this loss, like Dylan’s loss, feels like a smack in the face; a radical recalibration toward what brings us to this practice.

“Love someone back,” she wrote in a poem that I read the first day I realized I already loved her and always would. “You just begin.” So I began. Sometimes if I close my eyes, I can go back into that moment, finding the colors now reflected against the flesh under my lids; I can imagine her posture and her size, her eyes wide open, taking it in; and then, whether it actually happened then or not, her shoulder at my shoulder, her left hand slipped into my right hand, forever there.

Conway was arguably an extreme point in the convex hull of all mathematicians.

You can tell that the poet misses his pet, misses this unique relationship in his life that—itself like a star—helped orient him on certain too-quiet nights when he was lost at sea. It is a marvelous demonstration of how to write about animals: by using specific memories, and not anthropomorphizing them to such a degree that they lose their essential dogginess or catness or mongooseness, but, instead, by recognizing their striking, sometimes sublime differences from us, alongside their similarities. ​ Sometimes, it is enough, as Neruda understood, to have someone look at us to remind us we exist, and that someone, or something, cares that we do. ​ listening with drooping eyes and the occasional blustery sneeze.) He was wonderfully just-there, an uncritical receptacle for my childhood loneliness.

The type of seeing we’re referring to here is less ocular and more oracular. ​ There are hidden pennies everywhere. Our job is to see them. ​ Because in the end, after all of your goals are over and through (achieved or not), when the final tally is counted, these are the only pennies you can keep.

So please: imagine your closest relationships, and imagine losing them in an instant. Figure out what would be left unsaid and say it. ​ I’m grateful for my friends/family who didn’t ask — they showed up. ​ On our year traveling the world, Alex and I would often look at gravestones near old decrepit churches. At some point in history, these gravestones were new and people would perhaps lay flowers on them. Years later, maybe a relative or two would come by on an anniversary or birthday. Decades later, maybe some stranger from the same village would recognize the name and smile slightly. But soon, the marker is anonymous. When we saw many of them, the march of nature had worn them into illegibility. Tombstones are a shout in the dark, but eventually the echoes subside. So this post is my digital tombstone for Alex. I like to think it’s better because it’ll help me remember her. And maybe help you know her a little better so you can remember her as well.

😭

At the service, I read the eulogy below, which tried to explain why he was special to so many of us. Writing it was easy, at least in part because he wrote the best bits himself. The hard part was reading it. He was unabashedly silly. He laughed at his own jokes and at yours. He made it very easy to love him.

I first read Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese” on Twitter, which explains something of why her work is both beloved and dismissed. It’s a boring discussion: I enjoyed this, but is it art? I won’t stoop to take the bait of it here. “Wild Geese” is one of those telegraphic poems that announces its meaning without flourish from the very outset: You do not have to be good. I feel worthy of being in the world when I think of “Wild Geese.” I feel that the world has use for me. It’s a poem of arresting lucidity and wisdom. It would be stupid to call it simple in that way that suggests that simplicity is a moral good or an aesthetically preferable state. But I also won’t say that it is complex, as though one needs to apologize for the spare nonpyrotechnics of the piece. Instead, I’ll say simply that “Wild Geese” is a poem that made me want to breathe again. The speaker, in an act of breathtaking generosity, offers the reader, no matter how lowly or afield they have found themselves, an opportunity to reenter the world. There is an entreaty to follow the natural grain of one’s character, to heed one’s desire.

Mary Oliver has died. I have a friend who used to keep her poem “Wild Geese” folded up in his wallet. It begins: You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees For a

“James had this amazing way of being a total realist, seeing all of the world’s flaws and acknowledging them, and remaining passionate and optimistic.”

At the service, I read the eulogy below, which tried to explain why he was special to so many of us. Writing it was easy, at least in part because he wrote the best bits himself. The hard part was reading it. He laughed at his own jokes and at yours. He made it very easy to love him.