It’s now twelve days since Amy left us. I don’t really want to count the days, but it gives me some perspective on a time that already feels boundless. It’s a new world for me that’s just coming on two weeks old. It’s built on the still-warm ashes of my old world and it’s relentlessly rising into new mornings.

People keep asking how I am doing. That is a reasonable and important question. It requires real thought and heart-work to reply. That’s necessary work for me now, and so I appreciate the question. Here is my answer from this moment:

I think about Amy a lot. Everything around me is full of her and our story. The thrifty-magpie collector in her found the couch I a sitting on left by the roadside. The small table next to it is covered with colorful books and art she gave me. The warm (but salty!) dog at my feet has been our companion and daily marvel for ten years. This place is brimming with reminders and our artifacts.

Like an archaeologist I sift through her things and my memories, hoping for insight into her mind and her hidden lives. Friends come and help with the careful digging, blowing dust off images and brushing unseen surfaces with the lightest touch. Everyone wonders what part they could have played in this tragedy, even the smallest, both seeking and sometimes fearing the answers. “What if I’d said…done…known…?” I’m a perplexed chief in this tribe of conflicted seekers.

What I know is that Amy’s illness did not come from any one thing anyone did. Not even any one pattern or personal dynamic that carried through time. She loved every single one of us and in her heart knew that we loved her. She really did.

Still, we build hypotheses about her mind and heart; try to construct airtight theories about why Amy left us the way she did. But like all reconstructions of past lives, the deeper mysteries remain. Somehow I can live with that. I now know more clearly that Amy layered troubled thoughts and feelings under her joyful face and packed schedule. The busy and joyful faces she showed us were real, but so were the quiet and troubled ones below. Like dark animals in a wood, her other lives could be glimpsed but never were brought into the light.

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My days have been beautiful swirlings of dog walks in the autumn-lit hills with my brother and friends; eating of the delicious plenty that people have brought us; and greeting bright, sad faces at the door. It’s all terrible and amazing, and I couldn’t ask for a better launch into this new world without Amy.

The anguished surfing through grief-waves that consumed me earlier has mostly calmed down. I am not collapsing into tears at the sight of an old photo or scenting her favorite jacket. I seem to be out beyond the breakers, on longer slower waves of sadness. I don’t know what these rollers hold for me but I intend to keep sailing onward. I know many people are among the dark towers of anguish over Amy, and I’m sorry. I can say it’s possible, and probably good, to keep swimming out toward open waters. Find a jet-ski if you can…

A few days ago my brother and I took the dogs and some of Amy’s ashes down to the creek. We walked in silence down paths Amy and I had walked a thousand times. Along the channel where trout spawn, past the path to Osa’s grave; under the great trunks of Ponderosas etched by bear claws, and the high boughs of Cottonwoods that could fall any moment.

Over the bridge, I found the faint trail to the perfect swimming hole that Amy and I frequented. With four puzzled dogs looking on, we stripped down to the skin and waded into the icy water. The shock of the cold and what we were doing hit me. Steadying on the smooth rocks, I spread her ashes on the water and saw them swirl away into the current and sink to the bottom as a strangely beautiful constellation. Maybe with guiding stars to navigate this new terrain.

It gives me comfort to know that Amy will always be in that creek as it flows from mountains I love past my home and through my circles of friends. Pieces of her will be present in the plants and birds and bugs here, and the silent forest-dwellers we only half-see. These waters that hold her, and us, are fully connected; touching all waters upstream through tiny streams and trickling springs, and downstream to greater rivers finally the ocean. Then the waters return to this corner of the new world; carried on thunderstorms and blizzards that frighten and amaze us.

To you all from the losses and loves we share - Dave

It is now seven days since Amy left us. It’s been an unbelievable week in the deepest sense of that word. I never imagined we would be here. My sorrow at her hidden pain and for our collective loss is immeasurable. Amy’s family is bereft in ways I can’t truly fathom.

Her friends from 20 years of life in Montana are also devastated by her loss. They (you) are pelting me with beautiful blizzards of support and love. Since last Tuesday it’s been a non-stop train of visitors, phone messages, bushels of fantastic food, and heartfelt pledges of long-haul support. All of you are quite literally holding me aloft through this awe-full time.

My only regret in this period is that I have not been able to respond or connect with everyone to report how I am doing, what I might need, and to properly appreciate the vastness of the gifts I’ve received. This writing is intended to share what’s been in my mind and heart these days because I cannot talk with all of you nearly as much or as deeply as you deserve.

For those who don’t know me, I was Amy’s partner for over fifteen years and we lived together for most of that time. We’ve been in a small house next to a beautiful creek with a couple of dogs in the friendliest neighborhood I’ve ever known.

Finding Amy gone cast me into a black cold sea of disbelief and sorrow. There was absolutely nothing that connected that terrible moment to the life we had shared. My heart and mind were pounding against a reality that just couldn’t be real. Those were the hardest moments of my life.

But they passed like all our moments do. People arrived. A desperate friend and then the police. Then more friends and neighbors, and then dear people from Helena and Livingston and my brother from Seattle - all came to me with amazing speed. My own time slowed and sped unpredictably through waves of grief and anguished reflection.

Over time I began to recover a sort of reason and an awkward kind of humor. I could forget for moments why there were so many lovely people beating down my physical and digital doors to give me everything they could imagine that might help. 

Amy’s Mother, Father, and Sister arrived. Their grief was equal to mine and we swam into it together.

Was all this overwhelming? Yes. In the most necessary way. Being with people who share this enormous loss has kept me from wallowing in pain or staggering into toxic mental loops. I have had to keep on my feet to welcome people and to respond. Being upright and active is a good thing for me. Meeting people also brings on the cycles of SORROW - CRYING - CALM - HUMOR - REFLECTION that my current state of being seems to require.

I told my counselor that it’s like being on a jet ski blasting out through heavy surf. The grief-waves come fast and steep but amazingly you can get through all of them. Without the jet ski velocity of all you legions of annoying and loving co-grievers, I’d be dog paddling hopelessly through that surf, choking underwater, and washed back ashore to anxiously swim out again. So PLEASE keep coming to me with wonderfully annoying help!

This ongoing contact with loving, brilliant, knowledgeable, and experienced mourners has also allowed me to weave together strands of memory, reason, psychology, life-history, intuition and medicine into an understanding of how Amy could have arrived at the heartbreaking point of ending her life. 

A key insight I've gained from the mental health world is that a profoundly depressed mind does not work at all in the same way other minds do. It’s on a different psychic plane where logic, emotion, and value do not apply in any way we would recognize. And that a depressed mind can co-exist in a person with another mind that we would recognize as rational and sane.

There are lots of other factors in Amy’s personal, work, family, and social life that also influenced her state of mind. I can’t explain it all here, but it seems like a perfect storm of influences knocked her down a dark path. There will never be a definitive answer but I believe that we can at least point in the direction of the truth.

That’s important to me, and maybe to you too. I have confidence in this loosely woven narrative because it’s been twined by the clear minds and warm hearts of people who knew and loved Amy alongside me. It’s a small but real comfort for me on these hard days.

I know that Amy was loved and that she knew that. I know that she loved all of us and the world in a way that I will never fully appreciate. I know that her sane heart and mind longed to spend every long day of a long life rejoicing with us. I also know now that she was profoundly unwell in a way that none of us could see or understand, and that that condition led to her death.

My path from here is to try with all I have to remember and realize Amy’s spirit in the world. I saw her tender fierceness, her wild creativity, her appreciation of every worldly detail; her desire to curate, combine and share the beauties she found; her irrepressible sense of adventure; her desire to connect people, places, ideas, nature, and art for the benefit of all. I knew her lovely collapses into laughter, and her sharp mind. She loved to snuggle on the couch with popcorn, too.

All of those qualities and abilities will always be present in the world and in all of us. We’ve only lost the way Amy crystallized that beauty into one being. That loss is, again, unbelievable. But I’m committed to keeping her spirit alive by living those qualities every day.

On Sunday I rode my bike down a swooping trail lit by slanting fall light. I was trying to be present for that moment as Amy might have been. My vision sharpened and my heart rose through the rollercoaster turns and drops. I reveled in the place, in my good fortune, and in the beauty of it all. It was a moment of peace and I felt Amy riding with me.

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