Originally Published February 11th, 2021 Technically, this is less blog and more personal essay. I'm writing a little more in my free time now, entering a few contests along the way and sharpening my skills a bit. This essay is a product of that. We lost Alan sixteen years ago. It was an incredibly difficult time for just about anybody who knew him personally. I've never written about it before, for whatever reason; I didn't want to bring up bad memories, or make his family and friends uncomfortable, or my own husband, for that matter (which is ridiculous, when you consider how secure we are in our marriage). I found excuses to shove those memories back into the furthest depths of my mind—until just recently. I was prompted to write a personal essay about an event in my life. Well, this is about as personal as it gets. And now I'm putting it out there, for the world to see, regardless of insecurities or vulnerability. This is how we grow. So here it is. A Kindred Soul, Taken I can't breathe. I can not breathe. Oh. This is what hyperventilating feels like. Well, this is a new sensation. What do I do? I 'm sitting on the front steps of our trailer, and the pair of homicide detectives standing in front of me aren't doling out any advice, so I put my head between my legs. It seems to help. I'm so confused. Wasn't it just this morning when I sent a prayer up to the Lord, thanking Him for gracing me with such a kind-hearted man? No. It's 4 o'clock in the morning, so that would've been yesterday. Eighteen hours ago, I whispered my gratitude to God. Now I'm describing every detail of the man I love; my Alan. The crack in his glasses, the skulls on his arm, the tiger on his shoulder. And, with every word, their expressions grow evermore grim; they're silently confirming what I already know. I've known it for four hours. I knew it when he failed to return to the hotel—when he left me to walk home from work alone. The convenience store he'd set out for was only a block away. I'd checked it. I checked the motel across the street, wandering the halls, trying to remember his friend's room number. I checked back with my co-workers, but there was no sign of him. I walked home in the dark and called the front desk every thirty minutes to see if he'd come back. I sat in the hallway of our trailer and cried because I knew it then, despite our roommate's best efforts to console me—his concern for my safety would never allow him to abandon me so. The detectives don't confirm my suspicion, though; they can't, not right away. I'm only the fiancé, not next of kin. Never mind his promises to marry me next month. Never mind my studded leather engagement bracelet or my turquoise marijuana-leaf ring. I'm nobody. His sister? Did they ask about his sister, or did our roommate mention her? She's here, in the same park, but in hiding. They assure me, they don't care about the warrant for her arrest. And I need so desperately to know. I need confirmation. It's obvious, my gut tells me, but I need the words to escape their tightened lips. "Your brother is dead," our roommate tells Alan's best friend, sleeping on the couch. Your brother is dead; my God, what a shocking wake. But his girlfriend is here to console him. Our roommate's boyfriend is here, for her. Alan's sister, his mother; their somebodies are alive. My somebody is gone; he's never coming back. My entire future's changed in a matter of minutes, and my shoulder to cry on is never coming back. I've never felt such loneliness. But I don't speak of it. I bury these words for decades. Because it isn't about me. It isn't about his mother, his grandmother, his siblings. It's about him. It's about a life taken too soon—a beautiful, charitable, knowledgeable life—my kindred soul.

If I could change the past without changing the present, I would have listened to my mother when she told me at my sister’s seventh birthday party to go inside. That day, five-year-old me played chicken with a one-hundred-and-some-odd-pound Rottweiler and lost. Dog. His name was Dog, and he was the sweetest. My grandfather would have put him to sleep that day, if not for my grandmother holding her ground. It wasn’t Dog’s fault, after all—my nickname growing up was Klutz for a reason. But Dog shied away from me for years after that… I suspect he was more traumatized by the events that day than I was. My sister’s birthday was ruined, of course—something she never once threw in my face. It was a nasty break. My parents rushed me to the hospital, my father nearly went white when they drilled that traction rod through my knee, and I woke up afterward in a full-body cast. The next three weeks presented me with my mother sleeping on a couch in my hospital room, a birthday cake baked by a nurse for my 6th birthday, many gifts, including a stuffed cat from my grandfather who never bought presents on his own, and countless replays of my Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory VHS tape. My mother, by the way, is a saint. Five-going-on-six is a rough age for a child to be strapped to a hospital bed, so she did everything she could to make it better. She tied three ribbons to the trapeze bar I used to lift myself when it was time to change the sheets and taught me how to braid. She suffered through my obsessions with Gene Wilder and Julie Andrews, listening to me sing Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious more times than I’d like to admit. And she stayed by my side, away from the comfort of home. But more importantly, she kept me in check. Because like I said, five-going-on-six is a rough age for a child in the hospital. My birthday cake didn’t have cherries on it. I didn’t get to choose my birthday dinner. The orderlies were all elderly, and I didn’t have friends to keep me company. So, when little ol’ me started to feel a sense of entitlement, she’d throw a meow my way. Literally, she would meow at me. It was her very polite, discrete cue, telling me to mind myself. And it worked—hell, it still works. After that, they removed my cast—too soon, unfortunately. The day I went home, I wanted to sit on the porch with my sister and her friend, but going downstairs was no easy task with crutches and I tumbled. Only, I couldn’t go back to the hospital, I’d just gotten home. I cried, I begged, and I talked my parents into letting me sleep in a recliner in the living room that night. The next morning we went back to the hospital and found out that I’d broken the bone again. However, since we postponed our return trip, the bones had begun to fuse together improperly. The only fix? For the doctor to break it, of course. Within one month the bone in my leg had seen three breaks. I started the second grade in a new city with a cast and crutches, couldn’t run a mile without limping, couldn’t play sports in school... I still can’t straighten my leg completely and will have issues with my knee for the rest of my life. But those aren’t the reasons for my regret… My regret comes from adulthood, from the knowledge of what life really is once you’re older. I was the youngest of three children. We were considered, at best, upper-lower-class well into my teenage years, at which point we finally hit lower-middle-class just as lower-middle-class became obsolete. My mother suffered from a chronic stomach bug (a mystery to her many doctors for a full decade, and another story all on its own), and could barely keep down food or water so she was prone to fainting spells and constantly accused of drug abuse. My father worked full-time, but it was a struggle. And my mother worked as much as she could, usually at a diner near home, but when you’re hardly able to stand, how can you work a full-time job? So here my parents were, doing their absolute best to raise my brother, my sister, and myself. And I had to go break my leg. Thousands in debt and weeks of taking me back and forth to the All Children’s Hospital, simply because I did not go inside when my mother told me to. If I could change the past without changing the present, I would have saved my parents so much heartache and so much stress. And I know, of course, it isn’t possible to relive your regrets, to make better decisions, to take wiser paths… But oh, how I wish I could.