In another life, under different circumstances, I might be inclined to do a Bond villainesque chair turn, followed by my most gravitas-laden voice saying something to the effect of, “You may be wondering why I’ve gathered you all here.” Shawntel, of course, would then sigh in faux exasperation, possibly accompanied by an eye roll.
Hello, everyone who may have been surprised to get an alert for a new blog post. My name is Alan. Before I get started with...whatever this is, I want to make something clear up front, because it might seem odd if noticed while reading these. Basically, I won’t really be describing Shawntel very much. At least, in the context of what she was like, no matter how overwhelmingly positive. The main reason for that is something that hit me pretty hard during the leadup to the memorial, and has proven very difficult to shake. Even at my verbose best – or worst; your choice – nothing I say or write (or think) ever feels like it's good enough. No string of adjectives, regardless of how obscure or poetic or esoteric or hyperbolic, ever looks or sounds remotely meaningful enough, as if the words themselves just aren’t worthy of the subject they’re describing. That probably sounds pretty obvious, but try coming up with something that feels like a fitting tribute for someone you love. Yeah, like wedding vows, except that the person in question is gone, and what you’ve written and/or are saying is meant to stand in as a representation of who that person was and what he or she meant to you. There’s a reason we pay funeral homes to do stuff like this, and I now have a far greater appreciation for them than I ever did before. One of Shawntel’s best friends, Katie, put this all in perspective when I was struggling with helping to write the memorial post on her blog: “None of this is a substitute for her being alive.”
Sobering, eh? But appropriately so. That’s why there won’t be many flowery descriptions. I can and will describe things she liked, how she’d react to certain things, but it just feels empty to say that she was beautiful, smart, funny, clever, creative, optimistic, hopeful, uplifting, etc., etc., etc. Those are just words, especially now. On the other hand, I feel just fine relaying that she hated puns, but only when someone else (i.e., me) made them. I do it, and she’d roll her eyes and audibly groan. If she came up with one, though, she’d laugh her ass off for five minutes, and I’m not even exaggerating. Hell, her Etsy shop was named WellOwlBe. How hypocritical is that?!
Anyway, what am I doing here? As many of you undoubtedly know, today is Shawntel’s birthday. A year ago, she wrote here about turning forty, and what that milestone meant to her. I've known very few people that have ever been so happy to turn forty. Then, just six weeks later, she was gone. It’s difficult to believe that it’s been almost a year since she passed, but that hits in oft contradictory ways. Primarily, it feels like we’ve been without her for far, far longer than that. At the same time, though, it can’t possibly have been a year, already. That day – April 8, for those keeping track at home – seemed to happen in slow motion while also being a careening, confusing blur. Surreal is the word I’d often use on the rare occasion I’d talk about it, and it still feels like the best way to describe life since then.
None of that answers what I’m doing with this right now. The answer is something. Or nothing, really. I don’t know. It’s her birthday, and our first one without her. Less than two months from now, it’ll mark one year since we lost her. As has so often been true for much of this past year, I don’t know what I’m doing, but I want to talk about her. So, I will. Starting today. I’m not a writer by any stretch, and that probably became apparent a good half dozen or more paragraphs ago. She was a writer, though. That’s why you’re even reading this right now, after all. It's her blog! To me, it seems at least somewhat fitting to maybe end her blog on a less abrupt, more complete note than life allowed last spring.
I’ll probably put something new up every so often – maybe weekly – between now and April 8, and then I plan to repost her memorial as the last blog entry here. (We’ve fixed the pictures on it so that, if anyone refreshes last year’s or reshares the link, it won’t have that dissonantly odd pic of Brynn making a mock sad face, which was taken years ago as she lamented stolen food. While Shawntel would’ve found it very funny, it could certainly be a bit jolting to those of us mourning her, so it’s been fixed. I don’t know why it so stubbornly kept coming up as the default in the first place, but it didn’t let go of that spot without a fight. That also seems appropriate.) That would probably also be a good time to change her Facebook page over to archive/memorial mode. Brevity is not my strength, so I’ll end this here and follow shortly with a post chronicling how we met. You already know how it ends. I'll revisit how it began.
In terms of significant others, I’ve found that the best time to meet someone is when you really don’t want to. Or, at a minimum, when you’re not trying. When you’re just doing your own thing, going about your life, perfectly content with how everything’s shaping up to that point and for the foreseeable future beyond. That’s the ideal time for someone to come merrily along to muck everything up, the universe decides. Which is pretty much what happened in the summer of 2014.
That’s when I got a notification that someone had sent a message to my OKCupid account. At the time, I’d been paying so little attention that I would’ve bet money that I’d already deactivated that profile. Clearly, though, I hadn’t, since it was telling me I had a message. So, I read it. And then I’d deactivate the profile, I figured. As implied above, I wasn’t really looking to meet anyone. I was working two jobs, muddling through the prereqs needed to start nursing school, and barely finding the time to keep the grass mowed to a length deemed acceptable by my neighbor. I didn’t even have time for a dog, let alone a human with unknown care-and-feeding requirements (and they’re never honest about those up front).
Still, I read the message. From eBookworm81. Perfectly fine, as far as introductions go. On to her profile, then, the intent to deactivate my account notwithstanding. Alright, she’s cute enough, clever enough, and she knows how to write, were my superficial impressions. None of that changed my situation, though. I still wasn’t looking to meet anyone, and I still doubted I had the time to properly devote to someone else, anyway. Still, though, I didn’t want to be rude and just not answer. Besides, how often does something like this actually work out and lead somewhere significant? It’s a very small percentage, if you do the math.
At most, I’d send an appropriately superficial, cute, and clever reply, we might banter back and forth for a bit until she found someone better – possibly on that same site – and that’d be that, as these things so often seem to go. What’d be the harm? (That it does work out.) What’s the worst that could happen? (That she then dies.) So, I replied.
Then she replied. And I replied again. And so on, and so forth. She remained cute and clever. Apparently, so did I. The process of her finding someone better was, presumably, taking longer than I’d expected, so we kept messaging long enough to make plans to meet. Despite being a Kentuckian – a strike against her, to be sure - she suggested Sitwell’s, a classic go-to first meeting place. (Their first location, in the basement, was better, though. I’ll never not insist on that.)
Once I get to Sitwell’s and settle in, it happened. Not immediately or all at once, mind you, but eventually, as the realization slowly grew from amusingly fleeting thought to inevitable conclusion, it did happen: she stood me up.
And that turned out to be true. Of course, there was a perfectly good reason. While I was sitting in Sitwell’s, she was stuck on Martin Luther King, Jr., Blvd during rush hour with a flat tire. She was waiting on her dad to arrive to change it. She sent the following pic with her most apologetic face as a gesture of her sincerity.
Who could be mad at that face?
As one does when at Sitwell’s during a time when one expected to be eating, I ordered lunch, and then went home. That was August 25th. We obviously did meet for the first time, and that was two days later, on the 27th. We both showed up that time.
Of course, the date itself went well. Even if she’d tried to hide her health issues – which she didn’t – the then-ubiquitous eyedrops made their first appearance within five minutes. The gist of it, from my memory, was, “Got cancer, now have another person’s immune system, it tries to kill me if we don’t keep a close eye on it, almost died a few times, but I’m now in remission and doing alright these days.”
After a reasonable first-meeting-in-public-so-this-stranger-can’t-kill-me-without-at-least-being-seen-by-a-lot-of-people length of time, she had to go because her friends were moving her stuff into her new apartment. While she wasn’t physically able to do much of that moving herself, she felt it rude to not be present. I think she’d also promised to feed them in one of the standard I’ll-give-you-food-in-exchange-for-manual-labor deals we all make when moving into a new place.
Upon leaving, we found that she’d gotten a parking ticket because her meter expired, and Clifton cops are on it with that kind of thing. If that alone weren’t omen enough to never see me again…
She didn't take heed, though, and she never did get around to finding someone better.
