hello and goodbye

“I don’t know why you say, ‘Goodbye,’ I say, ‘Hello, hello, hello.’”
The Beatles

Please excuse the MIA status since September. The past three months have been a blur of job applications, interviews, birthdays (mine and my sister’s), and the usual curveballs that life presents itself with. Days feel monotonous in their routines revolved around work, yet they slip by so fast that the year is already coming to an end. Leading up to the holiday rush, I had a quiet and chaotic season of saying hello to autumn and goodbye to a friend.

My late friend Emily had a gift for connecting with anyone she met. As a legal recruiter placing lawyers in major firms, she embodied the opposite of the stereotypically serious and stern law world. She was bright, inviting, and endlessly warm. She lived by her philosophy: open yourself wide and let people surprise you. I was one of those lucky ones drafted by her spontaneous “recruiting” when we first met three summers ago.

She approached me in the locker room of our local swimming pool after seeing a climbing sticker on my water bottle, and we hit it off instantly. It’s not common to meet someone who shares the same interests in a city as busy and lonely as New York, but finding a friend willing to join me in the masochistic routine of waking up at the crack of dawn for 6:30 a.m. lap swim made our friendship even more special. We understood each other in ways that other people might think odd or crazy–we were both fitness fanatics who always pushed ourselves too hard, the type to lose things because we got distracted, and people who would choose a walk in the park or a hike Upstate over anything else.

We talked about everything: our struggles as working women, complicated dating situations, and annoying office politics over coffee after a swim, wine in her cozy apartment down the street from me, or a hike in Cold Spring. She made me feel optimistic about adult friendships because making friends gets harder as you get older.

When a text notification from Emily popped up on my phone a couple of weeks ago, I assumed it was her telling me she was back home for Thanksgiving from Brazil. She had recently bought a place in Sao Paulo and spent part of the year there to escape the cold in New York. But instead, the message was from her mother letting me know that Emily passed away from a rare autoimmune disease. I was completely shaken and stunned. The words didn’t make sense. I reread them over and over as my head kept reeling and denying what I was seeing. I couldn’t reconcile the idea that my friend, someone so vibrant and alive, was gone. No more voicemails saying, “Hey! Just rang you to check in,” or the excited “Tell me!” during our catch-ups.

My sister and I went to her funeral a few days later. People from every facet of her life was there–family and friends from New York and colleagues from her global travels. She had a well-stamped passport and a heart that was even more expansive–from the Atacama Desert in Chile to the Patagonia mountains in Argentina to Africa. She never hesitated to go somewhere new and made friends wherever she went including the airport. She was adventurous and fearless yet tender and innocent.

The grief hits in waves. I still feel the huge void she has left behind on her departure from the world. Saying goodbye is never easy, but doing so abruptly, without preparation, is a different kind of heartbreak I never thought I would experience. This season of grief reminds me of Picasso’s Blue Period paintings that were inspired by losing his best friend.

But the color palette of my grieving has been the opposite of blues–a range of autumnal tones of yellow, red, and brown. This Thanksgiving Day, I took a long walk around Central Park, exactly how Emily would have spent the holiday–fitting in some movement before the feast. The warm sunlight, the colorful foliage, and the crisp leaves on the ground felt like her saying hello from above. Emily adored what the city and nature had to offer and would have appreciated these snapshots of autumn in New York.

Good bye, friend. May your memory be a blessing. I will carry you with me always. Love you, and miss you dearly.

I recently learned that ginko means bank in Japanese–golden and prosperous, just like these leaves.

Autumn in Harlem, my (and Emily’s) neighborhood, has its own charm. Sharing some highlights from my photo archive I’ve been curating since the moment I saw the leaves start changing colors.