Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, And human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect... ~E.M. Forster, Howards End
Your whole body, from wingtip to wingtip, is nothing more than your thought itself, in a form you can see. Break the chains of your thought, and you break the chains of your body too... ~Richard Bach, Jonathan Livingston Seagull
My friend Kaya took her life on November 9. Today is my last day at ISTE. And there is closure.
I met Kaya in the fall of 2008 when she became the social media/marketing intern at ISTE. She seemed cool (She tweeted, so she must be!), but we never really spoke til one morning in the staff break-room when we bonded over grief and tattoos. Her mother had committed suicide six months prior, and there was for me that deep and instant connection that I feel with someone who knows death intimately. We spoke candidly of the pain and fog of grief and the release that comes from the ritualized blood-letting of tattooing.
We discovered that we had the same tattoo artist, although unlike me she kept hers hidden from view -- a pawprint on her chest. We spoke of memorial tattoos. I told her the story of my gargoyle. She said she planned to get a tattoo in honor of her mother: a bird in flight and a passage from Jonathan Livingston Seagull.
Ours was a connection born of heart and flesh and pain and loss and memory.
And then we pulled out our iPhones, the gadgets that seemed to never leave our hands, and we found we had another connection: and it was digitaltechnobliss, for like me, Kaya was radically geeky. She was the only person with whom I could sit and drink cocktails and pour out my heart while simultaneously texting and twittering. We'd multitask, switch between talk of technology and social media and stupid ex-boyfriends and yes, sure, what the hell, another round of margaritas.
Kaya understood the profound connections that can be forged in both the virtual and material worlds. It sounds so cliché, but she brought people together. She did so as a community manager for ISTEConnects. She did so as a friend.
When she died, I said that I'd write something for the ISTEConnects blog, a memorial post. I sat with a blank page, titled "Only connect" for a long time. I didn't know what to say, other than to point to that brief passage from Howards End and curse the emptiness her death left.
The blog post went unwritten, and it weighed heavily on me.
"Live in fragments no longer."
I'm quitting my job today to pursue my life's work as a writer. (Holy shit.) I wouldn't be doing this if it weren't for Kaya. She taught me a lot about passion and demons and silence. She reminds me that I cannot let these consume me. She reminded me that I'm resilient. She always laughed at my jokes. She taught me about connections, helped me reenter a world from which I'd withdrawn when I was widowed. She introduced me to Kin. And now I have my life back; now I have my life.
When she died, I tattooed the seagulls from the back pages of Jonathan Livingston Seagull to my left forearm. Unlike the things -- tattoos and otherwise -- that Kaya hid from view, every day I see (and others see on me) those birds. And every day since November I have sat in my cubicle at ISTE, and catching glimpse of the tattoo, I have thought of Kaya.
I had a dream Wednesday -- clearly a "going away" sort of dream -- where my last staff meeting at ISTE turned into some sort of Dead Poet Society / "O Captain My Captain" spiel. (There may or may not have been standing on the lunchroom chairs.) In the dream, I spoke eloquently about the transformational power of education and technology. I'm not sure if I was the Robin Williams or the Ethan Hawke character (or maybe even Walt Whitman), but I remember thinking that Kaya had killed herself and I had to stand up and say something.
And I said my piece at work, to the best of my ability. And I said goodbye to that chapter of my life. And I say now, thank you Kaya. Today, I take flight.