After

This is my question:

What do you with the blank, gaping hole of a bright life, gone too young and much too soon? What do you do with the love and the pain, the guilt and the anger, the heaviness and the emptiness? What do you do, after?

The first time I saw Iri, she was paddling her kayak up to the side of the White Salmon River after running Husum Falls. She was grinning ear to ear; radiating excitement; beaming. “That was fun!!!”, she exclaimed enthusiastically. Mind you, I had just swam out of my boat after taking a bad line and flipping over. I was very impressed, and a little bit envious at the same time. She was so full of life, and seemed really motivated to push the limit. I decided that we should probably be friends. Back then, she was living in Battle Ground, Washington with her family. She drove a white SUV and had a gigantic, beautiful fluffy dog named Walter. She sold crocheted hats online, painted commissioned portraits of people’s dogs, and always seemed to have some side hustle of one sort or another. She laughed easily, and was definitely a little bit wild.

The next few years brought multiple changes for both of us. She got married, had shoulder surgery, had a child. I moved back to the city, changed jobs, moved in with my boyfriend, left everything to be a travel nurse. I called her the night I arrived in Tennessee for my first travel job; she told me that she was scheduled to have a pretty serious surgery. She was scared. I came to visit after she was out of the hospital. Time marched on.

In November of 2020, I made it back to the west coast after being gone for a year and a half. We hugged each other in the grocery store near her house, jumping up and down and squealing. She was single now. Her son was getting bigger. She had started a business offering women’s-only onewheel retreats. She had new friends that I hadn’t met before. We spent a lot of time together that winter in her house in BZ Corners. Drank wine. Shoveled snow. Talked about relationships. Made Christmas cookies. Covered ourselves in temporary tattoos.

We weren’t close the year before she died. She had pulled away into herself, as she did at times. I was hurt by this, assumed I had done something that she was unhappy about. Had I left my van parked on her property for too long? Was she upset with the fact that she had set me up with her friend, and it had gone badly? A couple of months before the accident, we reconnected. She reassured me that it was none of those things; she had just been dealing with life in the way that she often did. Of course. I knew better. I knew her better than that. I had let my own sensitivity get in the way of seeing the whole picture, as I sometimes do. “When are you coming down to the Gorge?” she asked. I would come when I could, I said. We both missed each other, we said.

She left us on a sunny day in July. She lost control of her truck on the curves of Highway 141. Her car went over the concrete barrier and rolled down the embankment.

I was at work when I got the call. Everything went blurry; it wasn’t real. I had to leave. Someone came and took report on my patients and I gathered my things and walked out the door. I called her phone, left a message. I was pretty sure she’d never get it, but I had to try. There was some confusion and uncertainty at first: Had it really been her in that truck? Was she still alive? If so, where was she? I called the hospitals that she could have possibly gone to, asking if she was there. The next day, I had confirmation; she had passed away at the scene.

A week later, we sprinkled her ashes into the White Salmon River. I will never forget what that looked like, the ashes blowing away on the breeze, floating down the river in the sunshine, out to the Columbia. And then, she was gone.

Grief is a strange, lurking animal; sometimes I will think about it, and I am okay…and sometimes, I will think about it, and I want to rip my chest cavity open and claw out the contents to make it stop hurting. Sometimes, I will be feeling sad about something else and this will cross over into my sadness about losing my friend.

Sometimes, I think about her and I laugh about how ridiculous and wild she was.

Sometimes, I wish that I had been a better friend in any way possible, and judged less and accepted more.

Sometimes, I just wish she was here.

She is still here in my mind, though… with her curly/wavy hair and her unrestrained laugh. Ruminating about a specific situation out loud until she felt she had processed it well. Building trails on her property with the tractor, oftentimes her son riding on the seat in front of her. Crocheting a hat. Leaving her house wearing knee and elbow pads and a helmet for her daily onewheel exercise. How I wish I had taken at least one picture of her looking like that! Authentic Iri. There was the time I bought her a ski lift ticket in exchange for a snowboarding lesson, and she took a hilarious video of me riding up on the little kiddie conveyor lift and set it to music. There was the time she went kayaking after not being in a boat for a LONG time and swam out of her kayak almost immediately. Not only had she forgotten to zip the lower portion of her Goretex drysuit, but she was wearing jeans underneath. It was February, I think, and she was soaking wet and undoubtably cold. She just laughed and laughed about it. I loaned her an extra base layer I had, which was a thin pair of light blue stretch paints that were too small for her and unfortunately rather translucent. She wore them into the restaurant we went into after, continuously trying to pull the hem of her sweatshirt down to cover everything. We all laughed hysterically, including her; she was always like that.

After she left, I knew that there would never be anyone quite like her ever again. No one can fill the distinctly Iri-shaped hole that she left in the universe. That’s the thing, though; we are each who we are, composed of our very own distinct mix of energy. We pass through, and are gone.

After is when you look inside yourself and to one another to pick up the pieces. After is when you sit with all the memories, the love, the pain, the guilt, the anger, the heaviness, and the emptiness...and also the joy, the laughter, and the irreplaceable genuine realness of it all. After is now, when you make a list in your journal of all the people in your life whom you deeply love and appreciate, who have stood by you, and you know will continue to do so. And then you try your best to tell them.

After she left, I bought a boxful of sunflowers and dahlias, and strew them all over that concrete barrier while ugly crying on the side of the highway, cars driving past. A mutual friend dubbed the spot “Iri’s Sailing Portal”, and I have continued to think of it that way. I go visit her there sometimes. I am not religious and I don’t really know where she is, but I think it’s probably someplace good. Peaceful. Free from confusion, free from pain, free from struggle….

Just, well, free.