A Beginning

Why you're here, why I'm here

Hi, I’m Rachel, a writer from Texas living in Brooklyn. Chances are if you’re reading this you’re my friend. Thanks for being my friend :)

I created Be There Soon! because life has been swirly and heavy. Namely, I’m processing grief. When my dad died two months ago I thought I had “pre-grieved” (thank you Roman and Shiv Roy for this term). It wasn’t sudden, it wasn’t unexpected, we had a complicated relationship; I was his caretaker for most of my life and he, a harm doer for most of mine. Still, his death has rocked me. I don’t feel like I’ve been grieving in the sort of textbook picture I have of the word grief, which is to say slumped on the couch in sadness, missing the person who passed and crying over lost time (a little outdated, no?). Instead, it has triggered a deep depression, with walls so high I sometimes feel I’ll never crawl out. Just a massive tidal wave of hopelessness and existential confusion that I maybe should have expected but that took me by surprise.

The darkness isn’t new, that I’ve had within me for a lifetime, perhaps since the beginning of time, but I’m still learning how to befriend it, and I thought it might be helpful for myself and others to write through it.

I’m not sure how long I’ll keep this going for, or with what regularity (if any) I’ll post, but I hope that you might find some small moments of resonance along the way.

Please enjoy this photo of a bathroom, which I’ll explain in the caption below.

This is the Princeton University bathroom where, in and out of attending sessions at a conference about ethics, I took calls from hospice and my sister, just two days before my dad passed. I’ve taken calls from so, so many random bathrooms over the years that as I was pacing around and crying in the stalls I thought about how foreign it would be for this to not be a regular part of my life. I wanted to document the last one of this chapter