This past month, we said goodbye to my dog, Lou. I want to say so much more than that but I am not ready to. The piece Lou deserves is not something I can write from inside the thickest grief I have ever swam through. Lou was the love of my life and when I finally write about her it will be pages long and will take everything I have. I want to give it that when I am ready. What I can tell you right now is that this past month has held some of the saddest days I have experienced in a very long time. This grief, real grief, after 8 months of anticipatory grief, has had a way of taking my breath away and throwing me into a loop I was not expecting.
With this grief, I have been introduced to a new-kind of burnout that is very different from one induced by overwork or chronic output without rest (the kind I know well and have spent years learning to navigate.) This is burnout caused by caretaking that has finally ended. It is the release after holding an enormous weight for months and months and finally arriving at the empty space that used to be filled with responsibility and devotion. This burnout is bone-deep in a way that feels almost cellular, and yet I believe that this burnout was worth it. I know that Lou is somewhere better, and that I can slowly begin to rebuild a life I had quietly put on hold to love her through her ending.
This month required the same dedication to burnout prevention as every other month, maybe more because it is less familiar and therefore easier to underestimate. So In June, I kept going with my burnout-prevention-dedication, imperfectly and tenderly and with significantly lower expectations of myself than usual.
With that…Here is what June looked like:
My grandmother Mary is one of the greatest joys of my life, full of life and humor and a kind of wisdom that simply does not exist within anyone my age. Being around her reminds me to love, to heal, to trust, to cry and to pursue happiness with everything I have because she has done exactly that for longer than I have been alive and the proof is in her smile.
She cooked dinner, made my favorite things, and spoiled me and my husband completely. Most importantly, we let her take care of us…which is its own practice for two people who default toward taking care of others rather than receiving care from them. There is nothing in any wellness-program or on any list I have ever written that replicates what it feels like to sit in the home of someone who has loved you your whole life and simply be loved without condition or performance or any expectation of being further along than you are. I went to San Francisco carrying the weight of one of the hardest months of my life and my grandmother did not fix any of it, she did not need to, she just loved me through it the way she always has. I am so blessed.
COST: My Whole Full Heart
While I was in San Francisco I went to the Nob Hill Spa at the brand new Huntington Hotel, which has been completely reimagined by the legendary designer Ken Fulk. It is genuinely stunning in a way that feels both maximalist and deeply intentional, the kind of space that communicates clearly that whoever built it cared about the actual experience of being inside it, rather than just the experience of photographing it. It’s not made for Instagram, people!
At Nob Hill Spa, I got a lymphatic facial, used the sauna, spent time by the pool, and did absolutely NOTHING useful to anyone for an entire afternoon. It was exactly what I needed. This was a spa day dedicated to communicating to my nervous system that it was worth slowing down for.
I must also add…the service and spa shop were also FABULOUS. I walked away with a million products I did not need, and have zero regrets.
COST: $273.00
I have been skeptical of GlamSquad for hair for a very long time, specifically because I am a Black woman with thick hair and the idea of a stranger showing up at my apartment to silk press it felt like an invitation to a disaster. That fear kept me away from the service for years longer than it probably needed to.
This month I finally booked Glamsquad for a Silk Press (*a new offer!) and I am genuinely glad I did because my stylist was fantastic. My hair felt and looked incredible! Someone came to me, tended to me, made me feel put together in a way I had not felt in weeks, and left. Voila! Such a gift!
COST: Starts at $90 (*NYC)
I had an enormous backlog of Substack essays I had been meaning to read from writers I genuinely love, Hunter Harris Rachel Kartan, Ali Kriegsman , Jalil Johnson Tembe Denton-Hurst Derek C. Blasberg , and I simply had not been able to get there because grief had quietly consumed the bandwidth I usually reserve for absorbing other people’s words. My phone has felt really overwhelming recently, so I printed a series of their articles out, physically, on paper, and sat down and read them without a screen anywhere near my face. It kind of felt like catching up with friends I had been absent from for months, coming back into a conversation, and finding that everyone I like was still there. Reading Substack articles without the ambient noise of the internet around, is a completely different experience and honestly so damn good.
COST: *Depends on your subscription model for each writer
One of the unexpected things grief taught me this month is how much I needed to be around random people who had absolutely no idea what I was going through, and sports turned out to be the most reliable vehicle for that.
I watched the Knicks and World Cup matches at bars around Fort Greene, surrounded by TOTAL strangers who were entirely consumed by something that had absolutely nothing to do with me or my loss. Tthere is a specific freedom in that, in being a person in a room whose grief is completely invisible, whose identity in that moment is just a regular-ass person watching a game and reacting to it like a normal human being. Nobody needed anything from me. Nobody was monitoring whether I was “OK” at the moment. I could be loud and happy and disappointed and completely anonymous and for stretches of this month that anonymity felt like the most luxurious thing in the world.
COST: Whatever the drinks cost
This month, I randomly started taking walks through Fort Greene Park and leaving my phone at home. One afternoon, I stopped to read a plaque on a bench. Then another. Then another. Before I knew it, I’d become completely obsessed and eventually read every single one. They made me feel something I wasn’t expecting. The dedications people have left behind for the people and animals they have loved and lost. Parents, partners, friends, and an extraordinary number of dogs. Marriage proposals. Inside jokes. Knicks references! Little declarations of love that someone decided deserved a permanent place in the world, where strangers might stumble upon them years later.
I cried on more than one bench. I laughed out loud more than once. It reminded me that love exists quietly in public spaces. I’ve now done it 4 times, and I know I’ll keep doing it. It takes about an hour if you read every plaque.
Do it. You’ll leave feeling more connected to complete strangers, to grief, to joy, and to your own humanity. I can’t explain it any better than that. It is one of the most unexpectedly beautiful things I’ve done all year.
COST: Free
Believe it or not, there are grief groups for EVERYTHING you might be losing, and before this year I do not think I truly understood what that meant or how much it mattered. This group was offered through the animal hospital where my dog Lou received her care, hosted by Pet Social Worker, Christine Galotti, who also offers individual grief counseling sessions for those who need more than a group can hold.
This group was unexpectedly really special.
A zoom-room full of people who understood without any explanation required what it means to love an animal with your entire self and then lose them. There were grown men, teenagers, mothers, young adults…you name it! People whose pets lived to 17 and died six months ago. People who lost them unexpectedly after only four weeks. The whole gambit. There were rabbit owners, cat people, reptile-loving-folks, and (of course!) dog lovers. It was a vulnerable, sobbing, gaggly-goo mess of incredible humans holding an astonishing amount of space for such a specific, special, profound, and often marginalized kind of loss.
Mon Dieu. It was truly the best thing I have done for myself while moving through this time.
COST: Free for VERG Clients // $199 for 1x1 Counseling with Christine
June was the hardest month of my life in recent memory. What I keep learning is that preventing burnout during grief is not so different from preventing it during overwork, in that it requires the same underlying commitment to choosing yourself in the smallest and most deliberate ways even when you do not have the energy to do it gracefully. Especially then. Lou changed my life by being in it (I LOVE YOU LOU) and I am slowly, imperfectly, learning that she is still changing it by being gone.
THANK YOU JUNE.
JULY WE ARE HERE
<3
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