On sunny market days, I’ll sit on a bench facing the bustling square from early morning until midday. I can sit out there for hours or until my skin starts to char, but the sounds and sights of people going about their business make the solemnity of the last year seem less sharp. 

I’m not a pessimistic person. I’ve always maintained a decent outlook on life, tried to see the positive side to everything and I’ve approached each day with a feeling of opportunity and potential. But the slings and arrows of the last year have really battered my sails so when it starts to feel a bit gray, I go to the market. I am kept focused by conscientiousness, by discipline of routine and practice, by not allowing too much time in silence to brood over what I can’t change. 

I don’t know how everything went so wrong. It’s as if mom’s death caused a ripple effect, as if the world had been robbed so suddenly and violently of happiness and joy that everything that was inverted by the simple force of the loss of so much goodness and love. Bad things came in threes, then fours… then fives. Tragedies drew tragedies and eventually I became numb. When I felt like my choices didn’t matter anymore, I stopped caring so much about anything. I wondered if each thing that happened was the result of decisions I made, if choices I made could somehow spark the misfortune of everything after. 

Early on, when the weight of the day got to be too much to bear, I’d get dressed and go to my bench and lose myself in the bustle of traders setting up and throngs of weekend shoppers with nowhere else to be walking through the crowds. In that sound in the white noise of life going on, I tried to find perspective  and sense in the events of this year. 

I have spent the last year trying to find a conclusion to all this, but there is only that white noise… and no sense at all. There is no sense to the tragedies of the last year. None. There is zero sense or lesson to take from this. There is nothing that gives meaning and weight to death, but there is the sound of life going on and that hurts less than the silence of a world without Vicky Baker. 

In two weeks, it’ll be a year since mom died. There are still days the brightest and sunniest days don’t touch me, but when I feel the weight of sadness start to come, I get myself dressed and trim my beard and put on my shoes and go to that bench and look out to see the market bustling and moving and the world, like a metronome, reminding me that life goes on.