Today will be the first time I teach my favorite class since its co-creator – my co-conspirator, my mentor, my friend – left us. 

We lost Cathy on February 22, 2022. It was sudden & shocking, and also not, which somehow made it a little worse.  The pain and grief that followed (and will never completely dissolve) was no less intense, complicated, complex, dynamic. But, for everything Cathy taught me in her life, her death has been no less educational. She continues to give.

·      She highly respected Brené Brown’s work. (We played this cartoon version of her talk on empathy to our students every semester.) It was a respect and appreciation she passed along to me. I knew I was growing from the information, but I didn’t know how much empathy & compassion I’d be called upon to locate in the last 4 months. Compassion and empathy for those who knew her, those who were formally taught by her, & for myself.

·      She believed in me before she ever really knew me, before she saw what I was capable of creating. It was blind faith. Like she could just see through everything that I wanted to be seen as, find the truth of who I was, and see beauty in what could be accomplished. I don’t know that I’ll ever see myself as Cathy saw me, but she gave me a sense of wanting to try – because that woman is brave, mindful, capable while still managing to not take the world or herself too seriously. If I was Alice, Cathy was the White Rabbit to Wonderland, and I would have followed her almost anywhere.

It has been estimated the average person will spend a third of life at work, or roughly 90,000 hours. If I continue the path I’m on, like many others, that number will be a low-ball guesstimate. It speaks to how lines are blurred between work and “life.” It explains how colleagues become friends, friends become family, and family changes our very DNA. 

I hope you have those types of colleagues. I hope you encounter people who teach, who believe, and if they leave you too soon, I hope your grief will give you the space to explore all the lessons. I would never have been able to survive Cathy’s death if Cathy hadn’t laid the foundation for me in her life.

So, today, when I teach a class we dreamed up together and laughed through for six years, I will think of her, thank her, choke back the emotion, and then move into a state of presence for 120 minutes, 7,200 seconds.  Because teaching is a gift, life is short, and Cathy would… Love you, Love.