A thank you letter to The Potter’s Guild of Baltimore

Today was the holiday open house for a place near and dear to my heart, The Potter’s Guild of Baltimore. Below is a post I shared on Instagram marking the five month anniversary of the shooting.

I want everyone to know, I’m doing so much better. Thanks for all the love.

The first day I walked into the Potter’s Guild of Baltimore was between the fifth and sixth service for my colleagues killed in a mass shooting at the Capital Gazette June 28.

I doubt the cut on my brow had even healed. I remember being afraid of the potter’s wheel, worried it would shake when I used it and trigger a panic attack.

I liked it immediately instead. I had to push all my weight on the clay to center it. I had the power to make it stop shaking. The clay felt smooth, and I felt strong.

Gaining control of a piece of clay made me feel like I had regained control of my life.

The coming weeks would be filled with grief, anger, confusion, depression, anxiety and exhaustion. But I always knew that for at least three hours a week I could escape by getting my hands dirty and building something beautiful.

It’s been five months since the shooting and the Potter’s Guild is still a big part of my life. I still go to weekly classes, and cherish time in the studio on the weekend.

As my life has steadily improved, so has my art.

This isn’t a thank you letter to clay — it’s the people at the guild, the kind, friendly, caring, funny, generous, patient people, who have made it such an important part of my recovery.

Thank you, I mean it.

Rachael Pacella

In the distance

I am sitting on the beach at Assateague Island National Seashore.

I push my legs down until the cold sand fills the arches of my feet.

The moon reflects on the surface of a dark ocean. Waves wash. Ocean City is a small ball of light a dozen miles north.

This is where I used to go in high school when it was all too much — work, school, relationships, whatever.

I envisioned my problems in that ball of light in the distance. I pictured the light pollution shrinking and shrinking. It was so far away from me. I exhaled.

I’m not sitting on a beach at Assateague; I am heading south bound at 80 mph on my way back to Denver to rest.

I’ve put actual distance between myself and the shooting. Well, not really. I’ve tried taking vacations from anger, trauma and grief, and they don’t work.

But the shooting isn’t at the center of the universe in Wyoming. Or Montana. Or Colorado. All places I’ve been this week. I sought solace again on protected land, this time Yellowstone and Grand Teton.

Now, back to Denver to rest up.

Staring out the window as I’m driven (thanks Ben and Cate) across the wilderness between destinations, I think about June 28, July 2, July 7, July 8 and July 10. The shooting, the funerals.

But my eyes are wide open the whole time, taking in the present and an environment I’ve never been in before. Semi-arid. I grew up in what was essentially a glamorous swamp.

I nearly cried when I saw the Rocky Mountains. I turned a corner in Denver and the jagged peaks were laid out in front of me at sunset. I lived to see them.

I have seen a lot more, but take this alone as an offering because I’m deeply tired: a field of sage in Wyoming. (Click here to see)

I’m taking in the beauty of the world with true ugliness on my mind. Yes, it’s helping.

Safe travels.

The one with music homework at the end

I am headed west.

Sometimes I feel like the country is slanted, and I will eventually roll down hill to California if shaken. I like the desert and the ocean, and I can’t get both on this side of the country. 

There have been signs. I bought a really excessive (read: gorgeous) pair of golden cactus earrings Saturday. I successfully kept a group of succulents alive for one month. Even I, who roasted on a pool deck for hundreds of hours as a high school lifeguard, can’t tolerate this humidity.

I’m going to roll, and by Wednesday I should be in Denver, Colorado. I know there isn’t a desert or ocean there. But there are mountains, and it’s closer to California, okay?

The trip will be a week and a half, to Denver then Yellowstone then back to Denver, which is the longest I’ve been away from Baltimore since the fall of 2015. I may try to swing a side-trip to New York City on my voyage home.

I love you Baltimore, but I am stuck. I haven’t been focused here. And I haven’t been writing or processing. I haven’t been particularly sober. I have been thinking, a lot, and feeling. By myself, which I think I need right now. Some by myself thinking and feeling time. Please don’t question me on that.

The world churns around me and I’m going to lean back and join for a while. Like a trip on that boardwalk ride that spins you round without a seatbelt while centripetal force keeps you in place.

Or, I’ll at least admire the spinning world from a better vantage point. I planned this trip months ago but couldn’t have guessed I would need it so badly. I don’t expect to feel much better, but I am sporting some non-shooting related heartbreak and I am hoping it will at least lessen that.

At first I thought any feeling unrelated to the shooting would be hidden, but I was wrong. I have learned over the past month that you don’t have a pile of emotions, you have strings on instruments. They can produce lonely notes or a chord. Lately, a symphony, with one ringing out over another.

What sound does the instrument of powerlessness make?

There is the powerless feeling I get when I picture another shooting occurring as I carry out everyday activities. That’s more of a “imagine where you would hide if there were a shooting in this theater and also imagine how it wouldn’t work.”

There is the powerless feeling I get when I see Phil suffering because of the shooting. That’s more like someone has stolen my insides from me and I’m totally hollow because I know I can’t fix what is hurting him.

And what of sadness?

There is the sadness I feel when I look through items from the old office and see the candles I got to celebrate Rob’s birthday. There is the sadness I feel when I remember that Rob will never attend another birthday party for his three children or his wife.

Hope is a strange instrument. It can be the loudest in the bunch for brief bursts, but it’s true strength is in the background providing a steady beat you can go back to when you’re off-step.

I hopped up and down on the pavement the other day, in childlike wonderment that I was alive. That’s hope. I plan on fighting to make our shooting one of this nation’s last. That’s also hope.

Layers. Maybe once I’ve gone out west for a bit I will come up with a cool rock formation metaphor. Stand by.

Thanks to everyone who is chipping in at The Capital while I do this. I feel guilty about leaving, but I know the people helping out and volunteering their time want me to rest and take care of myself. So, I serve them best by doing that.

I have a very important piece of homework for you, dear reader. I haven’t just been stuck mentally, I’ve been stuck musically.

So go to this link, and add some of your favorite music. Add a lot of your favorite music. Fill my trip with good tunes. Add some songs you listen to when you just want to be alone, songs you listen to when you want to be happy, songs when you want to be social, songs that make you cry, whatever. All the best songs. 

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLr_HtMdzGrzU_CHLcOy9WCeYLFMQj6bvu&jct=qs_A3nDgYypiuz5FEeeWfIiapqjn9w

I will try to write more from the road, and share photos. Thank you for reading. 

Newsroom pizza

If you’ve never been in a newsroom, pizza is a thing.

Typically, it is a thing tied to elections. You can be sure that if you’re working in a newsroom in America and there is an election, there will be pizza. The shine of grease pooled on top of cheese is a steady beacon you can find on top of a filing cabinet to relieve yourself from campaigning, uninformed voters and poll workers who don’t like reporters.

When the results are in, your story is filed and you’re really just bullshitting with your colleagues, cold (but still delicious) pizza is your reward.

An impromptu pre-election meeting held at the old office was mostly about pizza, specifically what kind to get on Election Day, June 26. The discussion spilled over to email. Selene said if we got Ledo’s she would resign.

Our very important pre-election pizza meeting. Left to right Phil Davis, Rob Hiaasen, Selene San Felice. In the background is Gerald Fischman.

Our election coverage went well, if you care. Rob really nailed the pizza thing though. I think there was one pizza for each person. I even got my very-specific vegan pizza.

Exactly one month later, it’s about 12:30 p.m. in the temporary newsroom and people are talking about pizza again.

I hear the pizza arrive and the announcement that it was purchased by our security guard Lon. Lon is the best.

The information is muffled. I’m in an audio booth alone, and I’m crying. Ugly crying.

Grief for me is an avalanche. Everything will be fine, then one thing will bump into another, build up and overtake me.

Crying isn’t a strong enough term. I am sitting on a desk, rocking back and forth and sobbing.

What formed the critical mass? Was it a video of Rob dancing? Was it seeing Selene head out for an “Off-Limits” story, one of Wendi’s signature series?

I know that the people in the newsroom don’t care don’t mind that I’m sobbing, but I don’t want them to know about it either. I’m trying very hard to stay quiet, but I know I need to sob. It feels good to sob. I cover my mouth to stifle the sobs. I wipe away tears and snot.

It reminds me of trying to stay quiet during the shooting. I put a hand over my mouth to stifle my breathing and wimpers. I wiped blood away from my eyes.

I make the connection and sob harder.

I have a strategy now — I sketch things when I need to escape a situation. Or when I need to feel grounded. Or when I need to calm down.

I remember after a while that I promised to never hide my emotions from my friend Phil, who also survived the shooting. I asked him to bring me some tissues, a notebook and a pen.

I realized a pencil would be better, and he brought me a pencil.

There is a glass door in the audio booth, and through it I see another window and a piece of the street below. Here is what that looked like.

Beautiful, I know.

But it got me where I needed to go. On my feet, back in the newsroom, where people are smiling and eating pizza.

A few hours later, a reporter who was out at an assignment grabs a cold slice and sits down near me. The world feels as it should be, even though its not.

Okay, that’s it for now. Here is some bonus content. My favorite two sketches so far.

A trip to the Newseum and isolation in the aftermath

I cried on the sixth floor of the Newseum in Washington D.C. this Saturday, to a picturesque view of the Capitol and Pennsylvania Avenue.

Minutes earlier myself and other survivors of the mass shooting at the Capital Gazette were greeted by the museum’s president Gene Policinski in the lobby. He was extremely kind, but I forgot to jot down a quote.

We thanked him and said goodbye, then decided to start our tour at the top of the museum and work our way down. It was a group outing, a distraction, I thought.

I realized I forgot something. A piece of paper and a notebook I wanted to share with the museum, in case they ever decide to make an exhibit about us.

They have one sign in the lobby and another by the Journalists Memorial so far. Policinski said they had something up by 4:30 p.m. June 28, informing people of the shooting.

Where was I at 4:30 p.m. June 28? In a fucking hospital room.

I was completely isolated from the outside world. As soon as I left the building that day I was triaged and taken to an ambulance. As I should have been. My head was bleeding.

I spent five hours in the hospital while my coworkers went on CNN to talk about the shooting. And they tweeted about it. And they covered it, all while I was sitting in a bed thinking there wouldn’t be a damn paper the next day.

I wasn’t supposed to look at screens because of my concussion, and I listened, for a while at least.

I have felt disconnected from the weight of the shooting because of this isolation. I feel the weight I’m carrying, and that of my friends, and my co-workers, and of loved ones at five individual funerals and one joint memorial. But I haven’t felt the weight this shooting had on the world.

I believe things happened as they should have, and everyone acted in my best interest. This is just the way things are.

It was a huge news story and I wasn’t a part of telling it. I didn’t even get to see it being told the same day.

Reporters left messages. Friends left messages. My phones were on my desk at 888 Bestgate. My shoes were under my desk.

As the world buzzed around me about the mass shooting in Annapolis, I sat in a hospital bed. The television was off. I asked the nurses and the police not to leave me alone.

I remember a red folder placed by my bed, with a sticker that read “Disaster Patient 1.”

My clothes were taken away in an evidence bag.

The only thing I owned in that moment was a sheet of paper and a pen, which I asked for and received from a family friend who works at AAMC.

I had no information, so I gathered my own. The name of the doctor treating me, the first name and last initial of the officer in the room.

My immediate recollections post-shooting.

“Dried blood on right arm looked like veins outside of my skin.”

“The office smelled like gunpowder.”

The words of a pastor who visited.

“We all benefit from your voice. We’re counting on you to lift it.”

The make of the camera the crime photographer used while photographing my injuries. A Canon EOS 7D, with a kit lens. He was writing down something in a reporter’s notebook.

How strange, I thought, to have the tools of my trade used on me in this manner.

The words of a counselor.

“I believe that you will eventually build some good out of it.”

I was discharged sometime between 7:30 and 8:30 p.m. I folded up my sheet of paper and was taken to the police station. Someone offered to hold it for me. I said no.

Then I was interviewed by police, and jotted down that I noticed a crack in one of the ceiling tiles above the tiny room we were in.

We agreed that they should interview me first, and tell me what happened second. I knew it was bad, but told myself I wasn’t sure yet that people had died.

I stepped over Wendi’s body. I told myself I didn’t know she was dead that whole afternoon. She may have just been injured.

The detective said several people were dead after our interview. I asked for a notebook, and he brought me a spiral-bound pad that was 3 and ¼ inches by 5 and ½ inches. 50 sheets, narrow ruled.

Another detective said five people were dead. A survivor told me the names.

I flipped open my notebook, and wrote them down.

Gerald
Rob
Rebecca
Wendi
John McNamara

She said he had a shotgun. I wrote that down. In the moment I thought it was a handgun. But what do I know?

She said Wendi charged the shooter. I wrote that down too.

I didn’t stop writing in that notebook. It includes a diagram of the newsroom, marking the relative position of a dead colleague’s body to my hiding place.

It is filled with snapshots from that day, as I remembered them.

Memories of Rob that I jotted down, fearing they would leave and never return.

Notes from the vigil at City Dock the next day. Candle wax from the vigil that spilled on the notebook, as I carried both.

Notes from a staff get-together that Saturday. Notes from the nearby pier I escaped to when I needed time alone with Phil, who also survived the shooting. Notes about the beetles skirting on the surface, and the dime-sized minnows.

A quote — “I’ll miss our old life.”

Notes from Rob’s funeral. Notes from one of the three breakdowns I had at Rob’s funeral.

Notes from the first, and still the only, day I visited the temporary office.

Notes about how upset I am to see my scar healing. I want it to be bad, okay? Stop telling me it looks good.

Notes from a breakdown at the Fourth of July parade.

Notes from a doctor’s visit where they took my stitches out. I got a better notebook on the way home that day. It is periwinkle, and also full of terror.

I am proud of that first notebook. I am proud of my instinct to write down and record everything that was going on around me. I think it belongs in a museum, or at least a permanent exhibition on my bookshelf.

I didn’t cry Saturday because I forgot to bring the notebook; I cried because I realized its value.

I cried because I realized that, yes, my dead colleagues who were alive just 17 days ago would be — were already — part of a museum. And the weight of it crushed me.

Hypervigilance and the trip home from D.C.

 

Union Station in Washington, D.C.

After trauma some people, including me, experience hypervigilance.

Increased awareness of my environment. I have always been observant, though sometimes spacey.

I have been grounded.

I noticed a teardrop on the floor of the synagogue at Gerald’s funeral. I noticed more teardrops on the back of a man’s suit jacket at Wendi’s.

What can I notice on the average day? Quite a bit.

I notice the beeping from a crosswalk button outside Union Station in D.C. I notice how it sounds like the heart monitor I asked them to disconnect at the hospital after the shooting. I didn’t need it. I wasn’t dying.

The station is filled with sights and sounds, as it should be.

The clicking of gears as a man walks his bike through the atrium.

The sound of hard luggage rolling over tiles.

A woman with balloons laughing and wiping away tears of joy as she greets two children.

A homeless woman in the same spot I saw her five hours earlier.

I notice two songs playing inside a card shop as I wait for my train – Mozart from a music box in the window and Buffalo Springfield on the speaker overhead.

“Stop. Hey, what’s that sound?”

I notice when the music box falls silent and the classic rock is left out of place among colored pens and stacks of thank you cards.

I notice a pigeon swoop down from the rafters on my way to the train.

On the train to Baltimore I notice a symphony.

The humming of a woman next to me, the distant beat spilling from a pair of headphones, the clanking of train cars, the spinning wheels, quiet conversations, loud conversations. I hear them all as one, but pick them out and name each.

I notice the conductor speaking — it is hard not to, that is his goal. The stop is Penn Station. The last train already left Martin Airport for the day. If you don’t get off and continue to Martin Airport, you won’t be able to come back by train. So get off.

I do.

I notice the sound of the exhaust, or maybe it’s the engine. A familiar rumbling from the locomotive either way. I feel my exhaustion.

I hear the footsteps of my fellow passengers walking up the stairs.

I notice the screech of the another train leaving.

I stop to write more in my notebook and lean against a pole. I notice the scratching of mechanical pencil against paper.

I notice a woman who comes up to ask me: what train are you waiting for?

I’m not waiting for a train, I say. She leaves, on a scooter of all things.

The train I climbed off of leaves. The platform is empty now.

“The Love I Lost” by Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes plays above me from a speaker.

I walk up the stairs and through the station and before the exit I look up. I’ve been to this station many times. For the first time, I notice the intricate, circular stained glass windows above me in the atrium.

Hypervigilance. Hyper awareness. Hyper sensitivity. Whatever you call it.

Sometimes it is hearing a nail gun fire while walking through a crosswalk. It is dropping my water bottle and stepping backwards into another woman. It is someone picking the bottle up for me, and another person guiding me to the curb. 

Still, I think it’s a superpower. And I hope I never lose it.

The stained glass windows inside Penn Station in Baltimore.

 

Messages to a friend before Wendi’s funeral

These are the messages I sent to a friend in the half-hour before Wendi Winters’ funeral began. It was a one-sided conversation, which is what I needed in that moment. I re-read them today.

I cannot tell you how happy I was to sing from the audience during the ceremony at Maryland Hall July 7.

11:27 a.m.

“Oh Lewis”

“I had let it be by the Beatles stuck in my head”

“On the way here”

“I even posted about it on my instagram story”

“How is it that I see this when I get the program”

“It’s like she was beaming it into my brain from heaven”

11:41 a.m.

“My heart was pounding as soon as I got into the building. I tried going into the bathroom to calm myself, which worked for a minute. When I came out there were even more people. I walked down to get a seat and met trif’s wife and suddenly felt compelled to get the fuck out of there”

“So I ran down the hall and climbed up the stairs.”

“I’ve found a nice dance studio room.”

“I sobbed and sobbed”

“I forgot my notebook downstairs so you’re my notebook right now”

“There is a noisy ac unit in here”

“I can see the blue sky out the window”

“I laid the program flat in front of me, with one hand on each page, and I hung my head and wept”

“I feel like she is in this room with me lewis”

11:45 a.m.

“I now have a much more fitting song stuck in my head, which I heard played live on bizarre renaissance instruments the last time I was in this building”

“Which was for johnny fox’s funeral”

“Forever young”

“Wendi was that”

“I’m singing it to myself”

“I feel calmer”

“I can do this”

“This is only the second funeral lewis”

“But I can do this”

Self-hatred and waterfalls

Floods have damaged the Baltimore County half of Patapsco State Park’s Avalon area. This bridge isn’t damaged, but it is closed for now. 

I was struggling to keep my head above water at work, and Rob Hiaasen was the guy I told first.

I’m talking pre-shooting.

I left the Eastern Shore of Maryland two and a half years ago, and I have found great joy in my new life. But uncertainty and self-skepticism have been my shadow.

I had hoped the shooting knocked all of that anxiousness out of me, like a wrecking ball.

Last night, however, my mind raced with negative thoughts. I’m being left out, I’m not responding to the shooting the way I should be. Everyone else is doing fine but I’m stuck. Am I more disturbed than other people, and if so, why? I decided people had grown tired of me. I thought I could get inside their minds and hear their disdain.

None of that is true, of course. To get myself in the right mind frame, a therapist once suggested viewing the world as if I were peering through a camera lens. Objectify, objectify, objectify. Did someone actually tell me they think I’m being lazy and worthless in the wake of the shooting, or did I come to that conclusion on my own?

Who knows the source of this self-hatred. I have no doubt that it comes naturally to me. I have a guess for what sparked what was already there. I went from living above a wine store and a coffee shop in sleepy Berlin with a man I’d been with since high school to living on my own in a fourth-floor walk-up in one of Baltimore’s busiest neighborhoods in the span of a month.

The change was monumental. I was without a partner for the first time in my adult life at 24. I shouldn’t be surprised that I was knocked off my pedestal.

Somewhere along the way I let self-doubt seep into my job. I would read and re-read my stories, fine-tuning them in ways that stripped them of humanity and made them worse. I would panic on my drive home that I got something wrong and pull over to the side of the road, when there was no reason to suspect so.

I lost the voice in my writing. I would lean on the way sources describe things, looking at my work sometimes as a list of facts rather than a story. It needs to be both.

I was once named Rookie of the Year by the regional press association. I felt like a shell of that person. It’s like I could no longer tell what was true and what wasn’t.

But Rob could. And Rob was helping me pull the humanity back into my writing.

I wish I could say the work was done, but it was only starting. Last August I messaged him during a particularly steep wave, saying I was trying to manage and that doing a good job was important to me.

“Anxiety is one of the tougher customers in our brains of ours. Please know that yes, you are doing very well here, and we’re your professional home,” he wrote in an email. “And if you ever want someone to listen, I’m pretty good at that.”

He did listen. He listened the most in May, when a chunk of roadway metal left my car disabled in The Capital parking lot. I know I bared my soul when he gave me a lift back to Baltimore. I wish I could remember more. I felt so much better stepping out of that car than I did stepping in.

I shouldn’t be surprised that the mental health problems I struggled with pre-shooting would persevere.

I do think here, in this space, I have found my voice. I will never let go of it again.

Okay, got that out.

Now let me tell you about a short hike I took at Patapsco State Park yesterday.

My family and I were walking up the Cascade Falls trail, when I broke off to explore the first waterfall I saw.

It’s a rocky, shade-filled pathway that is, as indicated, filled with the sound of running water, trickling falls and shallow pools.

I did some rock scrambling down to stream level at the first fall I saw, crouched and stuck my fingers in, feeling the slight tension of the moving water against my stationary hand.

Of course it was peaceful. I heard a tiny voice then, on the hill above me. A mom was rock-scrabbling down to my level, with two toddlers and a slightly older child in tow.

The little girl must have been five or six, and reminded me very much of myself — my mother confirmed this. When I was little I would wander off and find my own path. I was never afraid to dig for clams with my toes. If there was a body of water, I would dive in it. Sometimes while clothed. Clothing never seemed as important when my heart wanted to swim.

The little girl forged ahead of the group. She started climbing up a dead tree. She stuck her toes and then her feet and then her hands in the pools of water.

I moved on to the next waterfall. I climbed up above it, and sat perched looking down at the stream and people below me.

I was fine, I was fine. Suddenly I wasn’t fine.

I focused on the sparkling rocks under moving water. The bright green mossy patches. The purple flowers blossoming by the precipice. The beauty in every inch of the earth.

I thought about how lucky I am to be alive and sitting next to a waterfall. And I thought about how Rob is dead and he isn’t. I started weeping.

I dried my tears with a thought that has now become a custom.

I pictured Rob sitting there, on the other side of the waterfall, looking across at me. I don’t think he would tell me not to cry. We all cry, and we should.

I think he would comfort me.  I took a breath, and looked back down the valley.

The same girl was wading into the pool below me now. And much like me — again, my mother will confirm this — she decided to take a dip into the water, outfit be damned.

While my anxiety is still with me, the mass shooting has largely stripped me down to just the basics. I feel more like that little girl now than I did a month ago. And I’m glad.

I want to explore, I want to see everything, I want to understand how things work, I want to jump in the water without caution of consideration beyond “let’s go.”

I didn’t have any doubt as a child.  I just acted and hoped I would find a way to solve any problems I ran into, on the fly.

Maybe I can use this renewed sense of self to my advantage. Maybe I can use my childhood instincts to find a path out of the tangled wood that was already inside my head, long before June 28.

Hopefully I can use my writing and my voice as well.

In one anxiety-driven message to Rob on May 17, I questioned my time management and panicked about a story I hadn’t even started writing yet. After I began writing, I remarked how much better I felt.

He sent me a quote:

“The privacy of writing rescues us from public stress.”

He added a source.

“I said that. Just now.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Voicemails and my anger vacation

I am taking a vacation from anger today. Not from grieving, but from anger. I can’t feel any more anger, I just can’t. I won’t. Not today.

Instead, I have planned a lovely series of events in Washington, D.C., where I will remember Wendi Winters as her son Phoenix suggested — by walking the halls of museums.

I will take lots of photos and keep you updated on my favorite exhibits. I’ll update this post with a few.

I decided to check my voicemail first, however. I haven’t done that since the shooting. My apologies to all the reporters who called me. I would have loved to speak with you.

I scrolled down through my phone messages, past June 28, and then I saw it. Rob Hiaasen. Rob Hiaasen left me a voicemail June 18.

I kept scrolling. There are at least a dozen. Of course there are. Rob was my editor and I was fairly difficult to keep track of.

Here are a two that I will never delete. I hope they bring as much light to your day as they did to mine.

June 4:

Time doesn’t make much sense to me right now either, Rob.

From May 11:

The day of the MDDC press awards…I’m pretty sure he was the first guy I called and told when I won best in show for a photo.

 

 

 

The shadows are as important as the highlights

At the intersection of Fawn and S. High Streets in Little Italy artist Michael William Kirby has brightened my day, and hopefully the days of others, with a touching tribute to Rob, Gerald, Wendi, Rebecca and John. I have more to say, dear reader, about this. About seeing my colleagues’ portraits six-feet tall on the pavement. I could fill a (Capital Style) magazine with words on Wendi’s funeral. I could fill five editorial pages with words on Gerald’s. Rob’s would be a book. But the sad truth is I don’t have time today. I have back-to-back funerals. So please accept this video. Please take this, a slice of happiness on one of the saddest days of my life.