There are days I wake up and I wonder how it is I got here.

How do I live in the suburbs? How is it I have three kids? Where has the time gone?

I turned forty last year but because I was pregnant and fairly miserable with sickness, I didn’t realize it. I didn’t have a big party, or invite anyone over. I think I spent it on the couch, horizontal and probably whining about heartburn. But I turned 40. Had you asked me when I was 35 what I would be doing for my 40th birthday, I’d have said I would be at my favorite restaurant surrounded by close friends, celebrating a pretty momentous milestone. But no. Instead it was just another day, one I barely even realized. A day that came and went.

You’re supposed to realize you turn 40, right?

I turned 41 last week. And if it hadn’t been for Facebook, I’m not sure I would have remembered.

Sometimes living in the suburbs feels like waiting to die. I know that comes off as horribly depressing. And overall, I’ll contend: it’s a depressing thought. But it’s also darkly comical. Living in the suburbs feels like waiting, waiting for what? I’m not sure.

I think we plan vacations and then look forward to vacations so we don’t remember that the bigger picture—or some ultimate goal—doesn’t actually exist. There are lessons for the kids, countless practices that include balls and expensive equipment coached by parents with unfulfilling day jobs. We schedule date nights at mediocre restaurants and drink overpriced wine. We discuss the kids’ practices or that upcoming vacation. We go home, pay the sitter, and then continue to wait some more. We make schedules that repeatedly fail because of course they do when you’re dealing with snow days, sick days, train schedules, kids and other people. And when those schedules fail we come up with ways to make sure they don’t fail in the future because failing makes us feel bad. And it sucks to feel bad.

Our walkway needs to be shoveled. And the trash needs to be put out. Recycling comes every other week and if you miss the alert that they moved it due to a possible snowstorm, your garage starts to look like something out of an episode of Hoarders.

Small rodents break into your garage and lick clean the cans you didn’t properly rinse but since they likely got a big dose of dopamine and left with a full stomach it’s hard to hate them. Good for the small critters who don’t have vacations to look forward to or date nights at mediocre restaurants. They don’t have plans that fail or Common Core math tests to bitch about.

Living in the suburbs feels like waiting—waiting to return to something that matters, something bigger than yourself, something you pictured when you were 21 and graduating from a college you paid a ton of money to so they would repeatedly tell you that after you were done you could do anything; that you could change the world.

Today I grabbed a single trash bag from below our kitchen sink and went around the house tossing random pieces of crap into it. I filled that bag up within 10 minutes while the baby babbled gleefully into an empty box of tissues. That felt great so I made a plan to do it every day for two weeks. I’ll fill up a trash bag full of our shit. And items from that bag of trash will eventually end up in the middle of the Pacific Ocean floating on a sea of garbage the size of Texas because that’s what we do in the suburbs as we sit and wait for upcoming vacations: we give up gluten, wear yoga pants from lululemon, fight about parenthood, drive big cars and destroy shit.

Then one day you find yourself in the quiet car on a train headed north on the way home from a job that brings you nothing but stress and someone makes a thoughtless mistake and you think to yourself right before the car explodes into a burning inferno, “What was I waiting for?”

I want to dig through the empty cans in a drafty garage and discover happiness. I want to run these thoughts out of my head. I want to find meaning in an empty box of tissues and not spend another dime at a mediocre restaurant. I want to walk among a sea of strangers in a city where you don’t realize you’re waiting because the backdrop is forever changing and its inhabitants are fooled by distraction.

The first time I saw him he was being wheeled out on a stretcher and lifted into a van by two medical examiners. Eric was there as well—tall, well-dressed Eric. Eric is my favorite doorman. The sky was a dull gray, absent of any real emotion, leaving that to us. It was raining. But not enough to make you care, not enough to mean anything. Eric had just opened the back door of the apartment building as I rounded the corner. He made a hand gesture, pursed his lips and shook his head.

No. Not yet. Wait there. You don’t want to see this.

I froze. I couldn’t breath. A wave of dread and nausea washed over me as I fought back vomiting. I knew what I was about to see.

Earlier that day, while chaperoning a field-trip with my older son, the sitter watching my 2-year-old sent me flurry of texts. The texts included words like “FBI”, and “murder”. There were the words “medical examiner” and “crime scene investigators”. She wrote about a distraught man sitting outside, weeping. She wrote that something terrible had happened.

I read all these things while standing on the banks of the Long Island Sound, digging for clay.

He’d been dead for days.

They shut the doors to the van, thanked Eric for his help and drove away. Eric and I stood alone in the rain, watching the van become smaller and smaller. And then he was gone. Just like that. The dead man was gone.

“I spoke to him almost every morning. He was a nice guy…” Eric looked down at the ground, kicked a pebble and shook his head again.

I gave him a hug.

That whole tiny moment—the bleak sky, its hesitant rain; the look on Eric’s face; the hand gesture he’d given me; the van and the man’s corpse—would continue to haunt me for the remainder of the day and well into the next. When I shut my eyes, it was there. When I went to bed, it was there. When I took a shower, it was there. It was a picture—an image—filled with everything and nothing. I simply couldn’t shake it. I couldn’t unsee it. And I wanted to.

Is this what painters do? They have an image that they can’t unsee, so they create it in hopes that it will stop haunting them? The day had dropped this moment into my life and my memory kept repainting it, looking for something new, something different, something less final and horribly sad.

But I am no painter.

I kept looking for color.

I have no memory of there being any color.

If only the sun had been shining.

What I’m about to admit isn’t something I am proud of. And it’s probably not something most people would choose to admit in writing. Perhaps, if you were reading this in a book, you might forgive a character for doing what I did. Because we forgive fictional characters. Fictional characters can do irresponsible things. They can make poor, cringeworthy decisions and we forgive them for it. Even when fictional characters are based on real people, and actual events, we forgive them. It’s comforting to be able to say, “Yeah, but it’s not real. She didn’t really do that because that would just be crazy.”

But I am not fictional. I am me. And so.

I’m going to try something different. I’m going to write this next part in the third person. I’m going to refer to myself in the third person in hopes that maybe you won’t judge me as harshly for everything I’m about to tell you.

Also: every time I try and finish this post in the first person, I cringe and give up.

Ready?

After seeing his body, she became obsessed. She decided she needed to know as much as possible about the dead man. She couldn’t let her last and only bit of knowledge about the dead stranger be that of a receding medical examiner’s van on the grayest of all days beneath a rainfall that didn’t matter.

Who was he? How had he died? How old was he? Was he lonely? Did he love someone? Did they love him? Where was his family? Did he have one? Do they know? Did he kill himself? Was he murdered?

Was he lonely?

She needed to know more. She dug around on Twitter, searched the “nearby” option. She keyed in and searched their shared address. Twitter made her amateur sleuthing way too easy. Before long, she’d found an article written by The New York Post about a “mysterious death” in a “high rise” (not true) “luxury apartment building” (debatable). They stated that he had been found bloodied, with cuts to his face. They reported that his apartment had been trashed, but there had been no sign of forced entry.

“Was this all true?” She wondered. “Had a murderer been in their apartment building?” (Spoiler alert: No.)

But the most useful (and incidentally the only factual) bit of information The Post gave her was the dead man’s age and name.

She had his name.

She came up with scenarios: He was a jock and got too aggressive while drinking with a girlfriend. She had scratched his face and hit him and he later died from an accidental drug overdose; He was a gay man who died at the hands of an angry lover; He committed suicide because, at 46, he was still single and alone; He had gotten into a fight earlier that night, stumbled home drunk, and not knowing the extent of his head injuries, never woke up; He died of a heart attack due to excessive drug use.

(This is what happens when a person relies on The New York Post for information.)

Truth be told, she wasn’t sure why she’d become so invested in knowing more about the dead man. Perhaps it’s because she had seen a very intimate detail of this man’s life—his death. This was something most people wouldn’t and probably shouldn’t see. But she couldn’t let him go, not yet and not in that manner.

The first encounter with the man simply couldn’t be one of his very last.

She had been to many funerals over the years. She had lost friends and family. She knew what it was like to lose someone unexpectedly and tragically. But funerals were staged events. She had time to prepare for them. The funerals she’d been to were designed as a way to say goodbye to people she had known. She shared memories with them, memories of them being alive. She’d seen them smile.

But she hadn’t prepared for this. She didn’t have any memories of this man. The only memory she had of this man was that of his death. She felt a certain amount of intimacy for the man.

The strange thing about being alive today, during the age of social media, Facebook and an exhaustive amount of connectivity, is the ease of which we can dig around and find out way too much information about a person. Because before long, she knew the name of his mother, his stepmother, father, brother, sister, and many of his aunts and uncles. She even knew the name of his pastor. She knew where he’d gone to college. She knew what his favorite sports teams were. She flipped through the snapshots he’d taken while vacationing in Italy back in 2009. She got glimpses of his life through the eyes of countless friends and family who loved him deeply. Their mourning poured out onto Facebook for anyone to bear witness to. Even her. Their tributes and memories of the man left her weeping.

He was loved, so very loved. And he wasn’t alone.

What she came to know about the dead man was that he came from a huge, loving family. He came from a family who believes wholeheartedly that he is in the hands of God now. She learned that he loved living in New York City even though his family and friends lived far away. She now knows about his amazing smile and how it lit up a room. She learned that he looked sharp in a suit and was very successful at his job. She learned that he was unbelievably kind, a quality apparent in the wrinkles that framed his eyes.

She learned that he would be missed by so many people, so very many people.

Even her. Even though she’d never seen him alive. Even though she never would.

She is no longer haunted by the image of the dead man and the van and the lack of color on the grayest of all days. She has set the image free.