Shine

It has been a week since I sat down to have coffee with my husband at my favorite little coffee shop, Cafe Phil, in Bed-Stuy. I had just snapped a picture and shared it on Instagram. It was our 21st anniversary. I checked TMZ real quick, as I always do. Then I audibly gasped.

Not Kobe…

NOOOOO…

I handed my phone to my husband. He took one look at it and said, “they’re wrong.” I prayed they were, but in my gut I knew they weren’t. The headline read, “Kobe Bryant Dies In Helicopter Crash… Everyone on Board Dead.” I just knew, from a journalist’s perspective, there is no way they would have reported the story, with such finality, without obtaining confirmation. (Harvey Levin isn’t that careless.) I also knew their proximity to the accident meant even greater odds that the story was accurate.

We disappeared into our phones, searching every other news outlet for more information, hoping there was nothing. And there was nothing for quite some time. Until there was something and then it went dark for awhile.

There we were on our anniversary, sharing coffee, having dropped our precious youngest daughter off at a friend’s 13th birthday party, waiting ’til time to pick her up again, while cross country a family was just destroyed. My mind was reeling. They would never be the same again, their family of six. We are a family of six. Magical and Whole. 6. Their pain was thousands of miles away and yet it was perfectly tangible. Sitting there at Cafe Phil, I could feel Vanessa Bryant and her girls, their shock and disbelief, their utter devastation.

Then a flicker… I was conscious of it even then. The tiny miracle within the moment: that I was able to feel their pain, that I was able to harness love, and hope, and strength, and send it across time and distance to a mother and her children who had lost a husband and a father, to a father and daughter who were separated from them, just beyond the veil, to the others who had not yet been named and their loved ones, to every soul out there, wherever love, light, and goodness reaches. All because…

WE CAN LOVE PEOPLE WE DON’T EVEN KNOW.

I sit here tonight, sharing a few words with my tribe, in hopes of bringing some light, if only even a flicker, to the depths of the darkness. For the whole world has responded. It has felt a family’s pain, really felt it, and responded with love and light. And I am reminded that it is in times like these that we see the best of humanity. It has always been so. In the darkest of times, we find what it is that we are made of. Just like the stars in the sky. They’re always there. But it’s not until they are bathed in the inky dark night that we see their brilliance.