This is where it gets dark.

"Mom, she’s dead.”

I don’t know how I wrote those words or why I chose to say it that way. But those were the facts. They found her and she was dead. How else do you say that? I had to tell my mom, she knew we’d been out looking for Libby all day. So, I just said it. My phone was old and the battery was of course on 1% which meant I had to say it quickly. I remember trying to think of a different way to say “my battery is dying” because the words “dead” and “dying” were now suddenly very real and literal for me. Mary Anne was crying, and her friend Wendy who’d come to be a support was crying. I think I was crying too. I think I was also completely made of stone. I guess it was shock. But to be honest, I knew in my gut as soon as I got the call that morning telling me Libby was missing that it wouldn’t end like it did last time. But still my body and brain were made of cold, hard, marble. All I could do was whatever had to be done. Mary Anne and I knew that the next thing that had to be done was to tell Kathryn. But she was thousands of miles away getting ready to perform on Broadway.

Broadway was Kathryn’s dream. She had performed on that stage many times already but it was still her dream. And we had to rip her out of that dream and throw her into a complete living nightmare.

We face-timed her while sitting on the floor of a middle school library where the search party had gathered and saw she was getting ready to go on stage. So we tried to tell her it could wait until after the show.

But she knew.

She saw it on our faces and heard it in our voices.

She begged us to just tell her.

So we did.

“They found her body.”

Less harsh maybe than how I told my mom? Probably more graphic, though. But again those were the facts. Her body had been found face down in a creek. How she got in the creek we don’t actually know. We have theories and ideas but there was no way of knowing the absolute and complete truth of what happened. And we never would know, exactly.

Truth.

The only truth we had was that our best friend, our sister had died. And it wasn’t the kind of death you can prepare for over months or years. No, it was the kind of death where just a couple of weeks ago you were all dancing together at Mary Anne’s wedding. Libby had been given the task of buying some kind of alcohol and bringing it to the bridal party's dressing room and she showed up with the silliest little globes of vodka made to look like smiley face emojis. It was the kind of death where just a few months ago you watched ½ of the newly released Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life on her couch with her 1-year-old baby girl playing on the floor. The kind of death so unbelievable that you had dreams for months after about her coming back and telling everyone she’d just gone on a trip to see her friends in Arkansas and she wasn't really dead. The kind of death that left a husband shattered and a little girl to grow up without ever knowing her mother.

That was all the truth we had.

I remember going back to work the next day and feeling like I was living in a total blur of emotions. I couldn’t understand what I was feeling. But I knew I’d taken a lot of sick days already and even though in hindsight I know my boss would have been completely understanding of the situation I felt like I had to go to work. But I wasn’t really there. I couldn’t be. I was honestly just a warm body in the room. At one point in the morning, I looked at my co-teacher and friend and told her, “I can’t really do anything. Can we just paint?” Luckily for the 2 & 3-year-olds in our class, my worst day was their most fun day ever. Khirstin went down the hall and collected long sections of clean, crisp, white paper to cover our tables with and every color of finger paint imaginable. We put the kids in smocks and let them loose. She let me loose too. I was on my knees with my hands in the thick cold paint right along with the kids. The blur in my head and my heart was being transferred onto that paper. I was mixing the orange pain with the purple confusion and the blue denial and the red anger all combining into an ugly brown blur of grief.

I’m so grateful to have had Khirstin that day. She was typically a stickler for following the curriculum but on that day she saw me and what I needed.

The days that followed, I’ll admit I don’t really remember much.

I know we spent our evenings with Libby’s family. We drank wine and told stories about her love and light and occasional righteous indignation. One moment I’ll always remember was when Mary Anne and I went to the grocery store to buy more wine and the poor girl at the checkout was just trying to make conversation… I think she said something like “That’s a lot of wine!” or “Weren’t you just here last night buying wine?” I don’t remember exactly but whatever she said Mary Anne’s response was “Yeah, well, our best friend just died.”

The poor girl was so shocked she could only stutter out a whispered: “I’m so sorry”. She finished checking us out in complete silence. I don’t think she even told us our total. Thinking of other people’s feelings (especially a stranger’s) when every bit of your energy is being put towards simply standing on your own two feet is pretty hard. I know Mary Anne feels bad about it now, but I look back at the moment and laugh. Because isn’t it so absurd that we were even going through that? To this day I just think it is so absurd that our best friend who was bold, and bright, and beautiful is dead! Of all the people in the world, it had to be her?!

How completely absurd.

A few days later we had the memorial service. Kathryn had flown in from New York. We were doing this together, there was no way any one of us could've survived without the other two. The service was packed full of flowers and people. Literally packed. It was standing room only in a church that could fit 500 people. We all (her family and close friends) decided not to wear black. But to wear bright colors because that would better honor who she was and what she brought to the world. The three of us chose to wear yellow. On the way to the service, we stopped at Trader Joe's to get flowers. It's just dawning on me as I'm writing this that we were at a grocery store again. One of the workers asked if we were going to a wedding. I don't remember which one of us had to break the news that we were going to a funeral. This time wasn't as harsh as the wine incident though, because in some weird twisted way, us looking like we were going to a wedding was exactly how it should be.

Libby would've loved that.