It was a Thursday in July in Paris.

Two months before I met him, I had finished my book. A book of one hundred stories I had collected while traveling across all 50 states after my mother died. A book I’ve called More Good.

When I got off the road at the end of 2019, I had no idea what to write or how to write about what I had experienced. I had typed up thousands of words, and then, over this past winter, living in a cabin on top of a mountain in Homer, Alaska, I deleted almost everything I had written and started again.

I wrote an entirely new book from an entirely new perspective.

Which meant I also had to write an almost entirely new book proposal. I eventually condensed the original 90 pages down to 48. It was a proposal I was proud of, and I was finally ready to start sending it out into the world.

I finished it during my first few weeks in Paris. In between writing, walking about 25,000 steps a day, and eating roughly 55 chocolate croissants, I also decided to go on a dating app.

At first, I thought it might be fun. An entertaining story to share with my roommate while I was here. I had never actually been on a Bumble date before. But really, I was less interested in dating than I was in finding someone interesting to talk to.

After traveling for three straight years and talking to strangers every day during my mission, I missed the conversations. I missed meeting strangers. I love hearing how they got where they are, what they’ve experienced, and what makes them who they are. So I decided to use Bumble for what I wanted from it: a good conversation over coffee.

I don’t think this is what people always use these apps for, but I decided maybe I would.

The first date felt a bit depressing.

First of all, his name was Kevin, a name that felt distinctly un-French, until I learned that more than 13,000 babies were named Kevin in France in 1991 alone, the year Dances with Wolves and Home Alone made it to French theaters. Turns out an entire generation of French parents named their sons after Kevin Costner and Macaulay Culkin’s character.

Wild, but I digress.

Kevin was cute; he bought me an Aperol Spritz and showed up on time, so I don’t want to trash him. But the conversation was a bit dark. He told me that whenever he meets people, he automatically assumes they’re dumb and stupid unless they prove otherwise. He also had no interest in going to the United States, and absolutely none in Alaska. I found this all pretty interesting, given that I’d just mentioned Alaska was my favorite state, and that I spend my life looking for the good in people.

We chatted for almost three hours, but if you know me, this shouldn’t be too telling. I could spend three hours talking to a literal fly on the wall.

I gave up on the app after that, the conversation having left me feeling rather depressed about the state of people’s outlook on the world. And then, one evening, rereading my proposal overview for the 984^th time, I remembered I still had the app.

I went on and matched with someone named Richard.

He was Canadian and just visiting for the week to attend a wedding.

He started a conversation, and within a few minutes we planned to have coffee the following day.

The next morning, before I left to meet Richard, I reread the proposal and planned to submit it to someone later that afternoon so it would be morning in New York by the time they received it. Preferably, after their morning coffee break.

I walked over to Café Divan.

We chatted for the first two hours about our lives and the places we had lived and traveled to. I told him about my book and how today was a big day because I was submitting the proposal to someone. He kindly congratulated me. We continued talking, and I wondered what I was actually doing here.

Connecting to a cool person I’d inevitably have to say goodbye to.

The idea of it had nearly killed me on the road trip. Every single day, I met someone fascinating who would share their story or their home with me, only to say goodbye to them the next day.

I sat across from Richard, realizing that my little plan to connect with people using an app had backfired on me.

It had just recreated, in a tinier version, the one part of the road I never got used to. You meet someone curious, connect right away, and know you’ll have to say goodbye before you’ve had enough time.

And then, halfway through a ham and cheese omelet, Richard set his fork down like he wasn’t going to pick it up for a while, and then he told me a story.

It was about his brother.

A few years ago, Richard’s brother, Eric, had become very sick due to a long-standing, undiagnosed autoimmune liver condition. He was living in NYC at the time with his wife and two young kids, and doctors had offered little hope for them.

One day, Eric’s wife attended a community class where a rabbi talked about the power other people have to offer support to others. After class, she approached the rabbi and asked for more information about the resource.

The rabbi gave her a number to call for an organization called Chaim Medical Resource.

She called, and they immediately offered help. They reviewed Eric’s medical records and connected him with a doctor who specialized in his condition. The doctor also told Eric he was a candidate for a living donor liver transplant.

And then, they located an altruistic donor for him.

A stranger with no personal connection to Eric or his family, motivated by the Jewish principle of pikuach nefesh (saving a life).

The week before the surgery, Eric’s wife asked the medical team for the donor’s Hebrew name so she could pray for him. When they told her, she got full-body chills.

The donor had the same Hebrew name as her husband, Eric, the man whose life he was about to save.

The two families met outside the hospital for the first time on the morning of the surgery, and Eric hugged the young man and thanked him for what he was doing. To which the man replied, “No, thank you. This has been a dream of mine.”

The surgery was successful, and Eric felt “reborn” after years of feeling sick.

I sat there smiling at Richard as he finished sharing the story with me. And the next morning, when he sent me a short video clip of the story, I found myself crying. Of the hundreds and thousands of stories I collected on the road, it was the complete strangers who donated pieces of themselves to others and saved lives in the process that often left me speechless.

And now, here I was in Paris, trying to find a publisher for a book about the good I found in strangers, and another stranger handed me another story. On the exact day I was anxiously hovering my finger over a send button.

Getting this book out into the world has been one of the more discouraging and challenging parts of doing More Good. But moments like this remind me why I keep going. Why I keep searching.

Because these stories are everywhere.

We find what we are looking for. And if we keep our eyes out for the good, we might just find some more of it.

Even in the most unlikely places.

Like a Bumble app in Paris.

Paris, July 2026. One of many coffees, conversations, and chocolate croissants.

Seven years ago, we met because of an email.

Steve’s email arrived on the very day I admitted, for the first time out loud, how lonely my journey across America had become.

For almost three years, I had been sitting in strangers’ living rooms listening to their stories. Stories about loss, addiction, illness, and tragedy. Stories about people who managed to survive things I’m not sure I could survive myself. Stories that stayed with me long after I drove away and still haunt me today.

The irony was that the more connected I felt to humanity, the more isolated I felt in my own life. It wasn’t until one afternoon, when I was overwhelmed and run down from the journey, that I finally said it out loud.

“I wanted to create something that could help people feel less alone,” I told a friend. “But in the process, I’ve made myself feel more alone than I’ve ever felt in my life.” The second I said it, I started to cry. A second later, my phone vibrated.

It was an email with the subject line Kindred spirits. I almost deleted it. At that point, my inbox was overflowing for the first time since I got on the road. A few days earlier, the Washington Post had published a story about my journey across America, and emails had started pouring in faster than I could read them all. But something about those two words made me stop.

Kindred spirits? I started reading.

“Hi, Mary.

A friend sent me the Washington Post article about your journey, and I’m happy to learn of both. He also noted that we are kindred spirits, and I agree.

I also left home in February 2016 for the road and spent three years driving through every state...”

I read the sentence twice. He had gotten on the road nine months before I had. He had traveled to all fifty states, too. And it had taken him three years. As I kept reading, I learned that shortly after he got off the road, his mother had died of cancer. I had gotten on the road because mine had.

He told me he got on the road to make sense of how we as a country got to 2016. Along the way, he cooked 259 meals and visited 157 towns and cities. “I wanted to introduce myself, if nothing else, to let you know that someone else had done a similar journey throughout a similar time frame,” he said. And then ended with one word.

“Spooky.”

I immediately forwarded his email to my sisters. “OH MY GOD WHAT?” one replied. The other asked the question I was already wondering myself.

“Is this person real?”

At a moment when I felt more alone than I ever had on the journey, an email arrived from the one person on earth who seemed to understand exactly what it had been like to live it. I felt relief just knowing he existed.

I immediately hit reply.

“Are we secretly best friends who have just never met?”

I asked him if we could connect, and he replied with his cell a few minutes later. Two days later, I called him. We talked for hours. As we finished up our call, he asked if I would accept a passenger in my car. Besides my father and a very close friend, no one had been in the car with me in the last two years. The trip felt so sacred it was hard to imagine throwing someone else in the mix. Especially when you were staying in total strangers’ homes, you couldn’t just ask for a plus one to join you. But I was desperate for his friendship. For his understanding. So I said yes, with one caveat. “We would have to stay with the people who hosted you,” I told him. I couldn’t vouch for him to people offering to host me. But in my mind, it still followed my theme; the people were strangers to me. But to him, they already knew him, so they would be more likely to let a friend of his come to their home, too.

I gave him the route I was planning, and he told me he had a spot in Pittsburgh, Morgantown, Annapolis…” and then he paused. “Oh, and I have one in this cool town in West Virginia I think you’re really going to enjoy. It’s called Thomas.”

I froze. Why was that name so familiar? And then I realized. A few months earlier I had been in a coffee shop in South Dakota when I saw a painting on the wall. It showed a girl sailing through the sky in a tiny boat led by a string of birds. Underneath the drawing it read:

“To be sure, the adventure had been magnificent to the point of exhaustion. Yet still, nothing they had come across could hold a candle to how they felt about the simple help they had been offered along the way.”

I bought the drawing. And then that Christmas, I bought a different drawing with his beautiful words for each of my family members. I had researched the artist, Seth, and written to him to tell him how much his words had impacted me. He said that if I was ever in the area, I should walk on into his studio and we might meet. I never thought we would. His studio, Seth had told me, was in Thomas, West Virginia.

“Oh my gosh,” I told Steve, “I actually do want to go there! There is an artist I really love that is there; have you ever heard of Art of Seth?”

He started laughing, “Yes,” he said. “Seth’s girlfriend was my host.”

I nearly dropped the phone. Three days earlier, I hadn’t even known Steve existed. Now he was flying across the country to spend two weeks in my car and introduce me to one of my favorite artists.

On July 28, 2019, I pulled into a coffee shop in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to meet a man I had known for exactly fifteen days and was about to spend the next two weeks trapped in my car with. When I told some of my friends, they thought I was crazy. And to be honest, I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect either. Inviting a stranger into the space that had become my home for the past three years felt risky.

But by that point, uncertainty had become my normal.

Three years earlier, I had climbed into my car with no idea where this journey would lead me. Saying yes to letting Steve in didn’t feel crazy at all. It felt like the kind of decision the road had been teaching me to make all along. Trust, I’d learned, wasn’t about certainty. It was about choosing to believe in people anyway.

And I am so glad I believed in Steve. Somewhere between Pittsburgh and Maryland, after hours and hours of conversation and only one actual argument, Steve stopped feeling like a stranger who had emailed me. He felt like family.

We began speaking almost every day; he became one of the first calls I made when life felt confusing. He always checked in. He always called back. He always showed up. I hoped I became that kind of friend for him, too.

Two years later, when he spontaneously bought a van, I booked a ticket and joined him for the first two weeks of his maiden voyage. A few months later, I flew to him again for another two weeks of van life.

I’d best describe our relationship by comparing it to Steve Martin and John Candy in Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. He is the Neil Page to my Del Griffith. Quiet and composed to my wild nature. Steve is one of the smartest and most curious people I know.

While I grew up in a small beach town at the end of Long Island, Steve entered the world in the final weeks of the Vietnam War. He was born in Saigon just forty days before the city fell. His family narrowly missed the U.S. evacuation and remained in Vietnam for another eight years before France granted them political asylum. Paris became the first place they called home in freedom.

I think it is why Steve and I connected. We were both trying to understand the world through other people’s stories. The difference was that Steve took the time to understand mine. He finished his journey before we met, but he was able to be part of mine when he joined me in the car for those two weeks. I could talk to him about anything.

This summer, I get to do the same for him.

In a few hours, I’ll board a plane to meet him in Paris. We’re going in search of a series of documents connected to his family’s history. Specifically, military records of his paternal grandfather, who served in the French colonial army in Indochina. Decades ago, those records gave the French government reason to intervene diplomatically and help Steve’s family leave Vietnam for a new life in France. His family’s archives have revealed pieces of the story. Now we’re hoping the French archives might reveal the rest.

Steve was ten years old when he left Paris for the United States. More than forty years later, he’ll return. Seven years ago, I invited Steve into my car, and he became part of my journey.

Tonight, I get to board a plane to be part of his.

I’ll be writing from Paris for the next 7 weeks.

You can find Steve’s writing here: Le Mobile Feast

Steve and I near Cathedral Rock in Sedona, Arizona

Joshua Tree, first van journey, May 2021.

Slide Rock State Park, second van journey, November 2021.

July 2019, a day after we met in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Art of Seth

I made my way to the grocery store. It was around 4 p.m. on March 1. I had been back in Alaska for fifteen days and was slowly getting into a rhythm with my writing and adjusting to the 9 a.m. sunrise.

March 1 was the thirteenth anniversary of my mom’s death. But no one here knew, because I hadn’t mentioned it. Part of me always wondered: if I don’t mention it, will it hurt less? Will it be less sad?

Turns out, no.

I parked at the store and jumped out of the car to check the back seat. There was a cardboard box with a flower plant inside. A few colorful candles and a card. I opened the envelope.

Inside was a beautiful message: she wrote that, though she didn’t know my mother, she felt as if she did because she knew me. And how she wasn’t sure the exact date she died, but she thought it might be a day in March.

I sat there reading her card, tears running down my face in the Safeway parking lot.

-

I got home that evening and saw I had an Instagram message from one of my hosts from the More Good road trip, who did know the date. “Can I ask you something personal? Are there places you feel your mom’s presence the most? And is Alaska one? If not, can you tell me where those places are for you?”

I stared at Megan’s message for a moment before typing back.

I told her that while I loved Alaska, the places I feel my mom most aren’t really places at all.

They’re people.

I felt her wherever people loved me the way she had.

I think that is why I loved the road trip so much. Because everywhere I went, people took care of me. Fed me. Encouraged me. Cared for me. She was everywhere on the road in almost everyone I met.

I’ve spent a lot of my life chasing beautiful views. And while standing on top of a mountain can make me feel brave, strong, and alive, it doesn’t make me feel close to Mom.

People do.

The ones who show up. Like Kara, who somehow knew exactly what March 1 meant and left flowers and beautiful words when I needed them most.

Like Allison and Preston, who spent Mother’s Day with me, taking me on an adventure across the bay.

Like Brad, who handed me the keys to his car for a long drive back to Anchorage without a second thought.

Like Emily, who not only threw me a goodbye party before I had to fly back to New York, but then showed up at my door the next morning with cleaning supplies and a mop. I did not call her. And I sure as heck did not give myself enough time to clean before I left. And yet, she showed up. She knew.

And that is only a fraction of the people and a fraction of the things they did for me.

Alaska isn’t just the place my nervous system feels the most calm. It is the place I feel mom the most. Because I feel so loved there. So supported.

And now, so accomplished.

Because after three months in my little cabin on top of Ohlson Mountain, with nothing to distract me but a moose in my window, I finished my book.

I finished it on Mother’s Day weekend. Fittingly.

And then I invited over a few women from the Homer community who I felt had either reminded me of my mother or mothered me in some way that made me feel as comfortable as possible standing in front of them to read the introduction to my book. Many of them knew I had gone on a journey, but not many knew the origin story. So I figured I could read it to them and see how they would react. Whether it would land.

It was a potluck. Because, Alaska.

Each of them brought a delicious dish. I printed out a few photographs from the trip and nailed them to some unused wood planks I found lying under the house. I made a custom kindness-themed cocktail list. The empathy elixir being the biggest hit, with beet apple ginger ice cubes and muddled mint. All day, I imagined standing on the deck of the house and all of them sitting on the lawn in front of me as I read to them.

And then it snowed.

So the 17 women I invited over huddled into my little writer’s cabin. They piled onto the couch and in the little loft. And I read them my introduction.

Afterward, some of them asked questions, which I answered before Jenny looked at me and said, “Could I lead us in a song?”

I looked at her, confused at first. The East Coast in me immediately imagines Kumbaya breaking out. But instead, she started to sing this:

“Find yourself a power spot.

Bring along a spoon and a cooking pot.

Bring air, bring fire, bring water, bring earth.

And a new Universe will birth.”

And within a few minutes, every woman in the room clapped her hands and sang along. And it was really, truly beautiful.

Because for a moment, the world felt like it stopped. And we were all in this moment, together. And it was exactly what I’ve always wanted with More Good. For us to forget everything else that tries to pull us apart, and be in a moment where we feel brought together again.

And while they all sang around me, I had my answer.

Where do I feel her the most? Here. In these moments. In this cabin, with these people.

I wouldn’t find her in my hometown anymore. Or inside the house where I grew up. Or in a cemetery.

I’d find her here. In rooms full of people who love me the way she did.

Places where people drive out in the snow and rain to show up for me. Who leave me letters in my car, or offer their vehicle to borrow with no questions asked. The ones who show up with a mop and bucket when I am too overwhelmed to ask for help.

-

The view from my cabin windows on Ohlson Mountain was overwhelmingly beautiful every day. Moose. Northern Lights. Sandhill cranes. But it was the view from inside the cabin that night I will remember most from my time in Alaska.

Because for the first time, in a long time, I didn’t feel her absence. She was everywhere in that room, in all of the faces who showed up and in all of the kindness they offered and the way they cared for me.

It felt as though she had found her way back to me through all of the people I found in Homer, Alaska.

The views from my cabin window

and my favorite view, the one from inside:

It is a story some of you might know, and some of you might just be learning about today. So I will first share a brief explanation of what you are about to watch.

Once upon a time, a mom named Kelli started a mission called Nik’s Wish in honor of her son Nik. He had passed away, but she wanted to give other young adults fighting cancer something to hold onto. A wish.

One of those wishes went to a young man named Joe.

But Joe didn’t use his wish for himself.
He used it to help others.

He became the first Angel for Nik’s Wish, raising money and helping grant even more wishes.

I made a video about Joe years ago.

And a girl named Maddie saw it… and chose to act.

We lost Joe in 2023.

But because of him, we have Maddie. Another angel, carrying his wish forward, and helping bring joy to young adults (18–24) going through cancer.

Today is Maddie’s birthday.

And there are still so many kids waiting for their wish to come true.

If you want to celebrate Maddie, you can help her grant the next one with the donation link at the bottom. ❤️

Or, simply be inspired by her and go to sleep tonight knowing that people like her exist.

Thank you for being here.

xo

Mary

Make sure volume is up!

Be someone’s ripple.

Donate here. or Venmo under charities: moregoodtoday

*All donations to More Good Today this week will be sent to Maddie to keep granting wishes to kids in waiting. Every bit matters.

I pulled out of the driveway. He kept his eyes on me. There was nowhere else to look. There was no one else around.

His owner was gone.

It was not my problem. I could reverse out of that driveway, board the next flight out of the Caribbean, and never look back. Leave 2020 in the rear-view mirror.

I looked at him again. According to the paperwork, he was five years old.

A small white and gray cat with huge green eyes and a half mustache. He was looking around now, confused. It was not his fault, nor within his understanding, that his owner had gotten ill and would never return.

He just stood there.

Unaware.

Homeless.

I pulled back into the driveway.

And that is how I ended up with a cat.

I should mention that I am not a cat person. I am, however, a sucker for a sad, confused animal sitting abandoned in an empty doorway.

I am an animal person, really. But having an animal with my mobile lifestyle was not exactly the most logical decision I ever made.

Luckily, I have a lovely cousin named Nancy, who shares a cottage with me in Orient. Over the past two summers, when I temporarily relocated myself to Alaska and Wyoming, she took care of the cat. It might be a good idea to introduce him now. Five years is a long time to still be forgetting that I own a cat. But somehow, I still do.

His name is Walter.

I moved him from St. John in 2020. He moved to New York to a small apartment. Then he moved to Miami with me. Then he moved into a cottage with Nancy for months at a time.

And now, against his Caribbean nature, he has come with me to Alaska.

I did not have to drug him; he actually chose to walk himself into the carrier the morning we left. Perhaps he knew he didn’t want to be left behind, or he knew he wanted to follow the hand that fed him. After many a claw in the neck, his easy transition into the carrier was a welcome surprise. His behavior on the 24 hours of travel, two flights, and 8 hours in a car was equally as surprising. He was perfect. And yes, I was just tempted to write it as ‘purr-fect’…which honestly makes me want to punch myself in the face.” But I guess this is what happens when you own a cat for five years. You make cat jokes.

Walter and I arrived at JFK around 9 am on Valentine’s Day. As I approached security, the man told me I had to remove him from the carrier. This was something I had carefully avoided the first and only other time we had flown together. I had explained to the woman in St. Thomas, VI, that if I removed the cat from the carrier, it would run off across the airport and we would never see it again. “This cat doesn’t know me,” I told her. “Your call.”

She let me walk him through while he was in the carrier.

But things were a little different at JFK. The man stared at me with not a chance of budging written all over his face. I braced myself. Opened the carrier and started to try to grab him out. His claws held on for dear life. Finally, a kind woman came over and held his carrier for me so I could rip him out. His pee pad fell out in the process, a piece of poop flinging off with it. My embarrassment and heart rate at an all-time high, I grabbed the literal shit and threw it all back into the carrier. Walter, luckily, was so scared he didn’t make a run for it. He held me like a child, tightly hugging me until we reunited with his carrier, then jumped back in it as if it were the happiest place he knew.

I sat there in my black T-shirt and black leggings covered in about ten pounds of white cat hair and made my way to the bar.

On the flight, I sat next to a woman whom I profusely apologized to for having an animal with me. Even though Walter was being perfect, I felt her grimace as I moved past her into my seat.

Halfway through our flight, my seatmate and I started talking. Her grimace had turned into a huge smile, and she shared with me how she had moved to Alaska a few years ago, after her husband had died. How, even though she had never truly lived there, she felt like moving there, she was “going home.” I immediately agreed with her sentiment. She told me her name was Sue.

Then, to my complete surprise, Sue began to tell me how she and her husband had motorcycled around the U.S. before he died. Walter slept quietly under the seat during Sue’s story. Not one meow the entire flight.

“At one point, we made some friends on the road,” Sue told me. “Two other men joined us for a portion of the ride. We were along the Kansas-Colorado line when one of their bikes broke down.”

Apparently, she told me, it was starting to get dark. The four of them were on the side of the road, trying to figure out a plan as it got darker. An elderly woman drove by them and kept going. Then, the car stopped. The older woman turned around and came back despite her fear of being outnumbered. “I used to be a biker myself,” the woman had told Sue. “So, I couldn’t just leave you guys stranded.” She proceeded to let them know she had a trailer and only lived a ways up the road. She returned with her trailer; they loaded the bike so they could get it to a mechanic the next day when one was open. Then she offered her home to them. She made them dinner and pie. Sue stayed in touch with the woman until the woman died five years later.

“So, what do you do?” Sue asked me.

I laughed. “This,” I said to her.

I explained how I collect stories just like this from strangers, how I had done it for years through all 50 states. I told her how Alaska was my favorite state, and why I was returning to it to finish my book.

A friend of mine, whom I had worked with in New York City, once said to me, “I feel like you are just riding this endless wave of synchronicity.”

Walter and I surfed right off that wave into the Anchorage airport around 9 p.m. on Valentine’s Day. The following morning, after a quick trip to Costco, we made the four-and-a-half-hour drive to Homer. Only one more stop to have my dear friend who drove us capture a photo of the moment. To Walter’s absolute horror, I removed him from the carrier into the ten-degree air. We stood in front of the Welcome to Homer sign. He, furious. Me, happier than I’ve felt in a long time.

The woman renting me the cabin had sent a message a few days before our departure. “The spring has stopped running,” she had written. “There have been some serious deep freezes, and the water tank is empty.”

Alaskan translation: You might be in a dry cabin the first week.

I paused before realizing there was no outhouse on the property. What would the bathroom plan be?

Would I be sharing a litter box with Walter?

Luckily, everything resolved itself hours before Walter, and I arrived at the sweet little cabin. It was sunset, and the entire sky was orange and red. Snow-covered mountains in every direction you looked. I walked through the door into the one large room on the first floor. Lining the left side, a kitchen, in the center, a table to write at, and on the right, a living room area. A ladder along the far wall takes you to a loft with a bed surrounded by windows. I would stare at the stars until I fell asleep that night, and every night since.

I put the carrier down and let Walter out to explore.

We were home. For now.

This Substack has, in many ways, saved my life.

I started writing here one year ago because of a friend who was going through an incredibly upsetting situation. Her three-year-old daughter had been diagnosed with brain cancer. The news was thrown at her while she was already a caretaker for her elderly father and her mother, who has dementia.

This friend, one I am incredibly in awe of, had just learned about my More Good mission of sharing stories of human kindness last winter. She found out I was writing a book to eventually donate to hospital waiting rooms once it was completed. “Where is it?” she would ask jokingly, yet impatiently. “I need it now, Mary! I am in the waiting room right now!”

Her request didn’t just hit me with urgency. It also made me wonder. How can I get her these stories sooner? Why is it so hard to complete this project and figure out a publisher? Can anyone please come hold my hand and help me get this done sooner?

Then I was hit with the realization that I didn’t have to wait to figure out all of these answers. I could start publishing some now. On my own. A few stories from the book, from the road, from my travels. Stories of how I think, and why I think the way I think.

I am not sure whether this is a gift from my mother, from life, or how I came to be wired this way, but I truly do find joy in so many small things. In so many little moments. In every person I meet. Even the ones who I give too many chances to.

That way of thinking was something that I refused to let go of when my mother died. But it was definitely tested. Finding the joy in each moment and focusing on the good became a challenge when the person I loved the most had disappeared. And for a while, it made me want to disappear, too.

Instead, I chose to keep her alive by heading out into the world and searching harder for the good she promised me was out there.

Along the way, I met a man named Sal.

In 1988, Sal was living in Houston, heading to work at IBM one morning on Route 610 when an 18-wheeler struck his car. The truck had been changing lanes and clipped him hard enough to spin his vehicle around, leaving him facing the grill of the truck as it pushed him another hundred feet down the road. By the time the truck stopped, Sal’s ribs were bruised, his car was wrecked, and paramedics were tending to him on the side of the highway.

The truck driver was apologetic at first, until the police arrived.

“He changed the whole story,” Sal told me as we sat outside a coffee shop in Florida. The twelfth state of fifty on my journey. “He said I cut him off.”

Lying on the roadside, his blood pressure climbing, Sal listened as the accident he had just lived through was being told falsely to the police officer.

Then, a few minutes later, a young man showed up at the scene.

He told the police he had been driving his mother to work. He said he hadn’t stopped right away, but he’d seen the entire accident. He described exactly what happened and how the truck had cut Sal off. He gave his full statement and his personal information in case the police needed it later.

By the time the paramedics cleared Sal, the young man was gone.

“I never got to thank him,” Sal said. “I never even knew his name. He didn’t owe me anything. He went out of his way and came all the way back to help someone he didn’t know. And he has no idea how much he saved me from. Lawyers. Court. Years of stress. All because he chose to get involved.”

Thirty years had passed when Sal told me this story, and he spoke about it as if it had happened days ago.

“People don’t forget kindness like that,” he had said to me. “I hope wherever he is, it’s come back to him.”

That story is one of the reasons I keep writing. Because these stories deserve to be shared. To be remembered. Kindness has become so fragile and so easy to miss when we don’t notice it. One small decision in our day, to witness something, to turn the car around, to speak up for someone who can’t, to follow a pull towards something that we can’t even explain, can change the course of our lives. Or others.

It’s what’s happened to me on Substack over the last year. With you. My reader.

You didn’t just read my story and disappear. You came with me. You believed in the stories as much as me and chose to keep reading. And some of you have even paid to do it. Something that has given my words an ego for the first time, that you would support them monetarily, on top of the time you already gave them by subscribing in the first place.

Mostly, it has made me even more careful not to waste your time. To only leave you with a hopeful thought when you’re done taking time to hear or read my words.

As I celebrate one year of writing here, I am also packing up my bags again.

I am heading back to Alaska, my favorite stop from the fifty states I drove through on my trip. I am going to finish my book for the hospital waiting room. I’ve been working on it quietly alongside writing these Substack stories.

That book will hold stories like Sal’s, stories that acknowledge the moments that matter when one person pays attention. Stories of incredible resilience. Stories that remind us that even with the darkness that sometimes is too hard to fathom, light finds a way back to us.

Recently, I met with a friend who offered to do my Astrocartography chart. We both laughed when Alaska was a place where things aligned for me. It was something I had known for years.

Arriving in Alaska at the end of my journey reset my nervous system. I had never felt anything like that before, let alone on a three-year, 50-state road trip, in and out of homes, collecting emotional stories.

The reading of my map and Alaska aligning with my birth chart that day was all the validation I needed for something my heart has long felt. My friend’s reading simply gave a language to something I had learned to trust years ago when I got in the car in 2016. When something keeps calling you, it is worth listening to.

It is how my entire life has been lived since my mother died. One small, brave yes after another.

I’m not going to escape, or find myself, or get my butt frozen to an outhouse seat. (Albeit any of these things could happen.)

I’m going to finish something.

Something I’ve been steadily working on for a very long time. Something that I’ve been able to write more clearly ever since I came to Substack. Because this outlet has allowed me an audience. It has given me you.

Experiencing the three-year road trip, writing the book for the hospital waiting room, and writing my own story of the journey have been among the most beautiful gifts I’ve ever received. It has also been one of the most isolating.

But here, on Substack. I feel like I’ve come alive again. I am no longer writing and speaking to a void with the two books I am working on. Here, I can write something and share it immediately.

This year of writing has taught me the urgency of sharing these stories. Of reminding people that a single moment of attention can change a life, as it did for Sal. Kindness is fragile, and it can disappear if no one is paying attention.

Sal never learned the man’s name who helped him that morning, but the story survived because Sal chose to keep retelling it. Thirty years later, the kindness had stayed alive.

Ever since I got off the road, I have been doing the opposite. I’ve been carrying many of the stories alone. I kept telling myself they weren’t perfect yet, rewriting them constantly.

Meeting my friend, Melissa, reminded me that these stories don’t need editing as much as they need witnesses. I’ve realized that the stories don’t have to be perfect. For so long, I’ve written and rewritten them, terrified that I am not giving them the justice they deserve. I was letting myself and my stories disappear into a project that kept stretching further into the future.

But writing here changed that for me; it reminded me that my stories don’t have to be perfect. They just have to be told. Now. While they can still help someone feel less alone.

So, thank you for being here.

Thank you for listening.

Mostly, thank you for keeping these stories from disappearing.

Thank you for keeping my voice alive.

-

Halfway through last summer, my friend Liz called.

Liz and I met in the Virgin Islands in 2014. We lived in the same house for a few months before I moved back to New York. We visited each other a few times over the next decade and kept in touch by phone before living together again in Alaska in the summer of 2024. It had been one of the best summers of my life.

We both left Alaska at the end of August 2024. I returned to New York to photograph weddings, and Liz flew to the British Virgin Islands to work as a first mate on a sailing catamaran.

When the following summer arrived, I was desperate to relive our summer in Alaska, but Liz was under contract on the boat. Instead, I headed to Wyoming, where my brother lived. I planned to help him renovate a home for the summer.

It was a gift to be near him and his family. But the process of working on the house with the construction workers I had found proved challenging and left me defeated. So, when Liz called at the beginning of August to ask how I was doing, she could sense the defeat.

“You don’t sound good. Why don’t you come on my next trip?” she offered.

Every September, when hurricane season arrived in the Caribbean, Liz had time off. Usually, she would travel during that time, so she asked me if I might want to join her on a trip.

Specifically, a surf trip.

In Africa.

I laughed. “I don’t surf,” I reminded her.

She encouraged me, telling me I could learn. “There will be beginner classes!” She told me, excitedly. “And even if you only surf one day, it will be worth it! You can explore and read while I surf for a few days, and then we can travel around!”

“I’ll think about it,” I told her, convinced there was no way I’d be able to make the trip.

The next day, she called back. “I found one! We could go for a week. They provide an airport shuttle. All meals are included. They take us on excursions every day after surfing. Yoga every morning and night, it’s all included. And we can get a room with our own bathroom!”

It sounded enticing, but still…

“And all of that would cost like $700,” she finished.

“I’m in,” I said without pause.

A few days later, I booked our flights. I was going to Morocco.

We left on Labor Day. The shuttle picked Liz and me up and brought us to Taghazout. It was a quick 30-minute drive from Agadir Airport. We checked into the “Surf House” and immediately walked upstairs to the rooftop. The rooftop floor was scattered with beautiful mosaic tiles. A panoramic view of the Atlantic Ocean stared back at us. A huge communal table with cushioned seating was set up, where dinner would be served in a few hours, and where we would meet some of the other international travelers visiting and make friends for the week. Besides the two boys from Michigan, we were the only Americans for the majority of the trip.

I felt like I had entered heaven. Everywhere you looked, there was beauty, an overwhelming amount of it. As a photographer, I was completely overstimulated. I wanted to take a photograph of every single thing, but my mother’s voice replayed in my head, “Take a photograph with your eyes,” she would always tell my siblings and me.

On the first morning, Liz and I hopped in the van and headed to the beach with our group. Once we got there, we put on our wetsuits and began our workout.

Lahoucine led us down the beach in a slow jog before we arrived at two camels sitting along the water resting. Suddenly, we started to circle the camels, following Lahoucine’s lead. After three laps, we stopped. And then we stayed there while starting the stretching portion of the workout. The camels seemed relatively unbothered, but they all began to stand up.

It was then that Lahoucine ran underneath one, clapped his hands, smiled ear to ear, and waved us on to do the same. We all stared at each other, shaking our heads, slightly terrified.

Lahoucine ran back through again and grabbed at the first guy’s hand to lead him through, but the man backed up and declined. I thought that was it, but the girl who was up next ran right through, and the next, and then Liz, and one more before a camel stomped its leg up and almost kicked someone, and that concluded the terrifying game conveniently before it was my turn. I couldn’t imagine chickening out, but I also didn’t want to find out what it was like in a hospital there. I felt torn about what I’d do when it got to be my turn; luckily, I never had to find out.

We ran back down the beach to our boards and broke up into groups. I joined the beginners, while Liz joined the intermediate. A much older man came over to my group and began to explain the rules of surfing as I daydreamed about what it would be like to get up on the wave.

Between his accent and my ADHD, I did not download all of the words he had said before we jumped into the ocean. All I really remember was the first big wave coming, and me jumping up on my board immediately. “I’m standing!” I thought, excitedly. Five seconds passed before I was dumped headfirst back into the water. I came up for air, with a huge grin on my face, feeling very pleased with myself as I turned to look at the instructor, assuming he’d be very proud as well.

“IT IS LIKE YOU LISTEN TO NOTHING I SAY!” he shouted at me instead, instantly erasing the stupid smile from my face. “I SAID ONLY STAY LYING ON BOARD. YOU MUST FEEL THE WAVES FIRST. WE DON’T GET UP YET.”

I guessed he must have shared that bit of information while I was zoning out, replaying scenes from Blue Crush, and imagining myself becoming pro.

I spent the rest of the day ashamed and slightly terrified of our teacher.

That night, we were brought to a marketplace in Agadir where we were allowed to pick up some beers and wine. We strolled through the alleyways, stumbling across stalls selling seafood, clothing, souvenirs, and one very large room with live chickens in cages for sale. A lot of them had gotten loose and were running wild around the area. The pungent smell was overwhelming.

The next morning, we headed out for our second day. This time, we were allowed to stand, but it was a bit rougher out there. On one of my first waves, someone cut in front of me, and I was nervous to run them over, so I fell over. They fell over, too. A second passed before their board slammed me in my ribs, and I swallowed a cup of salt water.

I only surfed for half a day that day because, after that wave, I felt slightly frightened by the conditions.

But that evening, after we were taken on another included excursion, quad riding, I told our new friends that tomorrow would be my day. “Day one, I was afraid of the teacher! Day two, I was afraid of the ocean! Tomorrow I will be afraid of nothing!” I kept telling them, and myself.

The next morning, I got out to the beach and kissed my board. I stared up at the sky and talked to Allah. And then I looked out and spoke to the ocean. “Today is our day,” I said over and over again to the ocean, Allah, my board.

And out I went.

I am not sure if it was the new teacher who helped immensely, or my insane belief that if I talked to the ocean, it would work… but on the third day, I surfed all day long, standing with every wave.

After our week at surf camp, Liz and I got ourselves to Essaouira. We stayed in a beautiful little riad inside the medina walls. Outside the city was very windy, and Liz had chosen it because she had planned to kiteboard.

We headed outside the city walls and down the beach on our first morning to find where she could rent a kite. I had brought my book, as I was already feeling the pain in the back muscles I never knew existed, and didn’t want to push it.

We found a cute little restaurant on the beach near a kite rental place and decided we would get a snack, and I could stay and read my book here while she went out to kite surf. We were sitting down when Liz noticed a man in a wetsuit seated a few spots away. “I’m going to go ask him how the waves are,” she told me as she made her way over to him.

Thirty seconds later, Liz returned with the man. “He’s going to join us,” she announced as our new friend took a seat and introduced himself in a British accent.

And there we sat, Liz, me, and our new friend, Chris. We talked about a million different things as the hours slipped by, like we were in a movie. The restaurant slowly shifted from lunch to dinner, as people came and went around us. The sun set. And suddenly it was 9:30 pm, and a band was playing beside us.

It felt like time didn’t exist in Essaouira.

Full of some liquid courage, we all hit the dance floor. Another hour snuck passed before we asked the waiter where people went after the band was over. He gave us a recommendation, and we grabbed our things and headed to our next dance floor. It was a rooftop bar down the street, equipped with bouncers and an incredible local band playing.

I threw my tote bag onto a table with Chris’s backpack since I only had a book and a towel in it. But Liz wore her backpack and danced around with us. We couldn’t have looked more like tourists if we’d tried, in our beach attire, since we hadn’t changed since that morning when we left our riad to go swim and surf. We hadn’t expected to roll into a nightclub at midnight, but here we were. I clocked the people around us, taking it all in.

A couple having a full make-out session to my left, a man in a tan suit dancing near Liz, and a few other tourists slowly making their way to the dance floor. Another ten minutes passed before I noticed Liz was coming towards me, panicked.

“What’s wrong?” I asked her, noticing Chris was in tow, equally concerned. “My phone is gone,” she told me.

“No,” I replied. “It can’t be,” I reassured her, grabbing her backpack off her to check all of the pockets.

Empty.

“Where was it last?” I asked her.

“I don’t know, I might have put it down on our table for a moment,” she said.

Horrified, I checked the table, under the table, and every table around us.

It was gone.

“You can just get a new phone and go through insurance,” Chris kept saying.

“No,” I kept replying, “that is not an option.”

The thing was that Liz’s phone was the only working one between the two of us. I had been cheap and craved the chance to be phone-free as much as possible, so I had not gotten a phone plan. I figured I could just use WIFI if I wanted to. I didn’t need a phone.

But it turns out, it was extremely helpful while traversing Morocco to have one. So, I was very grateful for Liz when she told me she had gotten it all set up. But now, that phone, that same device that could get us back to our riad inside the city walls, to the next city, to the next plane…was gone.

Suddenly, I remembered I had her in my “Find My Friends” app. I had done it two summers ago when we lived in Alaska, and she would go out on a fishing boat for days. I wanted to be able to keep track of her, and now, with her phone gone, it was finally worth it. I grabbed my phone and opened the app. The little green dot of her location showed nearby. I started walking around, but didn’t see the phone anywhere. And the dot kept moving.

I looked over to the bouncer, who was well over six feet tall, his dark-skin gleaming in the rooftop lighting. He smiled, and I immediately walked over for his help. It looked like the dot was now outside, so he asked to take my phone and go look for it. I gladly handed it over, and he disappeared. Ten minutes later, he returned. “I’m sorry I can’t find it,” he told me.

I looked down at the phone again, the dot still blinking nearby. I refused to give up; I figured I’d just go look on my own. Maybe it had fallen off the rooftop somehow to the street, and he just hadn’t seen it. I walked down the staircase and made my way onto the street, following the green dot like breadcrumbs. It led me around the corner, where I saw a door. It was another bar downstairs. I walked inside. Another bouncer greeted me, and just as I was about to explain what was going on to him, I noticed something in the corner.

The man in the tan suit.

My eyes squinted as I wondered what the chances were that he was here when he had been with us earlier. Just like Liz’s phone had been. He was standing with a group of women around a high table.

I explained to the bouncer, without wanting to come off as accusatory, that I thought the man in the tan might have accidentally grabbed a phone from upstairs. The bouncer walked right over to him, saying something in a language I couldn’t decipher.

The man promptly emptied his pockets when the bouncer stopped talking. No phone.

I felt embarrassed as I brought my eyes up to his to show my remorse. But when I finally made eye contact with him, something felt off. I couldn’t explain it, but as I followed the bouncer out, I looked one final time at my app and saw the green button again. This time, it was showing up very clearly, almost right where I was standing.

I stopped short. The bouncer, unaware, kept walking back to his spot at the door. I turned around, almost robotically, and walked straight back to the man in the tan. It was as if the girl who surfed on day three had taken over, and I had a mission.

The man turned to me, and I smiled, touching the shoulder of his jacket and pulling it back a little to see if he understood. To my shock, he removed it and handed it to me. I immediately felt around the inside of the jacket. There was an inside pocket located near the back. I slowly put my hand inside and pulled out a phone.

Liz’s phone.

I shoved the coat back at him without even looking up, then said loudly, “Shukran,” as I walked away.

Thank you, the only Arabic word I knew.

As I walked back out of the door, I leaned in towards the bouncer, “He did have it by the way,” I let him know as I exited the bar. I ran back up the stairs to find Liz, full of adrenaline. I was greeted at the top of the stairs by the other bouncer clapping for me. Apparently, he had seen on the cameras what I had done, as the rooftop bar was part of the downstairs bar security cameras, and I assumed he must have watched what had just gone down by the way he was clapping. “You are hired for security,” he said, laughing. “You work here now.”

If there hadn’t been people and bouncers everywhere, perhaps I wouldn’t have approached the man and felt courageous enough to get the phone back. But instead, just as on day three of surfing, I seemed to find, deep within me, a feeling of belief in myself. Something that sometimes seems to fade in and out lately.

Morocco was a million things for me. It was so beautiful that I found myself sensory overloaded every single day. Everywhere Liz and I stayed or ate, we were greeted by incredibly kind, funny people. We spent the last twenty minutes of our stay in Essaouira laughing with the women who ran the riad. Realizing how different our lives were, yet how easily we got along and connected.

But of everything Morocco offered me, it was the momentary glimpse into a version of myself I once was that I appreciated the most. The courageous version who goes with her gut and gets the phone back. The one who truly believes that sometimes you really can fake it till you make it, and gets herself up on the surfboard for every single wave after days of failing.

Ever since my mother died, that version has been hiding more than I’d care to admit. Then, as if to combat the hiding, it explodes, wanting to do everything it held back tenfold. Like, I don’t know – buy a one-way ticket to the Caribbean, get in a car for three years, and stay with strangers. Go live in a homestead in Alaska with an outhouse and a job on a farm.

And then it tends to slip back into the shadows, leaving me confused and insecure at times. It’s a constant balancing act between two very different people.

But if Morocco taught me anything, it was that the old me isn’t ever really gone. That may be the point: to be able to hold all of these versions of ourselves and trust that, in the right moments, in the right place, with the right people, the stronger version of ourselves will reappear.

And until then, I will keep looking for ways to find my way back to her.

In 2008, a 32-year-old mom of three received a call from Jersey City Medical Center. Her husband, she found out upon arrival at the hospital, had been stabbed to death on his way to work. She was, in an instant, a widow raising their three kids alone.

When I met her on my road trip, she told me all about the community that raised her back up after her husband’s tragic death. She told me how people came to clean her home, cook her dinners, and help her with her children. They created a 5K to raise money for her and the kids, naming it after her husband’s nickname, Fuce. The “Fuce 5K” helped her the first year, and then she turned around and became part of it, helping others in the community who went through tragedies.

I met Nancy in August of 2019 to collect her story for my book.

Seven months later, COVID hit.

I was, luckily, off the road and finished with my 50-state trip by March of 2020. Nancy sent me a text out of the blue one day, and I have thought about it every single day since. It is a text I bring up whenever people mention how lucky I was to have finished the trip before COVID, because “no one would have probably taken me in.”

Turns out, it wasn’t true. Nancy would have.

Here is to all of the Nancys out there this Thanksgiving. The ones going through tragedies we may not fathom, but still opening their doors and hearts to the rest of us.

May you be one. May you find one. May you be thankful they exist at all.

I arrived in Florida on September 24, four hours behind schedule. The plane had been due to land in Orlando at 6:30, but at about 6 p.m., the pilot came over the loudspeaker and announced that, due to the weather, we would be rerouted to Tampa.

I texted Kelli. She had already landed a few minutes before…in Orlando. She sent me an image from the airport window of a beautiful sunny day and a rainbow. I sent her a confused face, as the pilot had just announced that due to the weather, we could not land. Then I profusely apologized to her, explaining that she would have to wait for me, and told her I’d keep her posted once I knew more. She sat in the cellphone parking lot for four hours while we deplaned in Tampa and re-boarded once a new pilot arrived to take us to Orlando. Halfway through the short flight, we hit turbulence. In the tons of flights I’ve taken, I had never experienced such bad turbulence. My seatmate and I nervously made eye contact as the woman in front of us began screaming in Spanish. Then she started praying.

And, honestly, so did I.

Another woman nearby quietly said the rosary as I looked around at the other people nervously bracing themselves in their seats.

And then, slowly, a calm came over me. I am on this flight because of Joe, I reminded myself. I tried to clear all other thoughts and focus solely on that. I focused on why I was here at all. Joe.

After Joe and I had met in Alabama in 2023, I posted a short TikTok video showing him delivering a wish to another kid his age.

I had never used TikTok. And to be honest, I had only heard negative things about it in the past. However, I figured it might help spread the word beyond just posting on Instagram and Facebook. I was right. Instagram and Facebook yielded zero help from the reel. But the TikTok? It blew up. Hundreds of comments poured in from people across the United States. People were incredibly inspired by Kelli’s story of Nik’s Wish, which grants wishes to children aged 18-24 who age out of the Make-A-Wish program. She did this in honor of her son, Nik. But they were astounded by Joe’s wish. Of all the things he could have asked for, he asked to work for her. He wanted to help get more wishes for kids, and he did just that, even as he was dying.

On TikTok, I explained that we had named him the first official Nik’s Angel. He was the “Alabama Angel for Nik’s Wish.”

It was that line that caught Madison Ellis’s attention in Florida. She commented on the TikTok and asked, “How can I help? Can I be the Florida Angel?!”

I had been looking through all of the kind comments but hadn’t expected hers. I stared at her first four words again. “How can I help?”

She wasn’t just inspired or saying Joe was great; she was stepping up. She was ready to do something. I reread her comment with goosebumps on my arms. Did TikTok give us our next angel?

Madison reached out to Kelli next and connected herself with Joe. They began holding angel meetings to discuss ideas for fundraisers. She hosted her first fundraiser that year, in September. After the event, she called Joe to tell him all about it, sobbing into the phone.

Overnight, he had gone from an inspiration she saw on TikTok to her close friend.

Joe died three months later. But not before they had grown even closer, to the point that Madison’s two little sons would FaceTime with Joe when he was having a rough day to cheer him up.

The following September, after Joe died, Madison hosted her second fundraiser in Florida. Joe’s parents and sister surprised her by showing up at the event to meet her and show their support. Madison broke down in tears when she saw them, instantly recognizing them from photographs and FaceTime calls. “I was a mess,” she had told me. She couldn’t believe, during such a dark time after losing Joe, that they had made the trek from Alabama to be there.

What makes Madison’s story even more special is that she was inspired to be an angel not only by Joe and the video, but also by her brother, Max. Max had been diagnosed with cancer when he was nineteen. And through the brutal period that followed, a bit of light showed up for him and his family in the midst of it—a Nik’s Wish. To this day, they have no idea who nominated them. They had never heard of Nik’s Wish before and were so grateful for the experience of having Max pick a wish. He chose to go to Hawaii. Kelli and her organization handled all the logistics, and for a few days, Max, Madison, and their parents experienced a brief respite from the difficult time they had been through. For a few days, they experienced some joy, thanks to Kelli.

Madison had no idea that a few years later, she would join the same organization that had brought her family joy. That she would be the one to bring joy next.

It was after a life-saving bone marrow transplant from a stranger in Poland that Max was able to enjoy the wish given to him. Then, after delays due to COVID, Max began nursing school. He was on the same oncology floor at the same hospital where he had been treated. For the first few months, he wore a custom stethoscope that Madison made for him. Attached to the stethoscope was a photograph of him sitting in his hospital bed. Occasionally, Max would pull it out to show a patient, offering them hope and illustrating that he had once been in their situation and was now here. Max’s story has continued to evolve since then. He now works on the oncology floor at Orlando Health Cancer Institute, a few miles down the road. And Madison’s story had evolved as well, since her brother had been diagnosed; she now had two little boys in tow.

It was by chance that she was scrolling TikTok and saw my video. She immediately recognized the organization’s name because she remembered her brother had gotten a wish from them. But what she didn’t know was that she could be part of helping them.

And now, here she was, about to host her third fundraiser. And here I was, on a flight to meet her and highlight her and Max.

A flight where I was clutching the armrest and absorbing all of the panic that was around me because of the terrible turbulence we had hit.

I thought about the web of wild connections that led me to this moment, and I realized I was fine. This flight would land. It had to. Joe would make sure of it. I closed my eyes and waited.

Twenty minutes later, we landed, and for the first time, I wasn’t bothered when everyone started clapping and cheering. Instead, I joined them.

----

Madison raised enough for a wish that Friday at her third Golf for Joy outing to raise money for Nik’s Wish. A few of the families of Wish Kids she has helped were in attendance. Each hole featured a fun activity or joke to make the event even better. I was, conveniently, placed on the “Butt” hole, where you had to putt your golf ball into the small plastic butt for a chance to win a gift certificate to a local restaurant. I was also given a fart machine, which I hid in the grass a few feet from myself. Each time they’d bend over to place their golf ball, I’d hit the button. As the youngest of four children, this was my heaven.

At the very end of the event, Kelli stood up and told her story. She told them how it all began because of her son and his wish to help kids 18-24. And then I spoke about how I had traveled the entire country collecting good, and how Kelli’s story had touched me so deeply that I never stopped wanting to be involved, which led me to Joe, who, in turn, brought me to Madison.

And then Madison spoke. She told everyone in her own words how she had seen the video of Joe and how her brother’s connection had only increased her interest in being involved after seeing the video I had posted. “Besides being a wife and a mother, Nik’s Wish has become my greatest passion in life,” she told the crowd. Then a short video played of the wishes she has granted since becoming an angel. Five wishes. Five kids, aged 18-24, whose lives have been positively impacted because of her. Because of Joe. Because of Kelli. Because of Nik.

And it made me cry.

As I watched the beautiful moments of these wish deliveries flash across the screen, I was reminded how the most beautiful things often come from the most devastating losses.

If Kelli hadn’t lost her son, if I hadn’t lost my mom, if we hadn’t lost Joe, where would we all be? Such an incredibly heartbreaking trail of losses that has led to such incredible beauty in the wake. It was proof that the love we leave behind can continue to help others long after we are gone, and if we are as lucky as Kelli’s son, my mother, and Joe, it will be powerful enough to change lives.

Madison rocking her wings as the second official angel for Nik’s Wish. “The Florida Angel.” And me, rocking the shirt for our first angel, Joe Thompson. Forever #1. Florida, 2025.

Kelli had three sons. Her youngest, Nik, who had cancer, received a Make-A-Wish, and their entire family went to Hawaii. But then Nik met another kid at the hospital who was never granted a wish. His name was Nate. He had been diagnosed a month after his 18^th birthday, so he had aged out of being eligible for a Make-A-Wish.

Nik couldn’t imagine it. “We have to help this kid, Mom!” he kept telling Kelli. Nik never stopped talking about it, and a few months after Nik and Nate met, Nik died tragically during what should have been a routine procedure.

After he died, Kelli couldn’t stop hearing her son’s voice. “We have to help him, Mom.”

After her son’s funeral, Kelli raised funds in her small community and was able to find Nate and his family, who lived in a completely different state. She was able to grant Nate a wish. It helped her so much with her grieving that she decided to keep going. She created Nik’s Wish in honor of her son and has, to date, granted over 400 wishes to children aged 18-24.

A few years after we met, Kelli asked me to be the speaker at one of her biggest fundraisers for Nik’s Wish. I went back to Illinois without hesitation.

The event was a huge success, but it left us all exhausted. I was amazed at how she could keep going. Kelli’s 9-to-5 job at the time involved working in HR, and a significant part of that role included firing people. When she wasn’t at work, she was granting wishes.

I’ve always wondered how strange it must feel to have one part of you forced into a job where you ruin someone’s day, while the other part works tirelessly to make someone else’s day better.

The night after the event, we were sitting around having our usual sip of whiskey when I said to her, “What if there were angels?” She looked at me, confused. “Like an angel in every state to start helping you get the word out and fundraise, we could call them, ‘Nik’s Angels!’” I explained.

It was January 2023 when Kelli texted me. “There’s someone I want you to meet,” she wrote. “Is it my future husband?” I joked back. “Haha, no, a cancer warrior from Alabama,” she replied.

“This kid is special. You need to meet him.”

I pressed the call button, and a second later she answered. Phone calls have always felt easier to me than sending 500 texts about the same matter. “His name is Joe,” she began. “He has terminal brain cancer; he’s 23. We granted his wish to go to the Kentucky Derby in May, but time is not on his side right now. I wanted him to pick something else... something we could do for him sooner. But all he keeps asking for is to work for me!”

I started laughing. “What?”

She continued, “Nik so inspires him, and he said he wants to help.”

I stopped laughing and suddenly found myself tearing up. He was 23, had terminal cancer, and all he was thinking about right now was how to help other kids get their wishes instead.

“What can we do?” I asked her.

“Well, I’m trying to get the board to approve of having a spokesperson. Someone who can represent Nik’s Wishes in Alabama.”

“AN ANGEL!” I yelled into the phone. “He should be the first angel!” She agreed.

Joe had already been getting the word out; he had been interviewed on local news about Nik’s Wish and was telling the story of Kelli and Nik. He had a fundraiser planned for the end of March. But it was only January, and Kelli had said time was not on his side.

“We need to fly to Alabama,” I told her.

“Let’s do it,” she agreed.

I had been off the road since 2019 at that point, and over the past year, I started to set up More Good as a nonprofit with my sisters. I called Kelli back and asked if it would be possible to grant a wish while we were there. She said she’d need to get approval from the board for the wish money, so I asked if I could bring a check myself from my nonprofit and have Joe grant a wish right away to someone there.

She said yes.

Three weeks later, Kelli, her husband Tom, and I flew to Alabama. We were going to meet Joe, and I had planned to conduct an interview. We would end the interview with the plan that Kelli would come out with the check for him from More Good.

Kelli and I had reviewed how the surprise would go before meeting with Joe.

I would scratch my nose just before telling him how we were going to name him the first official angel, and she would grab the big check we had created, ready to surprise him with it.

Moments after itching my nose and announcing that Joe was the first official Nik’s Angel, Kelli bounced in front of us with the check. Joe instantly put his hand to his face in amazement as he listened to what I just told him. He slowly came to terms with the fact that, because of this moment, he would be granting a kid his age a wish in a matter of hours. The moment suddenly hit me at the same time. I felt myself start to cry, and then I looked to my right. And there was Kelli. Her smile reached all the way across her face, holding the check up to Joe.

It was upside down.

I burst into laughter.

A classic Kelli moment. There was an incredible kid next to me, having an emotional moment and taking it all in, which almost made me start crying. Then, unintentionally, Kelli stepped in to make us all erupt into laughter. It served as a reminder that nothing in life is ever truly perfect, no matter how much you try to plan. Her ability to make me laugh during some of the most emotional moments in my life has been impeccable.

We told Joe that within 24 hours, he would be granting his first wish to someone on behalf of Nik’s Wish. Kelli had connected with her primary contact at the University of Alabama’s Children’s Hospital and found someone local who had asked for a wish. His name was Jerayle. He was 21 with a type of bone cancer. His wish was to go on a family vacation to Montana.

The next afternoon, Kelli, Tom, and I drove Joe to Pinson, Alabama, and parked down the street from Jerayle’s house. We unloaded a sign announcing that his wish had been granted, along with some confetti cannons. We arranged for Joe to be the only one to knock on the door and deliver the wish before we jumped into view to shoot off our confetti cannons.

The look on Jerayle’s face when the confetti went off and he read the sign was worth the entire trip to Alabama. I snapped one last photo of Joe and Jerayle standing together before we left.

On the flight home, I created my very first TikTok video, which embarrassingly took me way longer than I’d care to share. I posted the story of Joe and mentioned that if anyone else wanted to step up, we would love to have more angels! Fundraising is the most challenging aspect for Nik’s Wish.

Joe… our original Alabama Angel raised $28,000 in the nine months that followed. He spoke on television, in various speaking gigs, and organized fundraisers. Toward the end of the year, his body no longer functioned beyond his thumb. And with that thumb alone, he applied for a $10,000 grant for Nik’s Wish, which he got. Nine months. He did all of that in nine months.

And then, on December 27, 2023, Joe passed away. And while it still rips my heart out to share that news, the knowledge that this incredible human lived and accomplished more than some who might reach the age of 100 has offered so much comfort.

Six months after he died, Kelli got a call from Joe’s professor at the University of Alabama. She told Kelli that Joe had wanted to start a chapter of Nik’s Wish at the University. She would devote her time to getting the right people to start the very first Joe Thompson alpha chapter of Nik’s Wish, where they would donate at least one wish a year in honor of Joe. Even after he was gone, he continued to work.

I tried as often as I could to send Joe an encouraging text or an “I love you” after we had met. A few days before he passed away, I wrote to him about how proud I was of all he was doing for others, and I concluded my message with, “You are a blessing and I am so glad to know you.”

To which he responded: “I’m just doing my job.”

-

Yesterday afternoon, before I headed to the airport, I spoke to a company in upstate New York about my mission.

Halfway through my presentation, I shared the story about Kelli and Joe. Eventually, I mentioned that Joe had passed away. The second I said it out loud, I broke down.

In the hundreds of presentations and speeches I have given on More Good, this has never happened. I have teared up, sure. But never completely broken down to the point I couldn’t seem to stop the tears. It took me a full two minutes to regain my composure.

I finished the presentation, and as planned, I threw my suitcase into my truck and headed to the airport. I drove the first 45 minutes in complete silence, thinking about Joe, how incredibly inspiring his life had been, and how, if it weren’t for him, I wouldn’t be heading to the airport right now.

I realized that, despite the tears this kind of work will inevitably cause, it will still be worth it. Because, as Joe reminded me, we are just here “to do our job.” Whatever that job is. Wherever it might take us.

This week, he has led me to Florida.

To be continued.

The TikTok video I made for Joe.

-

Six months ago, I received an email from a Pilates instructor in my community named Stacey. She wanted to share a story about one of her students with me. The student was a father in his late seventies who, along with his wife, had been caring for his daughter for over thirty years. In her first year of life, she experienced seven to eight grand mal seizures a day, landing them in the ICU for weeks at a time. She wasn’t expected to live beyond a few months.

But miraculously, she did. She kept growing, mentally stuck at six months, but physically, becoming the thirty-five-year-old she is today, with a smile that spreads across her whole face.

She is an angel on earth, and her parents are as well. Her mother chooses ballet as an outlet to grow strong so she can continue to care for her daughter. And her father chooses Pilates.

But a little over a year ago, their daughter was diagnosed with cancer. Now, not only were medical expenses increasing, but his daughter was also immunocompromised. The oncologist advised the father against any group classes, but medical bills prevented him from affording private ones.

Which is why Stacey ended up writing to me six months ago.

She wanted to know if More Good could help. She had offered a discount to the man, but it wasn’t enough for him to be able to continue.

Thanks to a generous donor months earlier, I had some money left in More Good’s account. I wrote her a check that week. I was able to cover six months for the man to continue. But the following week, I sat with my sisters, focusing on the man. We wanted to do more for him. We couldn’t imagine his life and the challenges he faced every single day.

Pilates was his outlet; he needed it.

My sister, Sarah, suggested a fundraiser. As a photographer, I immediately envisioned the picture in my mind. A bunch of people all showing up for a man they didn’t know. A Pilates class being held in Mitchell Park, a beautiful park in my hometown that overlooks the water.

I met with Stacey the following week. Before I even mentioned my vision to her, she told me she had always wanted to conduct a class in Mitchell Park. Like almost everything I do with More Good, it felt like kismet.

We created a plan, designed flyers, and invited people to join us in Mitchell Park on August 23.

I am relentlessly, albeit cautiously, optimistic. When we finally had our plan in place, it was for a Saturday morning in August at 8:00 AM. I figured ten or fifteen people would show up. But instead, fifty people arrived. Online donations flowed in. And instead of raising enough money to donate the next six months of private classes to the man, I was able to give him a check for an entire year more of classes.

Five minutes into the class, I grabbed my drone, sent it up into the sky, and snapped the exact photo I had envisioned in my mind months earlier.

A bunch of people showing up for a man they don’t know. A class being held in Mitchell Park, overlooking the water.

Before the class had begun, I ran up to the front to say a few words. I explained how More Good had now morphed from a completed 50-state road trip compiling stories of kindness into a nonprofit. I told the crowd how I was trying to do as much good as I could back in my own community, but how this cause to care for a caretaker was one that was very close to my heart.

And then I told them why.

For over thirty years, I’ve watched my best friend care for her brother, who has a disability. It is a full-time job, one that she shares with her father. It is one of the most beautiful and incredibly humbling things I’ve ever witnessed.

When my mother died, I was living with my best friend at the time. She and I went to get tattoos. I got a tattoo of my mom’s signature from an old card, “Mom” written in script between my thumb and index finger. I liked to imagine how, now, she was forever holding my hand. (Or holding the wheel, for the road trip I was about to go on back then.)

My best friend got one for her brother: “I carry your heart.”

I explained to the crowd how I couldn’t think of a more beautiful way to describe what caretakers do, how they carry another person’s heart every day. As I began to talk about her, I immediately found myself starting to cry. I fumbled through the rest of my words and stepped aside so the class could begin. I imagined people around the world carrying someone else’s heart and caring for them so selflessly.

Later that day, at home, I started calculating the donations, which was when I realized we had made enough for an entire year. Double our goal. “For the most optimistic person I know, you sure can be negative,” a close friend joked with me as I told her the news. She knew how worried I was about how many people would show up and if we would raise enough for six months. And here I was, with a check to give the father another year of his source of strength.

I met with the father and Stacey that week. After telling him the exciting news about the fundraiser and donations we had secretly done, I told him the story of my friend’s tattoo. And how I feel he carries his daughter’s heart, just like she carries her brother’s.

He smiled and pulled up his sleeve.

I immediately got goosebumps.

There, on his right upper arm, was a tattoo of a heart. “It’s my arm and my wife’s arm wrapped around each other, holding our daughter’s heart with our hands.”

I couldn’t imagine the number of things those two arms have had to hold, but I could understand why. Their daughter was their world, but in that world, they needed each other. “Any marriage advice?” I joked, knowing well that statistics for couples with a child with a disability were not favorable.

“Value the differences in each other,” he told me.

And I quietly thought how that advice could really apply to much more than marriage these days.

In valuing our differences, we learn how to respect and become more understanding of those differences. We slowly pry open our hearts a bit more to those around us, becoming aware of where the need is. And then, we can act. We can create a vision. And sometimes we might think only a few people will show up with us. Maybe we will only be able to do so much…

But sometimes the vision comes to life, and you will find yourself surrounded by others showing up, too. And you will be able to give much more than you thought possible. You will be reminded once again that More Good is still out there. You just have to keep looking.

As I was walking home from my first day of work, I heard a man yelling in a slightly disgruntled voice, “Hey!” I looked to my right, and there was John. He sat on a rocking chair with a glass of red wine in his hand.

“Hey,” he yelled again. “Come introduce yourself.”

I walked over to the old man in the rocking chair, the sun catching the silver in his mustache. He squinted up at me, hand outstretched and steady.

“I’m Mary,” I said with a firm handshake. “I’m staying up in Fred’s homestead.”

“Ah, yes, I heard some girls were staying up there this summer,” he said, rocking gently in his chair.

All of a sudden, a woman appeared in the doorway. She smiled as if she had been expecting me and introduced herself as she handed me a piece of halibut wrapped in paper, like it was the most natural thing in the world.

I thanked them profusely, as now I had dinner for the evening.

“Come by anytime,” John told me. “We usually have wine on the porch after 5.”

And that was it. No awkward small talk. No asking about what I was doing for work. Just a simple welcome to the neighborhood.

I walked back down the path through the woods to Fred’s place, halibut in hand, smiling ear to ear. This was why I had come back.

Not just for the views and the potlucks that would go late into the night, since it felt like the sun never went to bed.

But for this.

The way strangers waved from their houses. The way people shared whatever they had. Their food, their stories, their time…without keeping score.

In Alaska, I never had to prove anything. The community here made room for me without question. And in a world that so often felt transactional or performative, this simple, unspoken belonging was a gift.

That night, I made the halibut for Liz. A meal we had a lot of that summer, but that first one, gifted from our neighbors, was the most special. And their kindness was what reminded me that it didn’t matter where I came from here, it simply mattered that I was here. And that the people around me were willing to welcome me in and make me feel like family. Something that helped a lot during the few weeks Liz was gone.

I also managed to get a cat-sitting job for a lovely woman in town the day after Liz had left. It was a nice bonus because it included access to a washer, dryer, and hot shower. I started volunteering one day a week at the local Homer Public Library. I found a coffee shop called the Zen Den, where I began going to write on my days off from the farm.

And it was the people on the farm who helped me the most. My boss, Emily, was the best boss I ever had. Alongside her were Allison, Kara, and Turt. Turt reminded me of my brother. A quiet man who didn’t talk nearly as much as I babbled or sang through life, but when he did, his words were always laced with wisdom. He was way smarter than he ever gave himself credit for and always knew the answers to my riddles. And he was kind, everyone on the farm was kind. It seemed like it was a prerequisite to get the job.

I remember one day at the beginning, when we were paper pot planting some Brussels sprouts. All of us headed to the compost pile, loaded up a wheelbarrow, and then brought it back up to Zone 1. Each section was organized by zone. Zone 1 was located in the upper left corner of the farm. This meant you had to go up a slight incline to reach it. It had been raining the last few days, and the tarp laid down as a path to the section was covered in mud. And, as it turns out, Extra Tuffs do not have a great grip. Each time I’d start to wheel up the incline with a full barrel of wet manure, I’d start praying. Then, I would hit that halfway mark; my arms would start shaking, my boots would lose grip, and I’d slowly skid backwards down the hill.

It was mortifying. Although due to the insane level of kindness on the farm, no one made fun of me but myself. “That happens to us too sometimes,” they would always say. But I’d watch them each day and only be in awe of their strength. It was inspiring to see them run this farm without any machinery. It motivated me to become stronger.

I also didn’t have a choice; if I didn’t get stronger, I wouldn’t get far here.

As I was new, I started bringing baked goods occasionally for our lunch break. Some of the people working on the farm had gluten, dairy, or sugar intolerances, so I became quite inventive in the kitchen. Honey and maple syrup replaced white sugar, almond and coconut flour replaced wheat flour, and applesauce or yogurt replaced the eggs.

My new passion for baking was a bit like my life there. Outhouses replacing bathrooms, lobster pots and sump pumps replacing indoor plumbing. The more convenience I sacrificed, the happier I felt. I realized that all of the things I had grown accustomed to in New York weren’t actually making me happier; they were just more things I was being told I needed. But what did I really want?

This.

This simple, sweet life on a homestead with my best friend. This was happiness. I remember the day we made the compost pile on the farm, with no machinery. Just the five of us out there for hours with our shovels creating layers of chicken manure, kelp, old compost, grain from the local brewery, and wood shavings. It was one of my favorite days on the farm, not because it was easy or enjoyable necessarily. But because it was such hard work, it felt so good to be a part of it all. To create something that would help make food for next year.

Emily was certainly skilled at running a farm, but her true strength lay in her ability to manage people. Each of us mattered to her, and she made sure we felt it. There was an unspoken, gentle respect that existed among all of us, rooted in the different paths our lives had taken that brought us to her farm. This mutual respect was evident in the small gestures and the way we looked out for each other. That sense of connection was what I cherished most about being there. Everything, and everyone, was handled with intention.

One day, on my way to work through the path in the woods, there was a small white envelope lying against a rock with “MAGS” written beautifully on it. It was such a surprise to find on my way through the woods to work. I opened it, and there inside was a card for my half-birthday from Kara. She had gone to work on the farm early, leaving it for me to find on my way to work. I never told her this, but the gesture made me cry. It was so unexpected and made me instantly feel so special. She put thought into every card she wrote. If anyone ever did anything for her, even the smallest thing, they received a thank-you card from her, usually accompanied by a drawing of the item they had given her or the act they had done.

But what amazed me most was how Kara carried so much gentleness and gratitude in a world that hadn’t always been gentle with her. Despite everything she’d endured, she moved through life with an open heart, always finding ways to make someone feel appreciated. She was one of the most generous spirits I’d ever known, proof that softness can be a kind of strength.

Our last week in Homer, Liz and I were finishing a hike at Diamond Creek Trail when I persuaded her to take the shortcut. It was a five-minute walk versus the fifty-minute trail. Partly out of laziness, partly because I felt strangely pulled that way.

A few minutes later, we turned a corner, and two Aussiedoodles ran up to us barking. Their owner called out that she’d just seen a bear cub, though not the mother. We exchanged nervous glances, but continued walking, now as a trio. I asked her about herself, trying to shake the tension.

After a few minutes, she told us her nephew had died by suicide years ago. In response, she packed up her 11-year-old son and began traveling, starting in Ireland.

“Travel is fatal to prejudice,” she said, quoting Twain.

“And it’s the best way to grow empathy,” I offered.

Meeting her sparked inspiration within me. I got home that evening and immediately opened my computer to write. I thought about how beautiful it was that she continued to search for joy, even in the midst of her grief. And I thought about how, when we had said goodbye, I asked her for her name.

“Mary,” she said.

I had looked at Liz and smiled.

If Alaska taught me anything, it was to pay attention.

There were no coincidences. The signs and messages were all there if I paid attention. Staying alert also kept you alive in Alaska. If you weren’t paying attention, you could get charged by a moose, attacked by a bear, or fall through the ice. The place was full of breathtaking beauty, but it demanded presence.

Paying attention, I learned, was the most important thing. Not just to stay alive, but to truly live.

I thought it was odd that I was pulled toward the shortcut that day, but the moment the woman told me her name, I realized it wasn’t. It was something larger pulling me towards Mary, towards a conversation I desperately needed to have, yet again reminding me that grief and purpose so often coexist. And that, despite the pain and heartbreak we will inevitably endure, we can still choose to move forward. She had. I had. I still could.

My entire road trip taught me to pay attention, but getting off the road changed me. The world shut down. I shut down. I couldn’t properly process all of the sadness rooted in the stories of kindness. All of the tragedy. I had numbed myself to sleep for a long time after I got out of that car. But it was here, back in the place that made me the happiest, that I reset myself.

Alaska was what healed me. Not all at once, but moment by moment. Trail by trail. Person by person.

Until, finally, I was awake again.

Continued from part two

The first weekend Liz was gone, Allison mentioned a yoga retreat she was attending. “It’s in a yurt up on Diamond Ridge,” she told me one day while we were planting turnips, excitement rising in her voice as she went on, “It’s the whole weekend, and we could carpool if you want to go!”

To be completely honest, Allison was usually excited about everything. Allison always had a huge smile and a kind thing to say. During the first few days of our arrival in Alaska, I met one of Allison’s friends, Kara. “When I first met Allison,” Kara told me that night, “it was on the side of the road in Colorado.” There had been an incredible double rainbow, and Allison had pulled her car over, waving to people driving by to look to their right and see it. I could not think of a more fitting story to describe Allison.

On the farm, we all had nicknames. But I had my own special nickname for Allison. “Tiny.” She thought it was hilarious as she was not a tiny person at six feet tall, but I finally explained it to her over a cocktail, my last week in Alaska.

“It’s because your heart is so huge that it wouldn’t matter how big you are, your body would always be tiny in comparison to your heart. “I don’t even know how your heart fits in there,” I told her. And she lit up, smiling so big that it made me want to cry. “Yous so sweet, Mags!!!” she said wrapping me into a huge hug.

Mags was my nickname on the farm. A combo of my first and middle. Mary Agnes, Mags. It felt like I had taken on another personality that summer with a new name. Mags was a farmer who lived on a homestead and showered outside and had an outhouse. Mags volunteered at the local library. Mags baked.

Mags was happy.

Allison sent me the link for the yoga retreat after work, and I looked it up immediately. Perhaps Mags was a yoga person now, too? The event was run by a woman named Anna and was labeled as a “Kundalini Yoga Retreat.” I had never done Kundalini before, but I was desperate for something distracting and fun. The next morning, I spoke on the phone with my friend Cali, who was on the East Coast. “You should definitely go,” she told me after I mentioned the retreat. It was a little pricey, so I had been back and forth about it on our phone call. Two minutes after we hung up, I received a Venmo notification on my phone. Cali had sent half the cost of the retreat with a note saying, “Now you can go.”

I signed up.

The retreat began Friday night. Everyone assembled into the brightly lit Yurt and found their spots on their yoga mats to face our teacher, Anna. She did a few breathing exercises before having us settle in to listen to a story that would set the theme for our next two days together: “Returning to Oneself.”

Anna was an amazing storyteller. I noticed how everyone else was as captivated as I was by listening to her.

One day, a fisherman noticed a group of seal maidens dancing upon the shore. They had glistening white skin and beautiful, long hair. He had never seen anything so beautiful. Each of them had stepped out of their seal skins to dance on the beach. While they danced, the fisherman walked over and grabbed one of the skins.

As it was time to go, each seal maiden ran to grab her skin and jump back into the ocean. One seal nervously looked around everywhere but could not find her skin. Then, she saw the fisherman holding it from her. She approached him to ask for it, but he told her it was his pelt now and that the only way she would get it back was if she married him.

With no choice, she went home with him. They married. Eventually, she became pregnant. As the son grew up, the seal maiden slowly grew old. She lost her shine; her nails started to break. Her hair fell out. Slowly, without her pelt, she was dying. One night, the boy heard his parents fighting. He heard his mother telling the man that he had made a promise. She married him. She gave him a child. She needed her pelt back now. But the man refused and yelled back, asking how she would ever want to leave her family now.

In the distance, the boy hears his name being called. It’s stormy outside, but he goes outside and follows the voice. Eventually, he is led to the sea. And there, tossed behind a rock, is his mother’s seal skin. He walks over to it, not knowing what it is, and holds it to his face, inhaling. Suddenly, he gets an overwhelming feeling of his mother. He takes the skin back to the home, where his father is now sleeping, and shows it to his mother. Her eyes light up at the sight of it. She immediately puts it on and feels better, then takes his hand and leads him to the water. She breathes her magic into the child and then takes him into the sea, showing him her world. As the magical breath starts to wear off, she brings him back up to the surface and promises to visit.

Anna stares around the room at us after she finishes the story. We were all digesting the words differently.

It wasn’t until the next day that we began to explore the story and see how it wove itself into our own, how the loss of the woman’s pelt was a metaphor for the loss of herself. How had we lost ourselves? A woman in the front shared, through tears, how she felt she had lost herself since having her children, as her life now revolved around them, survival, and work. She couldn’t remember the last time she had made one of her paintings.

For the next half hour, women shared their stories, and all I could think about was the child.

“But his mother left him!” I thought, angrily!

His story, instead of hers, was the one haunting me. The one that had woven its sad, tragic claws around my thoughts. My initial response was one centered around him. But as the day progressed, I reframed my thoughts. I couldn’t control losing my mother, but I could control continuing to lose myself. So, I would focus on that instead. And I would try to figure out how to get my pelt back.

Our weekend was spent practicing Kundalini yoga, enjoying homemade blueberry and buckwheat muffins, as well as fresh soups and tea, all made by Anna. We sat in nature, practiced guided writing, and listened to the symphonic gong.

On our last day, we discussed the man versus the seal maiden. Ego versus Soul. Ego, played as the fisherman, goes after what he wants so desperately. We all have that within us. The want. The desire. Sometimes so desperate we lose track of what we already have – because our want overshadows everything.

For so long, I wanted a partner. I wanted my own family. I dreamt about it all the time. I created stories to manifest it. It was that part of my ego I wanted to silence now. I just wanted to enjoy the things I had, and not hyperfocus so desperately on what I did not have yet. I had to remember what the ego gave me that was good. Without my ego, I would have never believed in myself and my More Good mission. It made me believe people would show up for me, and they did. It gave me the confidence to ask for what I needed, which I did.

My soul was the one that provided me with my open heart, so trusting and forgiving (at times to a fault). My heart has brought me to places of great love and connection and dragged me through the mud of deep hurt and loss. It is a tricky balance; I realize now that I had been given this gift. And when I finally got off the road in 2019, I know now, my seal skin was dried up like the seal maiden. I had lost my shine. I had to find my way back to myself.

And it was Alaska that was helping me return to my skin. It was putting the shine back in my eyes. It was here that I wasn’t bound by a script society had written for women. I didn’t feel like a failure at my age for not having a husband and a child yet. I felt like an adventurer here. I felt brave. Strong. Resilient. And I was surrounded by like-minded people. I spent my days working in the dirt in fresh air, surrounded by mountains, glaciers, and saltwater. This place was different than anywhere I had ever been. I learned that the very first week I had arrived, when I was introduced to John.

*To be continued.

A very short video I created to thank Anna for this beautiful weekend in June 2024.

Back inside, there was a note on the table from our landlords, Emily and Colin. They welcomed us with a beautiful, handwritten letter that included information about the original owner of the homestead. Fred had moved to Alaska to escape the growing population of the lower 48. “He farmed, hunted, and shared with his neighbors,” they wrote. “We are doing our best to carry on his legacy.” The rest of the note described a few quirks we should be aware of regarding the house, as it was almost 100 years old. We taped the note up on the wall and continued to explore our new place.

As we moved out of the kitchen, we reached a small walk-through bedroom that led to the back bedroom. In the back bedroom, there was a woodstove, a small couch, and a queen-sized bed. Liz immediately said she would take the smaller room. I was surprised because I thought we would be drawing straws for the bigger bed and main room, but she handed it to me without a second thought.

There was electricity, a bonus, something that not every cabin was lucky enough to have in Alaska. And there was running water. Only cold water, but it was drinkable and delicious.

The next day, we drove the 25 minutes down the mountain and into town to work on finding what we needed for a “shower.” We stopped at the Kachemak Gear Shed first. I needed coveralls and gloves for the farm, and Liz had done some research, knowing we needed a sump pump to get us started on the homemade shower we were going to put together.

An hour later, we left with farm gear but no pump. We then went to our second and final option, the hardware store in town. It was there, at Ulmer’s, that we realized we would need to order the pump online. The only available option the store had was nearly $300 and much larger than what we needed. Liz quickly ordered a $40 one on Amazon using her phone. The only catch was that we didn't know how long it would take to arrive in Homer, Alaska.

Showers at the local laundromats were pricey. The Washboard was up to $10 a shower. You got 20 minutes of hot, intense water pressure and a clean towel. We utilized that shower once at the end of our three-month stay (and we were in it for every second of those 20 minutes).

But it wasn’t practical to take a 25-minute drive and spend $10 every time we needed to shower. We stood in the store, looking around, until finally I said out loud, 'Well, we could get a watering can.'

Which we did. One large plastic watering can and one large plastic utility bin. I figured we could fill the watering can up with hot water and then sit in the bin and…well, water ourselves. It was the easiest, cheapest option at the moment. We went with it.

Most days, I just used the water from the spigot outside our cabin. Cold water directly on the scalp was the most difficult part, and the rest was just uncomfortable. Uncomfortable in a way I had grown used to after polar plunging daily for the last two years. But Liz would always take time to boil her water; the thought of showering with cold water didn’t even cross her mind. She had just moved from the Caribbean, after all.

When our sump pump arrived two weeks later, it was exactly what we needed. A tiny, light blue pump that we suction-cupped to the bottom of a lobster pot once we filled it with hot water. Liz always put the entire pot on top of the stove and waited for it to boil, but I went with the teapot method. We had an electric tea kettle next to the sink, and a few rounds of heating that thing had my shower ready in half the time the boiling method provided Liz.

Then, carefully, we would carry the large pot outside and attach the shower head to the sump pump. A silent prayer that the wind wouldn’t pick up or a neighbor wouldn’t walk through our yard as we dropped our towels.

Although many neighbors did walk through at random times, over the next three months, we showered naked and curtain-less outside our cabin, and only a mother moose and her baby ever witnessed this wild freedom.

I started work on the farm on our second day in Homer. It was an easy six-minute walk through the woods to Twitter Creek Gardens. The first two minutes were spent on a path made for cross-country skiing. The grass path twisted around a few trees, where I was always on the lookout for moose.

I was told that making noises can prevent startling them, which might trigger an attack. However, if a moose charges you, as has happened to some of my friends, I was advised to hide behind a tree. Moose don’t have the best eyesight and hiding behind something can throw them off. It also signals that you aren’t a threat. During those first few days on the trail, I was constantly calculating which tree I’d run behind if a moose approached. I sang my way to work that entire summer so the moose would know I was coming.

On the first day of work, I planted seeds so tiny in my hands that they continued to fall from my fingertips as I tried to place them in the small soil blocks set up for me. I imagined what it would be like in a few weeks to be harvesting the seed I had planted. In a few weeks, this tiny seed could be nourishing me for dinner.

The first week on the farm was the most challenging. Mostly, because I became aware of muscles I had never known existed that hurt in ways I did not know were possible. I would try to remember to do yoga before days I’d be on the farm, but often I’d forget, only to be painfully reminded later that evening why I should have stretched.

Each morning, I’d reluctantly tear off the covers and make my way outside, always hitting the electric kettle button as I walked through the kitchen. I’d return from the outhouse, brush my teeth, and turn on the oven, scraping leftovers onto a baking sheet to heat up for my lunch. By then, the kettle would be ready, and I’d pour the majority of the water into the French press for coffee. The remaining boiling water would be poured into my thermos. I’d keep it there until the last possible second when I’d dump the water and spoon the leftovers into my thermos. It was amazing how well the process helped keep the food warm throughout the day until lunch. While that was all happening, I’d fry an egg for my breakfast.

It was a routine that I thought I’d nail each morning as I began, but somewhere halfway through, chaos would hit, and I’d be rushing to get it all done at the same time before realizing it was already time to go to work. Liz would sit at the wooden table, sipping her coffee, laughing at me the entire time.

-

One afternoon, toward the end of my time in Homer, a man named Don stopped by the farm while I was washing the lettuce. Emily had mentioned that Don was one of the only people left who had stories to share about Fred. I couldn’t believe that we had been talking about him moments before Don showed up, unannounced, on a random Thursday.

He told us how Fred had taken care of the women on the mountain when their husbands had gone to war. He would hang moose meat in the trees for them and leave baskets of potatoes from his garden by their doors. He had a Model T Ford that he would drive to town once a month to get groceries.

“The kids loved him, too. They’d go over there to visit him, and he’d sit on his porch in his rocking chair with them and offer them a cup of coffee. They were little kids, too.” And there they were, hanging with Fred, talking on his tiny little wooden porch. The visual alone made me smile. “Often, he would take out his fiddle,” Don continued laughing. “And that was when the kids would leave.”

It was that type of energy that you could feel in the cabin – Fred’s kindness, his goodness. It seeped through the walls, behind paintings, where his crop yield was scratched into the logs. It was evident in every detail of the cabin he built and the way he lived. It was palpable.

We felt so lucky to be there.

When we initially planned for Alaska, Liz had it in mind that she would find work on a boat upon arrival. I was a little more anxious about finding work, so I was extremely grateful when Emily offered me the job on her farm a few weeks before my arrival. But Liz was even more of a “fly by the seat of her pants” kind of girl than I was, so she rolled the dice.

Unfortunately, most fishing jobs in Alaska are filled by May. We arrived on June 1.

In the first few weeks, Liz would head down to the Homer Spit and walk the docks, asking around if anyone needed a hand. Each evening, she returned a little more defeated. I’d get home from work around 5:30, and she’d be in the kitchen making dinner. I’d kick my chicken-shit covered boots off and go inside, open a cold beer, and sit down at the table just in time for her to dish out some meatloaf and mashed potatoes. It was a delight to finish work and walk into a home-cooked meal.

I remember once on the phone with my sister, making the joke, “Is this what marriage is like?!”

She responded immediately, “No.”

But in many ways, it was a type of partnership. There was something so sacred about the way we moved through those first few weeks in Alaska. The way she just handed me the bigger room without a care in the world. It set the tone for the summer. We were two very different people trying to navigate the same wild place. We would both contribute 50/50 as much as we could. But some days, one of us had to step up more and contribute more. And for all our differences, we were similar in the ways that mattered most in this small town in Alaska: our values and our ability to adapt. She was an adventurer, just like me. And those adventures weren’t always glamorous, but we always managed to keep ourselves entertained and laughing through those first few weeks. Having her there with me reminded me that, for once, I didn’t have to carry everything by myself. It was the first time in a long time that I didn’t feel so alone.

As we rolled into week three, Liz finally got a lead. Someone connected her to a captain who was about to take off into Prince William Sound, and they needed one more crew member.

She spoke with the captain on the phone for half an hour and then came inside and shared the good news.

“I have to start packing because we leave tomorrow,” she told me in the kitchen. After Liz packed a dry bag of essentials, we sat in her bed and watched a YouTube video of seine fishing in Alaska.

That 13-minute video was the only Alaskan fishing education she had before she stepped on the Newfie Adventure the next day to head to Prince William Sound.

Driving back up the mountain after dropping her off early the next morning, the silence hit harder than I expected. It wasn’t a silence that was unfamiliar, but one I hadn’t yet heard this summer. I was only halfway up the mountain when I started to cry. Not because she was gone, but because I didn’t know if she’d be back anytime soon. She didn’t have a return date. Depending on the fishing boat and its success, she could be away for months. In that uncertainty, something cracked inside of me.

The start of this summer had finally given me someone to share things with, and I hadn’t realized how much I now counted on that company. After three years of experiencing so many things alone across an entire country, I thought I was finally going to get to share this experience with someone.

But now, here I was, in this vast, beautiful place, alone again.

*to be continued…

Liz and our June 2024 shower setup.

And now I was “home.” But what was home? I felt like I had hit pause for three years, while everyone else seemed to have pressed fast forward in their lives. Married. Children. Secure jobs. It felt so disorienting. Coming back didn’t bring the comfort I had expected; it only made me feel more alone. I was desperate to find footing on Long Island, not because I wanted to be there, but because my family was there. Only the discomfort never left. And in many ways, it was what kept pushing me to keep uprooting myself in search of a new sense of “home.”

Last summer, I got closer than I ever had in Alaska.

-

In March of 2023, I flew to St. John to shoot a wedding for a friend named Lindsey. She and her fiancé, Mark, were eloping, with only her best friend and the best friend’s husband joining them as witnesses. Our mutual close friend, Liz, was marrying them.

The ceremony was on Peace Hill. A beautiful spot on the North Shore, featuring an incredible ruins site and rarely any tourists. It looked out over the bay and was only a five-minute hike to get to. It was perfect, as Lindsey was wearing a full-fledged wedding dress, and it was a sweltering hot day.

She smiled the entire day, and he cried when he saw her. After the ceremony, we all had dinner together and then headed to the Beach Bar. It was there, on a stool in the corner of the bar, where Liz and I came up with the idea to move to Alaska.

At the time, Liz was a partial owner of USVI Expeditions, a guided adventure tour company in the Virgin Islands. She was feeling a bit run-down from the job and mentioned that she was looking for a change. I was returning to Long Island after the wedding and desperate for an excuse to pack up again and leave.

I threw out Alaska to her.

“I’d go to Alaska,” she responded to my absolute shock.

Due to the consumption of post-wedding cocktails, the rest of the conversation didn’t get very far before we changed the topic. But a few months later, we revisited it over the phone. A few weeks after that, we began to craft a plan.

When I went to Alaska on my road trip, it was the 48^th state of my 50. It was, by far, my favorite state. As a photographer, you would think it was the beauty of the state that would have drawn me in. But, as an empath, it was the beauty of the people that attracted me most. Their kindness. Their resilience. When I left the state in 2019, I vowed to go back. And then, I told everyone.

The thing about a dream, I realized a long time ago, is that if I kept telling others I was going to do it, it held me accountable. That’s how I ever got myself into Mom’s car and on the road in the first place. I had told too many people. I had to do it.

Liz and I spoke for hours that night over the phone. “Ok,” I said once we both knew we wanted to do it, “we just need three things. A car. A job. A place to live.”

“I’ll work on the car,” I added.

She told me she knew a girl who used to live in St. John who moved to Homer years ago. “I can reach out to my friend Allison,” she said.

Over the next few weeks, I reached out to my contact at Subaru and inquired about the possibility of a rental deal if I were to return to Alaska. After a few more weeks, my contact wrote back and said they could offer us the car for $500 per month.

We had a car.

Liz reached out to Allison and found out she was now working on an organic produce farm, Twitter Creek Gardens. The woman who owned and ran the farm was named Emily. She mentioned that she might have a cabin for rent. A few weeks later, Allison confirmed that Emily could rent the cabin to us.

We had a place to live.

I reached out to Emily and asked if she needed any help on the farm. I couldn’t think of a better option than being in Alaska, in the soil, learning how to grow food that I’d eventually eat. Because I had to leave at the end of August for my wedding season back in New York, I wasn’t the best candidate for the only position she had available.

It wasn’t until we had booked flights and were about three weeks out that Emily wrote back again. She mentioned that she had been thinking about it, and it made sense that if I were staying in the cabin on their property, I would be a good fit for the farm. She sent me the job requirements, and we scheduled a phone call to discuss them.

I had a job.

-

I landed in Anchorage on June 1, 2024. I had just packed up my stuff in Long Island and jumped on a plane. Liz had a more challenging and emotional journey.

She had left the Virgin Islands permanently after living there for the last 14 years. She had to say goodbye to her Island cat, her apartment, her friends, and her business. And then, she had flown to her parents’ home in North Carolina. She traded out her flip-flops for wool socks and boots. And then, she was surprised by her girlfriend, who trekked to North Carolina just to fly with her to Alaska and say goodbye. Mia was living in California at the time, so they were already in a long-distance relationship.

Mia was with us for dinner on our first night in Alaska and the following day until about 3 p.m., when she had to take a flight back to work in San Francisco.

And then it was just the two of us.

It was a weird energy in the car as we drove those four hours to Homer that day. We were both excited, of course. But Liz was also sad. She had to say goodbye to her partner for the next three months. They had just spent the last few days together, and it had reminded her how nice it was to be in each other’s presence instead of only on the phone like they were forced to do most of the time. And now, here they were again, saying goodbye with no chance of seeing each other in person until the fall. She was, as she would call it throughout the next few months, “lovesick,” and the sadness of that energy was palpable in the car that day. It was a contrast to the absolute high I was feeling. I had done it! I was back in Alaska! I couldn’t believe things had fallen into place. I had always said I would be back, and here I was heading to a job on a farm for the summer. The thought of sitting in the dirt, working with my hands after slumping in front of a computer for the last few months writing or editing photos, felt incredible. I was beyond excited. And next to me, my friend sat quietly with a heavy heart. She had just left her life, packed her things, and said goodbye to her girlfriend.

Shortly after we made the turn toward Homer on the Sterling Highway, though, things started to shift. The views had been incredible all along, but now they were surreal. The mountains reflected perfectly in Kenai Lake as we drove through Cooper Landing. And then, out of nowhere, we noticed a moose running alongside our car on the highway.

A few miles outside of Homer, we stopped at a pull-off and looked to our right. There, in the middle of the field, was a mother moose and two twin babies. The babies were nursing. We sat there in absolute awe. I snuck out of the car with my camera to capture it, but, as I would learn over the next few months, it was impossible to capture the beauty of Alaska in a way that would evoke the same feelings as when you saw it. It was almost as if I was holding my breath some days as I looked around, afraid it wasn’t real.

Once we drove through town, we turned left to make our way up to Ohlson Mountain Road. It was about a 20-minute drive before we finally got to the dusty dirt road. To our right, you could see the Homer Spit. Even though it was past 9 p.m., it felt like the middle of the day with the sun still out. It was another five minutes down the road before we saw the turn for Harbinson Lane. We were going to be living in Fred Harbinson’s old homestead.

We pulled into the small circular driveway and shut off the car.

A tiny cabin with antlers above the door stood in front of us. Inside, the kitchen floor was painted red beneath the large, brightly colored rug. On the walls hung cast-iron pans, including a muffin pan that I used far more than I would have expected over the next few weeks. A rocking chair sat in the corner, and beside it, a small wooden table with two wooden chairs. It was where we would eat dinner and play cards the rest of the summer.

I walked outside to check the outhouse. Liz and I joked about how this might be the “best view from the loo” we had ever seen. The door swung wide to a breathtaking view of the mountains, wildflowers dotting the field in front of the little house.

Something about the stillness and simplicity of it all caught me off guard. I hadn’t realized how long it had been since I had felt this kind of peace.

Was I finally home?

*to be continued.

I met Rick through another amazing man named Chris, who started a men’s group in Spokane. Chris reached out to me when I arrived in town. He bought me lunch and gave me gas money, and then insisted that I connect with someone who made him think of more good. “Rick inspires me daily, and he’s got stories for days,” Chris had told me. I was scheduled to leave the next day. I reached out to Rick Clark on Facebook that night. He accepted my friend request and immediately wrote back to me.

My last day in Spokane was Rick’s only day off from work. It felt like every meeting on my trip seemed destined to happen.

“We were on welfare my entire childhood. My dad left when I was one, and even though he lived blocks away, he never had anything to do with us,” Rick told me as we sat in the corner booth of the diner. Raised by a single mother alongside two sisters, Rick quickly learned how to survive in a world that offered few opportunities. He dropped out of school before 11th grade, just like many others in his family. By the age of 19, he was a father. Over the next 28 years, he weathered three marriages, raised five children, and worked a series of minimum-wage jobs that barely sustained him. “It was just the same cycle over and over again,” Rick said. “I was a high school dropout who just started accepting the cards I had been dealt, and I hated it.”

But in 2015, something changed.

“I was living outside of Spokane in a trailer,” Rick told me. “I had no car. My electricity was shut off, and I thought, ‘I can’t do this anymore.’ You know, I'm 44 years old. And I was like, I'm either going to die or I'm not going to let this define who I am anymore.

That day, Rick took a bus into town to enroll at Spokane Community College. “I didn’t even know if I could get into school. I was terrified,” he told me. Rick had to switch buses at one point, and while waiting for his next bus, he experienced something that changed the trajectory of his life.

“I had about 15 minutes to kill until my next bus came. And so I went upstairs and I had like $10 in my pocket, and I was like, I'm gonna get some snacks. And I saw this homeless man outside of the convenience store, and I had seen him like three other times throughout the downtown area. And something was telling me, like, not to walk by him again, you know, because I'd done that so many times, and I was like, I didn't even know what I was doing. But I just walked straight up to him and said, ‘Hey, are you hungry?’

And he says, ‘I’m really hungry.’

Rick brought the man into the store and spent his last eight dollars on him. Then he sat with him for the last ten minutes before his bus arrived. He discovered that the man’s backpack had been stolen the previous night. The man was homeless and had been living downtown; the backpack was all he owned.

Rick told the man he would meet him back in this exact spot in two days. “I will bring you a backpack with everything you lost,” Rick said. Rick got his shoe size and pant size.

“But you had no money,” I interrupt Rick.

“No,” he responds. “But I had Facebook.”

Rick got home that night after registering for college and posted on Facebook. “Hey, everyone! I am a college student! Oh, and by the way, I met this man named Jared today. He’s my son’s age, and he’s in rough shape. He just got robbed of his backpack. Can anyone help? Maybe we can fill a backpack for him?”

Within 24 hours, people came together and instead of one, twenty-five backpacks were filled. Toiletries, gift cards, food, and clothing. Rick returned to the spot where he had met Jared, now with a truck full of backpacks, and began distributing them.

“The response was so amazing,” Rick remembers. “Just nothing but kindness. People were so happy to receive them.”

From that moment, Giving Backpacks was born. The movement spread beyond Spokane, with chapters popping up in New Mexico, New York, Australia, and even Africa.

Rick graduated from Spokane Community College with honors. Encouraged by his son, he applied to Gonzaga University, pouring his heart into an application essay that shared the story of his past, his mission, and a simple line: “The little boy who was hungry is knocking at your door.”

Rick is now crying as he tells me Gonzaga’s response to his essay.

A $34,000 scholarship and the words, “We’ve been waiting for you.”

Rick Clark graduated from Gonzaga University at age 47.

“People think there’s a recipe to being kind,” he tells me. “But it’s simple. Buy the cheese for someone’s sandwich. Say hello. Give one backpack.”

Rick is no longer defined by the hand he was dealt, but by the hand he now extends to others.

Meeting Rick Clark became one of the most pivotal days of my mission. I can still see him standing in front of my car before we parted ways. He said something so helpful to me, I asked him if he could repeat it so I could take a video of him and listen to the reminder daily on the road. He laughed and stood up tall in front of Old Blue.

“We can spend our whole lives afraid, or we can get up, get out on the front lines, and tear shit up.”

We hugged goodbye, and I headed back out to the front lines that day.

But now, years later, I’ve reconnected with him. I noticed on Facebook that he made an announcement the other day as I was finishing writing up his story. He was shutting his nonprofit down. I felt saddened by the news and the timing, as I was finally writing about him. But as I listened to what he said, I realized it wasn’t an ending. He wanted to do even more, and under the limitations of his mission statement, he wasn’t able to. He was taking a moment to help family, but he was also plotting his next more good movement and how he could help even more people. It wasn’t a loss or a setback, it was about growing beyond the limits of his old model to do even more.

As he concluded his announcement on Facebook this week, he said,

“I helped a stranger on my worst day, a lot of people think you can’t give back or help out properly until you retire… but helping someone on my worst day changed my life forever.”

It made me think of many of the people I met on the road, as well as those from home who would reach out to me as I traveled. “I wish I could do what you’re doing, maybe in retirement, I will!”

It was the kind of journey that left me mentally and physically drained. I was running on little sleep, repeating my story to new faces every single day. It wasn’t exactly a beach or a golf course, which is how I liked to picture myself living somewhere with my best friends into old age, like a proper Golden Girl.

It has taken me a long time to process all of these stories, to the point that some have evolved into entirely new stories. Some of the people I spoke to have now passed away, which has led me to break down and sob at my writing desk for hours each time. Each person and each story has woven itself into who I am and the work I am doing.

But the one thing I know I did right from the start was to get on the road at all. The week I was scheduled to depart in 2016, I had just photographed a wedding and had an entire hard drive full of summer weddings to edit. I was still fully grieving my mother, overwhelmed, terrified, excited, and had absolutely no idea what I was doing. I knew I wasn’t ready. But I got in the car, and I got on the road, and I started.

Because none of us are ever really ready, but we can start. We can make a change. And we can always offer help to someone else along the way. It could come back and help us in the end, just like it did with Rick Clark.

Just like it did for me.

The night sky in Spokane, the day I left. May 2018

The other people in the waiting room.

There were three in total. One older man sat alone in the corner. In the other corner, a man and a woman sat fighting. They were clearly divorced and arguing over a decision regarding their daughter. She was thirty years old and dying of cancer in the same ICU as my mother. Her ex-boyfriend wanted to visit, and the mother said yes while the father said no. I remember them yelling at each other and thinking how sad it was that, even during what was likely the worst week of both their lives, they were fighting. Sitting next to each other but alone. The other man in the corner was about to lose someone he loved. He sat quietly, alone.

Meanwhile, I was with my family: three siblings whom I love more than anything in this world and a father whom I consider a best friend. A man who spun my mom around for dances in the kitchen and kissed her before bed, sitting vigil at her hospital bed, now holding her hand. In the grand scheme of things, I was the luckiest girl in that waiting room.

I realized I wanted to try to do something. After a week sitting in that waiting room and seeing the people there, I wanted to help somehow. I wanted to offer hope for the next person who might sit there after me. A life raft for someone else while they floated through the hospital waiting room's darkness. I was desperate to honor my mother in some way. Even as she was still with me at the beginning of this week, I could feel her slipping away as my idea developed. I didn’t want her to be gone entirely. If I could carry out her message a little longer, keep her spirit alive…Maybe I could do some good.

It was in the hours before my mother died that the idea for More Good was born. I would drive her old Subaru across the country to collect as much good as possible and compile the stories into a book. That book would be placed in this waiting room. Maybe I’d find a way to get it into every waiting room in the country. I had no idea how I would do any of it, but I told my mother I would go out and look for the good she told me existed. I held her hand and promised her I would find a way to honor her. I am unsure if she was completely conscious during this conversation, but the fact that I made her a promise is all the push I needed to get myself on the road. I figured once I was ready, I’d pack up her car.

The entire mission, however, was not born in the waiting room. The seed was planted during a conversation I had with my mother weeks before she died, and after a moment of kindness that had happened simultaneously as a tragedy had occurred. The morning of the Sandy Hook shooting, a man had walked into a coffee shop and bought a $100 gift card, telling the barista to run it out on the people in the line behind him. I told my mother the story over the phone that morning, and she reminded me that despite the tragedies and horrible things that would happen in our lives, there would always be more good if we looked for it. I shared my mom’s words with my friend Laura, and we decided to create a platform. We wanted to hear more of these stories of kindness. Laura came up with the name: The GrAttitude Project. Two T’s, because it was more than a project, it was a lifestyle we hoped to inspire. An attitude of gratitude.

—

Whenever you start something, there is an exciting wave of momentum. It was no different with The GrAttitude Project when it first launched. Our inbox was full of stories, and people were excited to see something positive in their Facebook feeds. They wanted to be a part of it, so they sat down and emailed us stories of kindness from their lives.

My friend Laura and I launched the project on Valentine’s Day 2013. Eleven days later, my mother landed in the hospital. She died at the end of the week.

It was mere weeks after she died that the project began to wane. Most days, our inbox was empty. I would spend the better part of my morning before work scouring the internet for anything positive to share. Which, if you’ve ever tried, is not an easy task. At the time, I had no interest in sharing anything positive. I had just lost my mother. I had broken up with my boyfriend for no other reason than that I couldn’t seem to give anything of myself the moment my mother died. I didn’t feel like cheering anyone up when I couldn’t even find a way to make myself smile.

But I also didn’t want to give up on a project my mother inspired. She was gone now, and I didn’t want the project to die with her. I opened Facebook and looked at the post I had made that morning. It had only received 11 likes.

11.

It was right around when social media worked hard to have us define ourselves by our likes. How many likes a photo or post got somehow translated in our warped brains to how popular we were…how much we mattered. We had tricked ourselves into believing that was the logic behind the cursed little thumb that people either took time to press or not, that dictated whether they liked our content.

I stared at the computer screen, seeing the number 11. I felt defeated. Only 11 people cared, I thought naively. We used to receive so many more likes- sometimes even 100! And now I was working hard every morning to find something worthwhile, for what? I decided I would not let myself become discouraged. Maybe this was a sign to refocus on the road trip I wanted to take instead. Rather than waiting for people to send in their stories, I’d go out and dig them up myself. Maybe this Facebook page didn’t matter right now.

And then I opened a message on Facebook that I had received. It was from a girl named Carolyn. I tried to place her as I stared at the name in my inbox. It finally dawned on me that she had dated my friend Louis ages ago. She had since gotten married, so her last name was different from what I remembered. I met her once in my life, during a weekend home from college. We became Facebook friends shortly after a brief introduction and never saw each other again. I wondered what was prompting her to write to me now, years later. I clicked on the message.

Hey Mary, I just wanted to say that I LOVE your gratitude project. I read it to my husband every day, and it helps us keep things in perspective and marvel at humanity. I think it’s the greatest thing. You are making a difference! Keep it up.

I sat there, stunned. She had never liked a post. I don’t think she even liked the Facebook page. And here she was telling me she read every post to her husband every day. It meant so much to her that she took the time to send me a message.

I thought about a moment ago, when I stared at the 11 likes on my post. Only 11 people cared, I had thought naively.

It turns out that you never know who you might be impacting or who might be inspired by your actions. In every quiet moment of kindness you perform, in each moment you set aside for someone else, you contribute to the good. You affect more people than you might realize. Don’t give up because you don’t think you are making a difference. You have no idea how much one small note of thanks or appreciation might help someone. Carolyn reminded me of that. I doubt she knows I’ve read her message a thousand times since she sent it. I’ve never told her that it’s a story I’ve shared through high schools nationwide to remind them not to base their worth on their likes. Her message that day served as the motivation I needed to continue. A girl I met once, whom I hardly recalled, became one of the main reasons I persevered.

Keep it up, she had told me at the end of her message.

So, I did.

*3 years 31 days across America in and out of 154 homes. Over 43,000 miles. Currently writing the book for hospital rooms, along with a memoir. More Good is also an official 501(c)(3) and hosts smaller events to create and inspire “More Good” in communities across the United States.*

When I left for my trip in 2016, people asked me which state I was most excited to see. Without hesitation, I replied, “Montana.”

My answer was purely based on the scenery. I knew nothing about the state except that when I had seen photographs of it, it appeared to be the most beautiful spot in the country.

I can confidently say that driving the Going-to-the-Sun Road in Glacier National Park was undoubtedly the most beautiful drive I experienced on the entire trip.

But it wasn’t the scenery that validated it for me.

In Helena, after the Independent Record published an article about More Good, I received an email from the governor of Montana, Steve Bullock. He mentioned that he was on an airplane traveling out of town that morning and had picked up the newspaper to read. A woman had walked by him on the plane, and when seeing him reading his paper asked, “Any good news?” He replied, “Actually, yes,” and shared my story with her. In his email, he told me he would have loved to meet me if he hadn't left town. Two minutes later, I was notified through my website that he had donated fifty dollars to my gas tank.

I immediately forwarded the email to my sisters with the subject line, “The governor of Montana just donated to my gas tank!”

That afternoon, I had lunch with my host, Meg, and two of her friends. I had connected with Meg because a friend of hers had written to me first. The friend had described Meg as one of the most wonderful people she knew. She also told me that Meg had started something called “Stitching Hearts,” creating 800 Valentine’s cards for a homeless shelter down the street from her. After delivering them, she realized the cards could be even more meaningful if sent to people in domestic abuse shelters. Since then, she has sent thousands of cards to shelters. I emailed Meg immediately, telling her about her friend offering her as a host. It was very last minute, so I wasn’t sure it would work, but Meg replied within ten minutes.

Meg to Me:

Jen did tell me about you, and I was hoping you’d be in touch because your project sounds so cool! We have a lovely spare room/craft room that we’d be happy to have you in. I currently don’t have a cellphone, but I can text you later from my partner’s phone.

Me to Meg:

Woo! I am so excited! I wasn’t finding any connections in Helena, so I wasn’t sure I’d stop, but I feel like it's fate that this will work out now! I appreciate your flexibility! Did you throw your cell phone into a river and are living a life of happiness (LIKE I WISH I COULD!), or are you in the process of getting a new cell phone this weekend?

Meg to Me:

I moved here from Canada last year, and it was too expensive to use that phone. Then I got used to not having a phone unless connected to Wi-Fi, so I’m just going with it for now. It’s a much more peaceful existence.

My stay with Meg was precisely what I had hoped for; she was lovely and made me feel right at home. On our first day together, over lunch, a friend of Meg’s highly recommended that I meet Helena's mayor. I was intrigued. She connected us later that day, and the mayor told me he would happily meet with me. I was shocked by how quickly he was willing to make time for me.

Wilmot Collins was a Liberian refugee and the first Black mayor of Montana. We had met at the Starbucks on Prospect Avenue the next day at 2 p.m. He was already in the corner of the café when I entered the door at precisely on time. I sat down with him with my back to the door, and he began talking. Suddenly, a woman tapped me on the shoulder, only a minute into Wilmot telling his story.

“I’m just going to interrupt for a minute and give you a hug,” she politely said as she wrapped her arms around me. “I saw your car out there and read about you in the paper today, and you’re just awesome. Have an excellent day.” And with that, she vanished.

It turned out that a hug was the most popular response during the trip when people learned what I was doing. I remember in California, at the end of an interview, once everything was packed up, the news anchor said, “I know this might sound odd, but can I give you a hug?” I understood his hesitation; we were right in the middle of the #MeToo movement, and as a man, he seemed nervous even to ask. However, I sensed how harmless his request was. He had repeatedly mentioned how much he appreciated what I was doing and how grateful he was to have been able to highlight my story. I genuinely embraced every hug I received during my trip. They provided immense comfort when I was alone out there. There was a sense of connection in that fleeting moment, held in a stranger’s embrace.

I took another sip of my coffee and focused back on Wilmot. I noticed the seriousness he carried that seemed to melt away the moment he smiled - one of those smiles that lights up an entire face. He returned to his story now that the woman had left.

It was just after he met his wife, Maddie, when the Liberian Civil War began and left them both homeless. He lost two brothers in the conflict before he and his wife were able to escape to Ghana. Years earlier, Maddie had been an exchange student at a high school in Montana and had stayed with a host family that treated her like their own. With everything going on, Maddie reached back out to the family for help. They sprang into action, securing her a full scholarship to Carroll College in Helena and inviting her to live in their home again. Wilmot would have to wait to go through the refugee program before he could meet her in Montana. Just before she left for the U.S., they discovered that Maddie was pregnant.

Wilmot didn’t meet his daughter until she was nearly three years old. He arrived in Montana and was welcomed into the host family’s home while he looked for a place for his family. When he found them a house, it wasn’t long before there was a knock at the front door.

A neighbor had come over to ask if he had seen what was written on his garage door. He hadn't; he walked outside with her, and there, in large painted letters across the side, were the words “KKK Go back to Africa.”

“You hear of negativities and racism all across the country, so when I saw that on my wall, I decided to go to the police,” Wilmot explained. “And by the time I got back home, my neighbor had already gotten the neighborhood together, and they had all washed it off.” Wilmot paused momentarily before repeating, “They washed my wall down.”

I took a moment to process everything he had said - the turnaround of it all. Then he added,

“I do not dwell on the act of racism; I dwell on the reaction of my community.”

It made me think of every story I was collecting and what I was trying to do myself. It wasn’t the tragic event or horrible scenario we faced that always mattered the most, but how we handled the aftermath. It was what we chose to focus on more.

Perhaps these events led us to a darker place we didn’t want to be in, and maybe they suddenly became our new narrative: “The woman whose son died or the girl whose mom died.” However, how we continued to write our story from there was our choice. I recalled the widow I met at the start of my trip. She was one month out from losing the love of her life, yet she sat there telling me about the kindness a nurse had shown her while she was in the ICU. Then there was Julie, who lost both arms and legs during a shooting, yet she spent hours in her living room with me, sharing the story of a man who bought her two mechanical hands and delivered them on Christmas.

All of these people I met were reminders that we have a choice every day. Will we focus on the person who painted the evil or the ones who washed it away?

“That story,” Wilmot continued, “sometimes makes me teary when I think about it. Because there are so many people who have gone through that who did not have the kind of experience I had, they were left to struggle on their own, and no community showed up for them the way they did for me,” he told me.

When those beautiful moments occur, they often bring us to tears because they feel so rare now. We don’t hear about them, we don’t see them, we only hear the bad, and we only know the negative.

That's why meeting Wilmot inspired me to keep driving forward and continue sharing these stories. Reminding people that moments of kindness are still buried beneath all the darkness felt like the most important work I could do. For every person who is doing bad, there are a few more who are tirelessly working to do good. And I wanted to keep uncovering them. I wanted to keep my focus on them.

We all have that choice. We get to choose what we focus on…

Will we focus on the one painting the evil or the one washing it away?

As I left the coffee shop that day after saying goodbye to Wilmot, a man stopped me. He told me he had seen my car in the parking lot and handed me $60. “It’s all the cash I have,” he said before walking away. I thanked him profusely and went to the next gas station to fill up.

I was right to think Montana would be one of the most beautiful spots in the country.

But it wasn’t the scenery that validated it for me. It was the people.

A printed photograph for my desk of me and Wilmot at the Starbucks on Prospect Avenue.

“What the hell am I doing?”

It wasn’t the first time this thought had crossed my mind in the last 68 days, but it had never been louder or more persistent than today. I had arrived in Washington, DC, a few days earlier with a fever and on the brink of exhaustion. The mission was already taking a toll on me, and I still had 44 states to cover.

Before my arrival, my generous host emailed her community, asking her neighbors to share their stories. She explained that she would have a visitor traveling to all 50 states to compile stories of human kindness, and any story, no matter how small, was welcome.

Crickets.

Over 120 people in her neighborhood received the request, yet not one person replied with anything to share. Should I just give up now? Maybe I should change the title of my journey from “more good” to “a little good” or “kind of good”? I could call it a day, drive back home, climb into my own bed, and return to the comfort of normal life. It was tempting.

Good stories existed, but they were difficult to find. Everyone was in their own bubble, busy and stressed. The holiday season had just ended, and we faced a looming inauguration that threatened to further divide the country.

But I kept ruminating on how it had been 68 days – what did I have to show for it? This mission I embarked on in honor of my late mother may very well have been in vain. Demoralized doesn’t even begin to describe how I felt.

I checked my email the day before I was supposed to leave town, just as I had been doing religiously, hoping that stories would come flowing in. Nothing. Just as I was about to slam my laptop screen down in frustration… PING! A message from a young woman named Karin arrived, telling me she was in the AmeriCorps. She wanted to meet up to chat, but I couldn’t tell by her email if she had a specific story to tell.

Up to that point, I had met anyone, anywhere. I drove to people’s workplaces, homes, and local coffee shops. Once, I drove across the entire state of South Carolina just to get a story and then drove back to where I was staying that night. There was no one I wouldn’t meet, and there was no story I wouldn’t hear. At the very least, I figured people appreciated being listened to, so even if the story wouldn’t end up in my book, I could provide “more good” by giving them my time.

But I was leaving tomorrow, and as I sat at my computer and sipped a ginger ale to calm the pit in my stomach, I wasn’t feeling very motivated to do anything but get out of D.C. To make matters worse, it was pouring rain when I woke up the next morning. I started convincing myself that I was scheduled to leave that day and should pack and get going. Did Karin even have a story, or did she just want to meet and chat?

But then that nagging voice in the back of my head (the one that convinced me to attempt this trip in the first place) insisted: how will you know if you don’t go? As drained and defeated as I felt, I couldn’t help but cling to that little thread of hope that this woman might have something for me.

Karin worked downtown, so we planned to meet at a coffee shop near McPherson Square. By then, the rain was pouring down heavily, and it was close to rush hour. I tried not to view this as a sign to cancel our meeting and instead decided to order an Uber.

A few minutes later, a black Nissan Altima arrived. I quickly closed my umbrella and jumped into the back seat to avoid the downpour outside. The driver greeted me with a friendly hello, and I politely smiled and responded in kind. Then, I rested my head against the cold glass and closed my eyes.

The Uber driver interrupted my silent anxiety attack to ask me how long I had lived in D.C. I mumbled that I didn’t live here, but my lackluster response didn’t deter him. “Oh? Where are you visiting from?” he asked in an accent I couldn’t yet decipher. “New York,” I replied, offering no further detail again, hoping to derail what felt like a conversation on the verge of starting. “How long did it take you to get here, you fly?”

I lifted my head from the glass and sat back in defeat. I was raised always to be polite and considerate, so despite my best attempts to ignore the conversation, I engaged.

“It took me two months.”

I watched the confusion flicker across his face in the rear-view mirror. I took a deep breath before launching into my explanation. “I’m stopping in every state along the way, collecting stories of acts of human kindness to create a book for hospitals,” I shared. I waited for the perfunctory “wow, cool” response and hoped we could return to our mutually agreed-upon quietude. Instead, he immediately turned around and smiled at me. “I have a story for you!”

I figured he would tell me something short and sweet about someone who had been kind to him during his Uber ride. If I was lucky, I could still enjoy a few minutes of solitude before the ride ended. Instead, he told me this:

“I came here 20 years ago from Sierra Leone,” he began. “I came with a friend. I had a place to stay, but my friend’s place didn’t work out. He ended up in a shelter. My friend had been a doctor back in our country. But he didn’t have the proper qualifications here, so instead, he got a job doing a newspaper route. Every morning, he would get up and throw newspapers on the lawns of wealthy businessmen. One morning, he was throwing the paper, and it hit a light fixture, breaking it. Now, mind you, it was early in the morning, and no one was around. He could have left, and the homeowner would never know what happened, but instead, my friend went and got a pencil. He left a note on the man’s door and told him he’d come back to pay later. When my friend returned later, the homeowner was just returning from a business trip. He had seen the note and invited my friend in for coffee. They talked for a while. The businessman asked about my friend and found out his story, how he had traveled here and couldn’t be the doctor he wanted to be and was living in a shelter. Long story short, the man ended up putting my friend in a studio and paying for him to attend medical school. My friend is a doctor now in D.C.”

I sat in the backseat in stunned silence at what he had just told me. It wasn’t just that it was a huge story of kindness; it was that it had come out of nowhere.

It reminded me why I was even here in the first place, in this Uber with this stranger. It reminded me of my mission and that, despite the struggle- and boy, had it been one lately- there was still good out there, and it would find you if you let it.

My driver continued, “You know, it’s because he did the right thing. He didn’t have to leave a note. It was dark outside, and there were no security cameras. He could have walked away, but he didn’t. He did the right thing and followed his heart.” We were almost at the coffee shop when he began to slow down and pull over. He put the car in park and turned around to look at me. “It’s just like what you’re doing, too,” he explained. “The most important work you’ll ever do is the work you do with your heart.”

Tears began to roll down my cheeks as he turned back one last time. “Well, have a nice day!” he shouted to me as I thanked him and slowly got out of his car into the pouring rain. While everyone around me dashed to get inside, there I stood in McPherson Square.

4.32 miles. That was the distance we traveled together that day in his car. When I completed my 50-state journey almost three years later, I had covered over 43,000 miles. But those 4.32 miles with my driver that day were the most significant. They reminded me why I was here and what I needed to do. Although Karin didn’t have a specific story for me, I wouldn’t have gotten in the Uber without her email. I wouldn’t have spent those 4.32 miles with my driver. And those miles wouldn’t have given me the exact push I needed at a moment when I felt I might give up and forget the whole ridiculous thing.

I realized that these moments would occur again and again if I continued to say yes to anyone and everyone who wanted to meet. My driver taught me the most important lesson of my mission in those few short miles.

The most important work you will ever do is the work you do with your heart.

Reflecting on that 68th day, I had wondered, “What the hell am I doing?” It was also the day that question was answered—an answer my mom already knew. Although there will be tragedies and terrible events in our lives, there will always be more good—if we continue to look for it.

So, I kept looking.

And I found it.

“The simplest definition of a writer is one who is in love with the language into which he or she has been born…”

I was born into a language of light.

I’ve always been drawn to the positive, more light-filled areas of a day, a week, or a year. I am on a constant search for providing hope, an endless journey to make people feel better.

After months and years of processing and procrastinating writing about my three-year journey, I finally realized that enough was enough. I moved in with an elder cousin last year and set myself up to sit in a desk chair for the month: Wake early, write. Walk. Write. Eat healthy. Bed early. Repeat.

The first week felt like a success. I got up earlier than usual and forced myself into the writing chair. I walked a lot, ate healthier, and got into a rhythm. I even joined my cousin in her water aerobics class, rocking it as the youngest person in the pool.

Saturday arrived, and we figured we would go out and do an activity. Around 2 p.m., we went to the downtown mall in Charlottesville, Virginia and strolled through stores for two hours. We visited the library and found a great book that the library luckily had two copies of for us. We vowed to start our own little book club and finish the book to discuss by the end of the following week. We grabbed a glass of wine and a snack before leaving town.

The sun was out as we left the little wine shop, and I held her arm steadily as we walked. A little girl was playing the electric violin in the middle of the mall, so we stopped momentarily to listen. Her father was sitting nearby her, playing the accordion. A duet by Vivaldi followed by Fly Me to the Moon. We listened to both, standing in the sun arm in arm.

I mentally pocketed the moment. The sun. The music. The beauty of it all.

Then we started to walk back to the car. As we walked, I noticed a man approaching and instinctively gave a small smile, as I always did to people passing by. I heard him mumble, “Are you ladies having a nice day?” He was two feet away before I could answer him, and his eyes suddenly changed.

“Can I touch?” I heard him say, not registering what it meant or whether he wanted to shake my hand or give me a high five.

But before I knew it, his hand was on my crotch.

My brain was barely catching up as I realized what he had just done, “No, thank you,” I yelled back, annoyingly polite even after being violated.

He disappeared around the alley and into the crowd of the downtown mall. And I immediately became furious. After three years across an entire country alone, nothing like this had ever happened. He knew there was nothing I could have done. The way our arms were linked prevented me from running after him to say what I only thought of later: “CAN I HAVE A KICK?” And then, before he had time to hear or register either, swiftly kicking him between the legs. But I hadn’t thought of it then; I hadn’t thought of anything. I stood there, paralyzed in shock at the fact he had just grabbed me.

When my cousin and I returned to the car, my cousin said, “I wish I had done something. I didn’t protect you. Should we call the police?”

I felt I needed to calm her down, so I reassured her that I was fine, that he was a sick man, and that I was leaving him outside of the car and moving on.

But when we got in the car, I couldn’t help but notice my hands slightly trembling on the way home. I knew I was fine, but unease lingered for the rest of the day and night. Mostly, I thought of others who had been violated in much worse and more frequent ways. It made me sick for them. If I felt this way from such minor harassment, how would they feel? How did they move forward?

I thought back to the moment in the sun. The moment I had stayed in a few minutes longer to enjoy. Would we have run into the creepy man if we hadn’t stayed? The game of the mind immediately travels to the what-ifs and whys. What if we had just listened to one song instead of the next? What if I hadn’t been holding my cousin?

Mainly, why did that man have to ruin such a beautiful day?

Or, maybe, why am I letting him ruin it?

He was a sick man but not a man worth thinking about much longer.

On the way to Virginia six days prior, I had been listening to a podcast for my drive. In an interview with RuPaul, he said, “I look at the darkness; I just don’t stare at it.”

So, I will look at that man and see him for the sad excuse of a man that he is, who thinks it is acceptable to act the way he did. But I will not stare at him. I will not dwell on his darkness or disgusting behavior. In a year from now, I will choose to remember the beautiful sunny day I had with my cousin. I will return to the language I know. Because his is not one I speak, nor can translate. I will stick to my language.

A language of light.

*I am fortunate that my experience was minor, but I hope that anyone out there who has been violated finds their voice and the resources they need to move forward. I believe there is more good out there, but acknowledge that bad inevitably coexists.