not nothing

by Shannon Kopp

IN 2014, A PRISON INMATE gifted me two beautiful hummingbird necklaces that he had meticulously handcrafted out of hundreds of seed beads. Each pendant is about half the size of my palm, one in shades of green and the other in shades of blue. The hummingbirds are forever mid-flight, with bronze beads strung together to outline the edges of their wings. They have white and yellow beads on their chests and bellies, and their beaks are long and slender, as thin as sewing needles. The tails of the birds are clusters of beads that tickle against your chest when you wear them.

For a long time, the necklaces seemed too delicate to wear. I kept them on a white jewelry plate with a yoga bracelet and one of Dad’s sobriety tokens. But years later, when my sons were little, two and five, they were drawn to the birds. They loved to wear them during the pandemic when we were trapped in the house all day. I draped the necklaces around their little necks and watched them flap their arms all over the living room, jumping off the couch onto a bed of pillows, calling themselves Greeny and Bluey. One time, my oldest son asked to climb up onto my shoulders with the necklace on. I channeled my father’s playful spirit and let him. He hoisted himself up and clasped his fingers into my outstretched hands, and we swayed throughout the house, an unsteady human tower, flapping our arm-wings together, saying, “Buzz Buzz” (because we guessed this might be the sound a hummingbird makes). Greeny bounced on my head and we took a few laps around the kitchen table before it was time for my youngest to take his turn.

For all the times the kids wore these necklaces, not a single bead ever broke off.

Now Greeny is the only bird on my jewelry plate because Bluey is in a black box with my father’s ashes. In November of 2023, he passed away due to the health consequences of addiction—a battle that spiraled out of control in his fifties, with periods of sobriety he heartbreakingly couldn't hold onto. My sister Julie and I hated the illness, but we loved him, this person who gave us the childhood of our dreams, who lost his way climbing the corporate ladder, who strived to give his daughters "everything" despite the fact we already had it.

When he entered hospice care at Hartford Hospital, he was sixty-nine years old. Julie and I spent four days and three nights by his bedside, and before he passed, Julie put a rock engraved with an infinity symbol into his left hand and gently folded his frail fingers over it. I put the Bluey necklace into his right. He could no longer speak or open his eyes by this time, but still, I hoped he felt the power and intricate beauty of a necklace crafted by someone who had lived inside the walls of a prison cell, the way he did back in 2012. I hoped Dad felt the spirit of his grandchildren wearing the necklace, and the lightness of a world spent on the shoulders of someone you love. There was something about the strength of these tiny beads, the way they stuck together all these years. I hoped he felt that, too.

The last week of Dad’s life was filled with cold, gray New England skies, but the morning after his passing, the sun finally breaks through. I wake before the rest of the house, having barely slept, and carry my fourteen-year-old blind Terrier, Bella, into the backyard. I set her down in the grass to do her business. Tiny diamonds of dew cling to the blades. Everything is bathed in a radiant, golden glow, and this sudden burst of sunshine feels unfair. I want to go back to Dad’s final days and give him this kind of warmth and light outside of his hospital window. I want to go back thirty years and tell him that the trips to sunny places he worked so hard to give us during his 25-year sales career—before he lost it all—were nice, but I’d trade the beaches of Florida and California and Hawaii for him any day.

I’ve been to enough Al-Anon meetings to know that the complexities of addiction can’t be boiled down to one cause, and that his inability to recover was not my fault, but I still wonder, was there anything I could have done to keep those business trips from turning into benders that turned into the black hole he couldn’t climb out of. Should I have sat him down and said, Listen, Dad, I know that you think your value as a man comes from providing, from not giving up, from making it big…but you were a giant the moment you were born, and bigger than all the galaxies in the universe to your daughters, and sometimes, even the biggest and best of us need help.

Was there anything I could have done to change his fate? Did he know how much we loved him before he died? Did I ever thank him for all the times he carried me up on his shoulders around the house, pretending he was a magic carpet and I was Princess Jasmine? Did I thank him for learning the choreography to ‘N Sync’s “Bye Bye Bye” and practicing with me for months in the living room? For coaching my eighth-grade basketball team and for helping me survive Algebra that year? For the time my high school crush called to say that he liked another girl, and Dad helped me cut his picture out of my yearbook and then rip it into a million pieces and then took me out to get ice cream?

Did he know how much it meant to me when he gave me his thirty-day sobriety token, or brought me to a meeting with him, and that time he made amends to me in a church basement in 2009, saying, “Honey, I’m going to spend the rest of my life making up for the pain I’ve caused you. I love you more than you’ll ever know”? Did he know I was in the room with him the moment he took his last breath? Are these the kind of questions on every person’s mind the morning after losing someone so central to their being?

Bella makes her way back to me. She bumps gently into my leg, her tail wagging against my calf. A murder of crows caw somewhere nearby. Bella’s nose twitches as she sniffs the air, trying to identify the source of the commotion. I follow her gaze upwards and spot three crows flying overhead, their black silhouettes stark against the blue sky. When they disappear into the horizon, I remember something I once read about hummingbirds. Unlike most birds, hummingbirds don’t flap their wings up and down—they rotate them in a figure-eight, in an infinity symbol.

In April, six months after Dad passes, the temperature in Connecticut soars into the seventies. My husband is away on a business trip, and my mom offers to watch the kids, now seven and three. I drop them off at her house twenty minutes away and return home to Luna, a nine-month-old Hound mix that we adopted ten months ago from a local rescue group. It’s the perfect afternoon to take her for a long walk.

When I enter the front door of our house and close the door behind me, Luna is sprawled across the living room couch, chewing on Greeny like a bone in between her paws.

“Oh my God, Luna!” I scream. She leaps off the couch and dashes away. I pick up the necklace from the wet spot on the couch where Luna left it. The clasp is missing but otherwise, it’s miraculously intact. The pendant is slick and covered in slobber and a few white, wiry dog hairs stick out from the wings.

“What the fuck!” I scream again and pace around the house looking for her. Luna started destroying things the week we brought her home. She ate the pair of new black shoes I bought for my father's funeral, gnawing the heels off just hours before the service. Then she ate the floral arrangement I brought home from the service. Just yesterday, she chewed the arms off of one of the kid’s favorite transformer toys.

I find Luna cowering in the back of her crate, her floppy, copper-colored ears pushed back, her long tail tucked, and I immediately feel bad. I shouldn’t have yelled like that. I take a deep breath and try to calm my voice. “Luna,” I say. “Please stop eating everything.” She tilts her head as if she is listening, but I doubt it.

I attempt to dry Greeny with a towel and pick the dog hairs out and place him on a bookshelf where my sons keep their finished Lego vehicles. Bella, who got in a thousand times less trouble as a puppy, sleeps in her bed peacefully, oblivious to the Luna/Greeny drama. I apologize to Luna again for yelling and close her crate door.

I decide I’m going to the park alone. Not to walk the dog, not to push a swing, but to just be. This might be the first truly solitary moment I've had in weeks. Perhaps I've been alone while doing the dishes or on the way to the grocery store or in the carpool pickup line, but that is a functional, on-the-way-to-somewhere kind of alone, and today, I need the other, more spacious, less hurried, kind. So does every other mom I know.

I pull my black Toyota into the same parking lot where my father taught me how to drive. That day, in my first attempt to back out of a parking spot, I accidentally put the car in Drive instead of Reverse and we plunged over the curb and nearly into the trees. I can still see Dad now: his hands flying up in the air in a moment of stunned silence. Then, with his head tilting back and laughter erupting from somewhere deep in the belly, both of us found ourselves breathless and teary-eyed from laughing so hard.

Today, I walk past the trees I nearly drove into all those years ago, then past two handmade birdhouses, one teal and the other a fiery red. An old, familiar sign reads “Sundust Trail.” The mailbox full of walking maps stands sentry near the trail, and I cross a bridge over the babbling stream. Someone has penned in big letters on the underside of the bridge: “How are you doing?” and I think to myself, pretty shitty.

My problems at forty are different from the ones I came to this very trail to walk off at fifteen, seventeen, and twenty—troubles that all worked themselves out eventually: the F I got on an Algebra exam did not, in fact, ruin my life; the boy I swore was my soulmate was not; and my father’s battle with addiction ended. Not in the way I wanted it to end, but it ended.

I make my way deeper into the woods, the air thick with the scent of pine needles and damp earth. Sunlight filters through the canopy of branches and budding leaves. Soon, coming in the opposite direction, a mother pushes her baby in a jogging stroller. We smile at each other. Her baby is perhaps a year old and screaming his head off. The mom looks tired, and I hope, as they walk closer, that my smile communicates that I see her, and I am her.

When we're about to pass each other on the path, my smile suddenly doesn’t feel enough, and I say, hoping it’s not taken the wrong way: “Mama, you’ve got this.”

“Ughh, I sure hope so,” she says. She lets out a nervous laugh over the baby’s cries and lifts one hand from the stroller handle and places it briefly on the baby’s forehead.

“You do,” I say.

We smile at each other again and keep walking our own separate ways. A multitude of downed trees lies in a shallow pond, some half-submerged, their branches reaching skyward like skeletal arms, while other trunks stand tall, roots anchored in the muddy pond floor. The water is still deep enough to reflect the surrounding trees, creating a mirror image of the forest. A squirrel scampers across one of the tree trunks and disappears into the brush. A fat bumblebee flies by, the first one I’ve seen this season.

Last night, my oldest son and I listened to an episode about bees from our favorite podcast, But Why, where two librarians from Vermont answer questions from kids all around the world: If I swallow bubble gum, will it stay in my belly forever? If I eat too many blueberries, will I turn blue? Why are pandas black and white? Is it true that my brain will turn into mush if I watch too much TV? How do bees make honey? In the bee episode, the librarians visit a beekeeper in Maine and discuss how important all kinds of bees are to the planet, how they are the earth’s greatest pollinators, and how their honey not only tastes good but can be used to heal wounds. My son moved the teddy from between us where we lay on his Star Wars-themed bunk bed, looked into my eyes and said, “Did you know bees weren’t all bad? I thought they were just mean bugs that sting us.”

I told him that few things in life are “all bad,” but now, as I walk the trail that I once walked with Dad, it’s difficult to see Dad’s battle with addiction and his death as anything but all bad. Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino from The Jersey Shore recently posted a picture of his family, two young kids and his wife, with a two-layer Funfetti cake and the caption, “I’m 8 years clean and sober today. The comeback is always greater than the setback.” His son is adorably swiping a finger through the rainbow sprinkles on the cake. Mike has millions of followers, book deals, and a separate Instagram account dubbed “The Hope Dealer.” Even though I don't follow him, his stuff still finds me, as if Instagram knows I was the daughter of an amazing dad who couldn’t get clean and sober, who had the potential to heal and make an inspiring comeback, but never did.

In my twenties, someone in my eating disorder recovery support group correctly observed that in most areas of my life at that time, I thought in terms of black and white, all or nothing. There were good foods and bad foods, amazing days and the worst of them, and not much in between. When it came to Spirit or God or a Higher Power, however, I was gray, in between, wishy-washy.

She asked me to put my all-or-nothing thinking to good use and try out a specific walking meditation, which I did the following day on my lunch break. It was 2013 and I brought Bella with me to the pond behind the advertising agency where I worked. We walked a slow loop around the pond, past turtles sunbathing on rocks, water lilies, birds of paradise, tall grass swaying in the breeze. As instructed, I repeated to myself: God is nothing. Love is nothing. Higher Power is nothing. Over and over again. I walked and muttered those words under my breath for about five minutes, feeling so heavy and empty that even the explosion of flowers at the back of the pond didn't look all that pretty.

Then, on my second loop, I repeated: God is everything. Love is everything. Higher Power is everything. The kaleidoscope of color I saw that time around time blew me away. The glistening specks in the pavement. The birds. The light refracting off of the water. The emerald, jade, and lime leaves shimmering in the trees. Everything looked brighter, sharper, and more vivid. I remember calling my friend afterwards and telling her that I wanted to live a life like the second loop, with brightness and color. “Then start living as though Someone greater than you has your back,” she said.

In the final days of my father’s life in the hospital, I knew Someone had my back. The day before he died, my sister played several online recovery meetings on her phone near Dad’s morphine drip. In one meeting, a man who was maybe in his twenties shared that his mother took him to get a sixty-day celebratory haircut, the best haircut of his life. Someone a few decades older shared that he “couldn’t stand his big brother’s ass” while growing up, but now, in sobriety, they were close. Together, they took care of their mother who had Alzheimer’s until the very end. Just that morning, he got a call at six a.m. from his brother. The man choked up: “There were a lot of things I was looking for in sobriety. My brother calling me out of the blue just to say I love you was not one of them.”

As the meetings played, I swiped through all the beautiful Zoom box faces: different genders, races, ethnicities, ages, socioeconomic backgrounds, a diverse group of people that I instantly loved. I wished Dad could open his eyes and look at them. I wished they could see him, too.

That night, I dreamed I was at Dog Beach in Del Mar, California, with Dad, a place we once visited. Pups ran around us everywhere, panting and barking and lapping up the sunshine, but Dad and I were the only people on the beach. Dad was healthy, with black hair and tan skin. He wore a white t-shirt and red basketball shorts, the outfit I most remember him in when I was a child. He was barefoot like me, and we stood in shallow water so crystal clear we could see our toes. Dad’s eyes were chestnut brown, relaxed and easy like his smile.

Then someone started walking towards us from out in the middle of the ocean. Predictably, it was Jesus. He looked like all the pictures I’d ever seen of him in Catholic school, with long hair and kind eyes and a white robe and bare feet walking on water. The dogs didn’t seem to think the Son of God was a big deal. They just kept running about with sticks in their mouths, shaking their coats, playing in the surf.

Dad and I stared at the holy figure moving towards us. Once Jesus was about three or four feet away, his face started to change, morphing into the faces of the people from the recovery meetings my sister called into: the Black, trans woman who shared about how tough her job was; the old woman in her seventies grieving the loss of a friend; the kid with the sixty-day celebratory haircut; the man whose brother called him out of the blue to say I love you.

I woke up in the pull-out chair beside Dad’s hospital bed. He was still there, breathing right next to me. A feeling of deep peace spread through my body. For the first time since he entered hospice care, I wasn’t scared about what might happen next. I fell back asleep and slept soundly until morning.

But now, on Sundust Trail, I feel utterly alone. There is no Zoom Box Recovery Jesus walking towards me from the middle of the ocean. There is no Dad still breathing beside me. There is no still, quiet peace. There is just me and my grief and regrets and anxieties and the never-ending list of things I need to do before the kids go back to school and I go back to work tomorrow. I collapse on a rock and drop my face into my hands, a rock I probably sat on in tears when I was younger, too, with thoughts swirling in my head over some kind of loss: a break-up, a team I didn’t make, a graduation I didn’t feel ready for.

A bird lands on a nearby branch. I think he is a blue jay, but I don't know enough about birds to be sure. He has a splash of white around his chest and eyes, and a few touches of black, but mostly, he is white and ocean blue—the colors of my father’s alma mater and favorite basketball team, the UConn Huskies, and the colors of Bluey in the urn with Dad’s ashes.

The bird stays on the branch for a minute or so, either unaware or unafraid of me. The more closely I watch him, the lighter I feel. His charcoal beak opens slightly and closes. Perhaps he is chirping or singing, but I can’t hear over the wind. A crown of deep indigo colors sits on top of his head, and his feathers are dipped in white at the end. He shifts his weight from one foot to another, balancing effortlessly on a branch. His plumage and beak shimmer in the sunlight, and he opens his blue wings, and they stretch out so much farther than you’d think they could, with intricate patterns of white, black and azure on the inside. Then he soars upward into the sky and flies away.

I wonder where he’s going, what he knows, who he is.

Maybe he is en route to visit another grieving daughter alone on a walk in the woods. Maybe he is my father reincarnated. Maybe he is a message from God to take that second-loop-around-the-pond approach more often.

But one thing is for sure: he is not nothing.

About the author:

Shannon Kopp is the author of Pound for Pound: A Story of One Woman’s Recovery and the Shelter Dogs Who Loved Her Back to Life, published by William Morrow, a division of HarperCollins Publishers. Shannon holds an MFA in Nonfiction Writing from Pacific University, and has written for CNN, Maria Shriver, The Huffington Post, Good Housekeeping, BarkPost, and more. Her story has been featured in PEOPLE, NPR, CNN Turning Points with Dr. Sanjay Gupta, Women’s Health, and Psychology Today. She is a member of the HarperCollins Speakers Bureau and speaks on a variety of mental health and animal welfare topics. In 2016, she founded SoulPaws Recovery Project, an accredited nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting children and adults with eating disorders, which have the second highest mortality rate of all mental health conditions. She lives in San Diego with her husband, children, and three ridiculously adorable rescue dogs, Luna, Pua, and Bella.