disorganized overshare

I need my community today.

Not being on facebook, there's a lot that I miss. People assume that everyone sees everything, and I am very often forgotten. Yesterday, two different people--one of them my ex-husband, who does not communicate with me--sent text messages to inform me of a community member's passing.

I had not been close with this person over the last many months. I don't know if I would say that we were ever close, but we definitely had a relationship. The news of her death struck me, and I'm not sure yet how to respond.

Each death is different. All grief is the same, but each time we encounter grief we must experience it in the way appropriate to the situation. (Appropriate for each of us as individuals! I certainly don't mean to suggest that there are right or wrong ways to express grief.) This is the first time I've had to process a loss of this kind since my life turned over.

How do I talk about that, even? I mean, I'm going to need some specific, brief way to refer to the chain of events that comprised the year I was 27, still continues, and changed everything forever. My life collapsed. Now I am rebuilding it. I have a more solid foundation than I knew. 

I loved Nancy's energy. She brought such great enthusiasm to everything she did, and she had so many great ideas. She was truly dedicated to bettering our community using her skills and her resources. Nancy saw that everyone had a story, and she wanted to share queer and trans stories with as many people as she could.  I am honored that she filmed and published the piece I read at TransPride 2014. To even say that in the same paragraph feels selfish. 

Everything I experience is colored by the influence that he had on my life. I am frustrated by it now. Everywhere I go, something pops up that reminds me of him. I reached into a pocket of a bag I brought to my parents' house and found a pair of his leather cuffs. Everywhere I go, he is there. I am trying to remind myself that this is not because he still has control over me. It is because we spent four years of our life together. We built a history, and then we separated a household. Things shuffle and get lost and found in that process. 

Anyway, I don't want to become a person who takes death and makes it all about myself. There are others who were much closer to Nancy who are grieving harder than I am, and my role is to feel my own feelings while supporting those people in any way that I can. How do I make myself available to those people? Where are they? What can I do? Who can I feed?