Remembering a friend

❤️ / Issue 1,185

Oh, hi friends!

I have something very sad to share but this newsletter is a constellation of relationships I have with people, and one of those people is no longer with us.

I met Blakeney Schick in my Brooklyn running group back in 2016 and we clocked many miles, many races, many weekday let’s-figure-out-life coffees together. Running is a wild shortcut to lasting friendship.

Last Monday, Blakeney died from complications after going into cardiac arrest.

Blakeney was a podcast producer, yoga teacher, run coach, writer, daughter, friend, marathoner, and much more. 

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been remembering the little things. She sent notes when you were grieving and commiserated on rainy days. She’d stop during a group run, not to catch her breath, but to snap a photo of the sunrise. She celebrated birthdays, her own and everyone else’s, with a full heart and excitement for the year ahead. 

If she got a running injury, she’d crack open her anatomy books to figure it out and jump on a bike to cross train. She reinvented her career multiple times over. She wanted to visit Japan, so she visited Japan.

She showed up — for her friends, her family, herself. 

Blakeney never quit.

Many people will miss her, and if you didn’t get the chance to know her, I’m saying: wish that you did. 

I know Blake read this newsletter because she often sent me encouraging notes. A few years ago, she also sent along this quote from Frank Rich’s memoir Ghost Light, because she thought I’d appreciate his description of going to theater as a young boy.

She wrote, “To me, it perfectly captures that feeling I get when I'm watching something really good. It's also what makes theater so special.”

Of course, she was right. I included it in a newsletter back then, and share it now with a sharper understanding that just like theater, life can feel impossibly beautiful and incredibly short.

Here it is.

“Then, just when the suspense became overwhelming, the whole audience holding its breath, the curtain did rise, ascending heavenward so fast (where did it go?) and revealing such an explosive cacophony of light and costumes and people singing and dancing that it was more than I could absorb. The whole whirligig of sights and sounds and bodies rushing forward seemed to be aimed directly at me. And there was no letup. Each moment that followed passed too quickly, each shock of delight slid instantaneously, cruelly into memory — a pileup of double-edged sensation in which exhilaration turned instantly into a kind of sorrow. 

If only there was a way to hold each moment, to freeze it in time and put it in my pocket and preserve it forever, before it was hopelessly lost!”

If only.

Show up for yourself or run a little longer or dig a little deeper today, if you can. 

Blakeney would love that for you.