There is only before and after he died
Losing Kaleb
One year ago this week we lost the great writer Kaleb Horton. I am still very sorry that I won't ever get to read anything new by him ever again.
I wrote about his passing here:
Luke O’Neil
"In an earlier time he would have been the kind of writer being paid $5 a word by magazines to go write about whatever he pleased. And no one would be pissed off or jealous about it either. All of the rest of us scrabbling for that kind of gig just nodding in approval. That makes sense. He has that coming."
Today his partner Katherine Hudson joins us to write about her experience of loss and grief over the past year.
This will be sent out in the next edition of the newsletter. Please also treat yourself to this collection of his work his family have put together as well.
Losing Kaleb
by Katharine Hudson
Grief is my mother. She bore me that night in reverse, a new person bursting from the news like Athena plucked from Zeus’s head. The gestation came later. That night the phone call so radically changed me that I could not help becoming a different person. There is only before Kaleb died and after.
He was a Bakersfield native and damn proud of it. He couldn’t stand Redding, where his family moved before he started high school. He was a writer. He was immensely talented and not recognized nearly enough for it during his lifetime. Born in 1988, he was the oldest of four. All boys. The baby came when he was seventeen, and Kaleb doted on him so much that strangers assumed he was a teen dad.
Kaleb loved Mark Twain and Charles Portis, X and Billy Joe Shaver, David Letterman and Norm Macdonald, Harry Dean Stanton and David Lynch. Kaleb loved me. And I love him still.
I thought suddenly losing Townes, my orange tabby, to a swift and aggressive cancer in April 2025 would be the worst thing to happen to me in a long time. The universe is cruel like that.
Kaleb died suddenly of dilated cardiomyopathy. The seizure disorder he developed after being prescribed bupropion had been killing him slowly, as each tonic-clonic seizure drowned his heart little by little. He was on anti-seizure medication and had an MRI scheduled. We had no idea how seriously they were harming him. He had at least three the day he died.
The shock of the news was a birth and also a baptism. The physical prickling in every cell of my body made me feel like I had been dropped into the ocean. A fever roiled throughout me, moving from my head down through my legs and back up again. The physical sensations came fast, and my brain took longer to catch up.
We know now that for years pop culture has misunderstood the five stages of grief. I’ve seen dozens of Instagram graphics showing dotted lines wandering between the stages and looping back around in confusing paths, to show that grief isn’t linear like these stages imply. This correction is still not accurate. The five stages aren’t for those who have lost someone. They are the stages experienced by a person being told they’re dying. But haven’t we, the bereaved, died with them?
The next morning I laid in his unmade bed hugging his pillow. I handed his Bible to his mother and she and her husband took me home with them. They wouldn’t let me see him. It wasn’t a cruel refusal, it was a kindness. My mother agreed with them, telling me she doesn’t want me to see him like that, the way she saw her dad after he died. I listened. I both regret it and don’t.
His ashes, a small portion of them, are on my shelf. The rest are with his parents. The big urn we will bury in a plot next to his grandparents, and a small one each for me, and his mom and dad, Bill and Debbi. Each urn sits on its own altar, full of pictures and knick-knacks. I have a small Elvis-branded pocketknife from his grandfather and a John Prine bandana he treasured. I’ve added a crucifix and a brass sacred heart to my arrangement. Kaleb didn’t like Catholicism, but he understands why I need them there.
No one ever asks how grief feels. They either know, think they know, or desperately do not want to know. I’m going to tell you what it feels like.
My grief is a birth and a baptism but it is also a mountain. I struggle with explaining it in plain language. I can’t get across how deep and wide and consuming it is without these metaphors. Kaleb said to me, “I love you so much I don’t have the words for it.” Imagine that! A writer of generational talent, a wordsmith, a real live authentic storyteller, struggling to put it into words. I love him so much and I hurt so much that I don’t have the words either.
When I was born, ripped out of my old reality and slammed into my new life, I balanced on a peak as sharp and narrow as a sword. I can’t throw myself off. That’s not an option, if only because he would be furious. “You IDIOT. What did you do? You know you can’t commit suicide! That’s a SIN. A really big SIN. Don’t you know that?” he’d say.
There are no trails. I must pick my way down blind. Each step is a guess. I desperately want to hear his voice, to receive a sign, to know I’m going the right way.
There is no one here with me. I can talk to people on radios. They keep asking what I need. I don’t know? They keep telling me that they’ll check in. The radio has been silent for months. It feels hard to breathe. My tears sting my eyes and my keening scares the birds.
It feels like throwing yourself off is a really good option. No, it’s not. It’s not an option. I’ve paid too much money for a good psychiatrist, several anti-depressants, Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation, individual therapy, a grief support group, and an Intensive Outpatient Program of group therapy, for it to be an option.
I can see some other people on other peaks, on their own grief mountains. I watch them through binoculars and wave. Everyone else is down in the valley. They think we’re all supposed to get back to them, to rejoin society and act like we didn’t just go through all of that. Instead I make camp in Gethsemane. My agony is between me and God and we rehash it every night.
The curriculum in my grief support group is emphatic: anger is normal and allowed. Especially anger at God. Job is peerless. The rest of us mortals, we all feel the anger, the unfairness, the jealousy. We question what we did to deserve this, knowing our person certainly didn’t. I’m jealous of people who “only” lost a sibling or a parent, a nasty, unkind thought. The tears are romantic; the anger is ugly and shameful. But it is there, and normal, and even encouraged a little bit. Feeling angry feels a lot better than feeling sad, if I’m honest.
Grief feels freezing cold but also as if you do not want to make a fire. It feels like being burned and parched yet unable to drink from the stream. It feels so lonely. It is the worst anguish you can imagine. And that’s the problem, you can’t imagine. Until you suffer a tremendous loss, you cannot imagine. (As soon as I realized, I felt so guilty for all the poor support I had once offered to friends and family in the past, not having a clue.)
It feels like Magical Thinking. Joan Didion’s experience seems common. Maybe if I perform the rituals enough times, he will come back. Maybe I can invent time travel, or shift to a parallel universe.
It feels like bottomless dark sorrow and raging anger and complete numbness all at once. It literally, physically, hurts.
My company told me to return after a week, even when I said I didn’t know when I could come back. I thought it would be healthy to have something to occupy my mind. Turns out I can’t force something else in to displace the grief. I know some people can, even in early grief.
Not me. I had to go on leave and go to full-time group therapy. The care team wrote “crying spells” at the top of my intake paperwork.
Kaleb was a devout Christian, and we often discussed how we would overcome our difference in faith. I told him I was open to attending church with him. We prefer the same style of liturgy, and there’s no chance he’d end up a member a conservative megachurch. On occasion he would go to Sunday services at new churches with his retired neighbor, and after I’d ask how big the screens were or if there was a smoke machine, and we’d die laughing. He would always note if there were donuts.
I was agnostic, accidentally raised that way. After his death I felt an urgent need to understand his faith. I thought I would have had decades with him to ask at my leisure. So I started reading, learning, and praying to understand. While in my intensive group therapy program, I started attending the grief support program hosted at my nearby parish, and began to spend a lot of time in prayer.
One of my uncles, the only open atheist in the family, described belief to me like a switch. You either believed or you didn’t. I simply never had. In my grief, I started poking at the switch while praying the rosary. After a few months, it became clear my previous comprehension was infinitesimally too small. One night in December last year, the understanding came suddenly to me. I saw how subatomic substances in the universe that we don’t understand or even know about wove together in radiant light. Samsara is an equation and the dance our atoms make expressing it.
Biblical scholar Pete Enns had this to say about the Book of Lamentations:
“[Lamentations] reminds us that sorrow, confusion, protest, and even anger have a place within the life of faith. The question is not whether we will suffer. The question is whether we will have the language to bring that suffering before God when it comes.” My suffering arrived, so I needed to go to God with it.
I’m making a conscious choice to believe and participate. I guess it makes a lot more sense to stop believing in any kind of higher power after a tragedy. At least, I don’t think it’s common to come to it. But I come to Our Lady of Sorrows like a little child, needing a new and invisible substance to form my life around. It will fall apart otherwise.
I’ve chosen to join my mom’s family and complete my sacraments in the Catholic Church. I’ll be baptised in this other way and consecrated at Easter Vigil, but I’m already born again. My mom, even though she didn’t take me to church as a child, is happy. That’s why Kaleb understands; I can never agree with him on Calvinism, and this is my family’s culture.
I worry my friends will think I’m abandoning my leftist principles, abandoning them. I promise I’m not. I worry they will think I’m changing and becoming a different person, then remember that I am a different person.
People pray I will come down from my mountain. They don’t pray the way he prayed for me. I’ll never hear him say, “God guard ye and protect ye,” as I drift off to sleep ever again. I don’t want to come down; I want to stay up here veiled in the clouds. If I stay up here, maybe I can keep him close.
Katharine Hudson lives in Texas with her cats. To read Kaleb Horton’s writing visit kalebchorton.com