Sam I Am

Sam and me in 2018

This Substack is meant to explore housing, houselessness, public safety, and the social contract, but this week I have to write about Sam. If you’ve not been following the news, and don’t know what happened to her, I will tell you like I was told. I received a text from our friend Zak last Saturday around noon saying: Devin call me immediately—written just like that, with no punctuation. I knew it was bad, and somehow I knew it was about Sam, but the only thought I had time to think was that maybe she was in Israel and something had happened there? When Zak answered the phone, he said, I’m so sorry, I’m going to tell you the worst thing you’ve ever heard. Is Sam all right? I asked, and he said, no, she’s not all right. Sam was murdered last night. 

I can’t remember anything else. Part of it was that my two-year-old was screaming to my husband downstairs and it was genuinely hard to hear, but the other part is that as soon as I heard the word “murdered” I went into a fog from which I have yet to fully emerge. Somehow I thought it would be a good idea to go to the Container Store that afternoon just to keep busy (or something?), so I went and left with two huge boxes and 11 drawer organizers, most of which were the wrong size and I still need to return. On Monday, I read that someone named Benjamin was hosting Kaddish for all of Sam’s friends in Portland and so I messaged him for his address and then prepared myself all day to go to Benjamin of Tudela’s house, the medieval Jewish traveler who was the subject of Sam’s thesis. When we got there, I introduced my friend Ariel as Sam. This morning I wanted to see if it was going to rain in Portland and googled “weather Detroit.” 

I mention this as a way to state what’s probably obvious—I barely know where I am right now, much less what happened to Sam, or how any of us are ever going to get through it. I’m not in a position to offer any kind of clarity or wisdom, but I’m writing this anyway, because I’ve found some comfort this week, amid a sea of grief, in things other friends have written about Sam and if there is even a smidgeon of a chance that I can do the same for someone else, and add to the written record of her in any way, I will.

I met Sam at freshman orientation. She was walking down the hallway of our dorm carrying a fan and so many bags they were falling through her hands, and she had wild black curls that were spilling out on top of the bandana in her hair. In my mind, she was wearing baggy corduroys and a Phish t-shirt, but it may have been that she’d just gotten back from going to a bunch of Phish shows, all over the Midwest, which to me sounded very exotic. I really can say it was love at first sight. 

She seemed to me, at the time, to be so free, and because I was 18 and still under the impression that this was the goal of growing up—to escape your upbringing and suburb and all the pressures and rules associated with them—I wanted to be friends with her immediately. I can see now I was right to want to be friends, but wrong about being free: yes, Sam rebelled, like most teenagers, against her parents and their politics, pushing boundaries wherever she could, which is probably why this first image of her, bursting at the seams, has stayed with me so vividly. But in the ways that really mattered, Sam was not free at all, but deeply tethered to the people and place she was born into and very much aware of the responsibility that came with this. As long as I knew her, she wasn’t trying to escape her history or family or religious tradition, but bring them with her, even as she confronted things that may have given her reason to have critiques. I can’t tell you how fortunate this turned out to be for me. I was rapidly detaching from my own world and very much at risk of getting very lost, but before this could happen, Sam enthusiastically invited me into her world, and for a few glorious years, I got to live there with her. 

In the beginning, as it was at the end, the center of Sam’s world was Judaism. I knew nothing and Sam wanted to tell me everything. And she did—she taught me all the blessings and what to say on holidays and why exactly some of her friends ripped toilet paper every week in preparation for the Sabbath. On Friday nights, we went to Hillel, which Sam liked for community reasons as well as dietary ones—she was allergic to dairy and the cake there was always dairy-free (no mixing of meat and milk, I learned)—and on Passover, to her parents’ epic seders in their basement where there was a separate Kosher kitchen. In our last year at U of M, we lived together in a little apartment on the third floor of an old house we called the Hobbit Hole and sometimes hosted Shabbat ourselves and when we did, she was always very sweet about letting me make beets and read the beautiful passage on them from Jitterbug Perfume in lieu of a blessing from my own religious upbringing, which I had moved away from, just so I could contribute something of my own spiritual understanding even if I didn’t totally know what that was yet. I learned how to bake challah and knit kippahs (I had a Jewish boyfriend by then) and I remember walking through campus one day and getting asked by a guy in a Sukkah, holding out a branch, excuse me, are you Jewish? and I thought, basically. I got so many questions about this—what was I doing spending my Friday nights in college at Hillel and learning the Kiddush if I wasn’t Jewish? And the answer is that because I loved Sam (and ritual and community and candles), I loved Judaism too.

Sam was an interesting paradox of a person in that she always seemed to be organizing forums for the Muslim organizations on campus to have dialogue with the Jewish ones and trying to negotiate peace in Michigan, if not the Middle East, while at the same time working very hard on the tasks her therapist assigned her, like making her bed in the morning. She (we) tried our best. We had a worm compost. We worked on an organic farm. We were in SOLE, or at least we spent a lot of time in the guys’ room down the hall who were in SOLE talking about No Logo and Crimethinc and we tried to be careful about where we bought our t-shirts. We tried so hard with these big things, even as we struggled with the little ones. It was not easy for Sam (or for me) to turn in papers on time, arrive places on time, commit to a career path, be fully employed etc. When I visited her last year, I remember looking at her bookshelves and laughing that we had all the same mental health books and had even underlined all the same things in these books—although, in the same visit, I saw real food in her fridge (in college, she’d mostly subsisted on soy yogurt and tofurkey), and heard her talk about how she’d taken up jogging for her mental health and listened to her stories about working on political campaigns, which she said was exhausting, but also that she liked it and was good at it. I was so happy for her.

It’s true that I haven’t experienced a lot of loss in my life, so I don’t really know, but I imagine the grief process is sad and hard no matter how someone dies when you love them. But the specific problem when a crime is involved, at least for me, is how quickly even the sweetest of memories begin to give way to other memories which a week ago seemed innocuous enough, but now maybe, possibly could be relevant in a murder case—so that one minute I’m thinking of us in front of her bookshelves, laughing, comparing notes on the CBT classic Feeling Good, and the next, I’m remembering that her bookshelves are near the couch and the couch, according to the police, is where the attack began. Who was this person and why did they kill Sam? Was it because she was Jewish or was it because she was a woman who lived alone? What would the headlines have said if it’s the latter, or more likely, would there be any headlines at all. 

Since Saturday, I’ve dreamt of Sam every night and thought about her pretty much every minute of every day. I remember her a line at a time. She’s in her dorm room freshman year, getting ready to see her high school boyfriend for the first time since they broke up, finding her confidence, telling me there’s so much he doesn’t know about her—that she only wears skirts now. She’s in that same room, typing in the lyrics of We Didn’t Start the Fire as her away message on I.M. She’s in the Hobbit Hole, telling me she went to Shabbat for the first time with her new boyfriend and when someone suggested they all take a moment to listen to this new boyfriend’s mom, a Holocaust survivor, say a few words, he said BOR-ING—and Sam laughs, sort of, as she tells me this, but should she?! She’s in her gingerbread house in Woodbridge years later, deeply in love with Detroit, asking me: where were we??? in college and how did we miss what was happening there. I didn’t know, but fully agreed, and honestly thought about moving there myself. 

I know I’m grasping. I’ve reread the birthday card Sam wrote me in 2005 one hundred times this week. I also reread every email we sent to each other since 2008, and really, truly considered writing the University of Michigan to see if there was any way I could access earlier emails between us when we both had umich addresses. I’m ok today, but on Tuesday, I was so upset I started googling rabbis in Portland, and was getting ready to just walk into a temple, weeping, and ask to be comforted by the same prayers and rituals that had always comforted Sam, and that would remind me of her in the way that all Jewish things do.

What I’ve been grieving the most this week, surprisingly (to me), is not the last ten years when we saw each other only five or six times, but the years I was with Sam every day, but only sort of, or the years I could have spent with Sam, but didn’t. I left Michigan after freshman year, telling myself I’d made great friends there and thus, could make great friends anywhere. But I was wrong—I did not make great friends at the second college and ended up hating it and transferring back. When we lived together senior year, I spent way too much time stuck in my own mental health messes or on Craigslist, planning my life in a dozen different cities I was thinking about moving to when I graduated. And that was my time with her—to hear all the things that had happened in her day, to figure out how to handle the fruit fly infestation, to give each other a hug before we each went to therapy on Wednesdays and then come home and talk about what we’d talked about in therapy all over again—to talk and talk and talk as truly I could listen to Sam talk about anything, because she had something interesting to say about everything. Why do we do this—wait until someone is gone to work out what they mean to us? If Sam were here now, I would tell her I’m sorry for every minute of our time together that I took for granted, that she was the love of my young life, not the guy for whom I was knitting kippahs, and that if I could do it over again, I would take back every second I spent with him and spend them with her instead. I would tell her thank you showing me, long before I even understood, that to be tethered to people and place is part of what it is to belong, that freedom is really abandonment and that it’s possible to grow and change and stay rooted at the same time. I would tell her thank you for sharing her family and faith and community with me when I was lost and so far from my own, and I would tell her, Sam, I love you, and I will miss you so much.