23

I celebrated my 23rd birthday with no one. Make no mistake, I received many ‘Happy Birthday’ calls and texts from loving friends and extended family members, but I didn’t spend any of that day actually with anyone. I sat and watched YouTube videos in my parents’ old house in Colorado Springs, leaving only to go to Chipotle.

My life has been a spectacular anomaly ever since I was in my early 20s. I think I’d had actually quite a normal life up until that point, really. I’d graduated high school, gone to college, gotten a job in a town that I didn’t grow up in. It was a fairly standard American story.

So why was I spending my 23rd birthday alone? For one thing, like I myself had done, all of my friends from high school had moved away. Some were in Denver, others were in California, and one was even in Japan. I was back in my hometown, and all of my friends were away.

For another, both of my parents were dead.

That’s not an easy thing to say or explain, especially at my age. I had to tell that to a sales representative once. For unimportant reasons, she needed to know where my parents had made a purchase two years prior, and I needed to explain why I couldn’t just ask them. Her response was, “Oh wow, was it a car crash?” I don’t think that’s a bad guess. One death in the family is rare; two is even rarer. It is rarer still for them to both die in a two year period. From a probabilistic standpoint, it makes most sense if they had died in the same event.

They both died separately of cancer, my mom when I was 21, and my dad when I was 22. I have no siblings.

My 23rd birthday was the first one I celebrated without any immediate family. How many people can say that? How many people can say that they are a total island on their family tree? Usually by the time someone has lost their parents, they’ve married or had children. At the very least, they probably have a sibling or two. Most people never find themselves without any immediate family, let alone at the age of 22.

Orphan-adjacent

When my mom was dying, my dad had not yet been diagnosed with cancer. She did, however, see him gorge himself on junk food and soda. He was not taking care of his body, and she knew it. Once, in complete and utter frustration, she yelled at my father, “Do you want him to become an orphan?”

Her saying that left me with a question that I still think about from time to time: Am I an orphan? That word brings to mind images of little Oliver Twist begging for more food, not a young adult with a comfortable lifestyle. I wanted some help to form some kind of understanding of my situation, so of course I turned to Google. This was supremely unhelpful. For a while there, if you were to google the phrase “Orphaned in my 20s,” the top two results were articles titled “Welcome to the Freak Show” and “You will behave weirdly.” I think about that a lot.

So Google did not help me come to grips with my reality. Like, at all.

I then turned to the dictionary. The technical definition of the word “orphan,” according to Oxford, is “a child whose parents are dead.” Looking up the word “child” gives two definitions:

1. A young human being below the age of puberty or below the legal age of majority
2. A son or daughter of any age

This is again incredibly unhelpful for my situation. By these definitions, “orphan” could mean a minor whose parents are deceased, or it could mean someone of any age whose parents are deceased.

So I’ve been left to answer this question myself, and I think that the conclusion I’ve come to, at least with regards to my own situation, is this: I am not an orphan, not really. In my view, for me to have been a true orphan, my parents would have to have died when I was a minor.

Even so, I did still lose them almost immediately after becoming an adult. It felt like beating the tutorial level of a video game only to be faced with the final boss immediately afterwards. What I settled on is that I consider myself orphan-adjacent. I’m not an orphan, just someone who is two steps removed from being one.

Life Alone

Before my dad died, he and I talked a lot about what I would do after his death. The plan was to sell the house, move to Denver, resume my job, and develop my career. All of this was to happen over the course of a month.

In hindsight, it should have been obvious that none of that could possibly have panned out.

To say that I was in a fog after my dad died would be a severe understatement. I recently described it to my therapist as feeling as though I was on train tracks, or that I was a video game character being controlled by someone else. I didn’t really have a strong inclination on why I was doing anything.

I want to be completely clear on what I mean by that. When someone says that they don’t know why they’re doing anything, it bears certain connotations. They often are talking about not seeing the “point” in doing anything. I saw the “point” in everything I was doing, I just truly did not understand what force was driving my feet to carry me through the motions. I felt like I had no true free will. I had no control over what I was doing. I didn’t particularly want to see any of the “points” of a given action fulfilled, and yet I performed those actions anyway.

That feeling is not conducive to making any changes in your life. Of course, that’s when you need more than ever to make changes. The idea that I could have moved back to Denver and resumed my career in just a month was laughable. I was… nothing. I felt nothing. I couldn’t make decisions, even simple ones. I just existed, and that was it.

I remember talking with an aunt and uncle who were driving through town and just visiting for an hour or two. I explained to them that I didn’t see any way I could resume my job, but also that I couldn’t decide if I should quit or not. They told me point blank that it was obvious that I needed to quit. In hindsight, it really was so obvious. I was in no state to be resuming my job. How could I ever have done that? Ultimately, I did quit, but it took another week of deliberation and unwillingness to commit for me to finally send that email.

Making a Damn Decision

The plan to move to Denver was what I had told my dad I was going to do, and it was what I felt like I needed to do. It never actually felt right at all. If anything, it felt safe. It was a minimal change: I would resume my job, I would stay in the same state, and I would carry on with my career as if nothing had happened. I would effectively be stagnating myself. Thankfully, I had a totally different idea sprouting in the back of my head: maybe I could move to Bozeman.

I have a group of cousins who had moved to Bozeman a few years before either of my parents died. I love all of them dearly. Every year, we would go visit them for Thanksgiving when they were still living in Texas. That was always my favorite time of the year very specifically because of them. When I was a kid, I would have given anything to have lived in the same town as them, and as a young adult, it was finally possible.

That plan was what I wanted to do. I just wasn’t sure if it was the plan that I should do. Moving to a whole new state without so much as a job lined up is a massive commitment and a gamble. Of course, because I was incapable of making any decisions, the idea just sat in my head untouched.

Thankfully, there soon came an event that would help get that idea off the ground and give it some momentum: the 2017 eclipse. I have a friend from college whose parents live in Jackson, Wyoming, which happened to lie directly in the eclipse’s path. He invited me and many of our other friends from college to go visit his parents for a few days to see the eclipse. Had he not done that, I would never have gone. It was a wonderful time, and seeing that eclipse is forever seared into my mind.

Since Bozeman is just a few hours away from Jackson, I made the decision (for once) to go see my cousins up there and continue toying with that little idea in the back of my mind. Once the eclipse was over and done, I hit the road and waded through a sea of traffic leaving Jackson to find myself in Bozeman.

The moment I entered the town, I thought, “Oh, I could never move here. It’s too different from home.”

Thankfully, I quickly warmed up to Bozeman during that trip, and by the time I left, I felt invigorated. Of course, it took another visit to Bozeman for me to actually decide to move there. And another. And another. But over the course of that series of trips, I came to realize that I was going to move there.

But wanting to move somewhere and actually committing to a move are two separate things. For months, I sat around in my parents’ house doing nothing. That changed on St. Patrick’s Day, 2018. I was napping when I woke up with a start from a nightmare about my parents. I had been having nightmares like that just about every time I fell asleep. I don’t remember what happened in this particular one, but I know it was especially intense. Crucially, it was enough for me to think, “If I don’t get out of this house, I am going to continue having these nightmares.” Without putting any more thought into it, I picked up my phone and texted a realtor I had connected with a few months prior.

Leaving Colorado

Over the course of the next few weeks, my realtor guided me through the process of selling my house. During that time, I felt more alive than I had over the entire year since my dad had died. I finally felt as though my life was moving forward. Still, I was struggling to know and do what needed to be done, so I pretty much just relied on my realtor to hold my hand throughout the whole process. I didn’t even do most of the packing; we hired a company to do that for us.

To be honest, I don’t remember much about that period. While my mind was clearer, there was still a heavy fog lying on it. I think everything was going too fast for me to be able to even process it. I was in the middle of the biggest move of my life, and I still spent my days playing video games and watching YouTube while all of my possessions were being taken out of my house.

Eventually, of course, the day came when it was time for me to leave. Those wonderful people had packed up all my stuff for me. Most of it was loaded into a moving van, while the essentials went with me in my truck. On a Friday morning in early April, 2018, I finally moved on with my life and left Colorado Springs.