Eat Pray Herman

Writing has always helped me to process things.  I’m not exactly sure why.  

What’s even funnier is that formatting documents relaxes me.  I sit in my office at the university creating lessons almost every single day, and when I get stuck on an idea or I can’t think of something, I make a big document and just start formatting it.  

The first time I ran into an issue at work with my lesson and I opened a document and just started formatting, I thought — this is exactly how it was in 2000 when I worked for Herman, with us sitting in that little office on Lee Highway in Northern Virginia.  I’m there, working on deadline, ordering food with my coworkers from the Lost Dog cafe.  

It’s 23 years later and I’m teaching at the university and I’m still there in my mind, in that little room with Herman and my coworkers.  By no means was that an easy time in my life.  I was 23, just freshly having been dumped by the guy I thought I would be building a relationship with, feeling like life was over, when I worked there.  I was happy at work but unhappy otherwise, not fitting in anywhere, least of all with all those Oxford shirts at the Hawk and Dove.  The Hawk and Dove.  Feels about a million miles away, distant and remote as the moon.  

A couple of days after Herman passed away, I was sitting in my office trying to solve one of my myriad problems for the day and I opened up a document and just started formatting it, like I usually do.  I always figure that whatever problem I have, I’ll just open a document to solve part of it and suddenly I come up with a solution.  The thing that time though was I finally figured out why I did that.  It was what I did when I worked for Herman.  In my mind I’m still back in that office and somehow this was a safe place for me.

Grief though.  Grief is weird.  I don’t know if there’s a better way of describing it.  Grief is just weird.  You are ok for a while and then it just grabs you again, when you least except it to. In these months after Herman’s passing, I have had to deal with it in a way that I hadn’t had to previously.

I don’t even want to remember the day I found out when Herman passed away.  It is just randomly somewhere in March, but otherwise I don’t want to remember anything about it.  When I found out, I went to my parents house for a week.  I remember the first night I was just sobbing.  Sobbing.  I told my parents that I would go downstairs (where my sleep area is) and I might not come back for a couple of hours and they just need to let me do that.  My parents gave me the space I needed and I am so grateful to them for that.  

But then something funny happened the second night at was at my parents.  A friend of Herman’s who I also knew quite well messaged me on Facebook to ask if I had heard and yeah, of course I had heard.  She called me and expected to have a ten minute conversation with her.  We ended up on the phone for two or three hours.  I didn’t keep track.  

Over the course of this conversation, we told every Herman story imaginable.  His plays being produced by Edward Albee.  The fact that he may or may not have a child in Norway.  He was a background extra in a Keanu Reeves movie. Tales of his ex-girlfriends who have nicknames that cannot be mentioned on this blog.  “Did he take you to Gatorland?”  Of course I went to Gatorland with Herman.  I mean who doesn’t want to spent the day in a place that is the temperature of your average sauna or Bikram yoga studio that is built for lazy, scaly small brained potential killing machines?  This friend mentioned that the Gatorland trips were his test.  A test?  Alligators are awesome.  Who wouldn’t want to hang out with them for a day and watch them eat entire supermarket chickens in one go??  

During the course of the conversation, we realized what a profound character we had been friends with.  He was alive again between us for that moment.  We had gone from being in utter, unending, inescapable grief to laughing about the guy.  

The next day I got a message from another woman.  The message was telling.  We’ve never met but I feel like I know you.  He had mentioned this woman many times and I felt the exact same way.  I had never met her but I felt like I knew her.  The next night I had the same conversation.  She had known him since college, so even longer than we had known each other.  She told me the full versions of some famous Herman stories that I had just gotten the summary, years later version.  And we laughed our asses off, of course.  I started feeling better.  The grief was still something unbelievable and just inescapable but now it was becoming somewhat easier to deal with.

A couple of weeks later, they held a memorial service in Virginia Beach for Herman.  I made my mom go with me.  My mother knew Herman and loved him a lot as well.  It was really important to me that she be there.

I did not want to get on that plane.  I did not want to be there.  We stayed in a hotel that smelled weird.  I was upset.  A portrait of a giant televangelist greeted us in the airport.  Bode well this did not.

But something happened at the memorial service that I had not anticipated.  It was almost remarkable.  I met the other women he shared his life with.  I knew some of them but I met others who I had only heard about before.  

Oddly, the memorial wasn’t sad.  Everyone was hugging and exclaiming — OMG!!!  I heard about you!!!!  Even before the memorial started, the other women in Herman’s life were heard to exclaim — OMG!!!!  That’s her???  I’ve been hearing about that forever.  My mother didn’t really know what hit her watching all of this.

What struck me as well was that I had this whole life with Herman.  We had been to Virginia Beach together and I had met his family there many times.  We had friends in common, this whole life that we shared.

The memorial started out a bit sad but as it went on, it was just hours of sustained laughter.  I mean it NEVER stopped.  Herman always told the story about his ex-girlfriend who he suddenly drove back to her house after her father had had a heart attack.  Herman always said — she went to College of Notre Dame of Maryland.  He always said that she had gone to “CONDOM college.”  So when I saw her and said — OMG, you are the one who went to “condom college.”  We were ALL laughing.  

Soon enough the speeches started.  Soon enough we realized that we all had the same stories.  We were yelling out parts of the stories and laughing at the wrong places when everyone started talking.  We also realized that it was all women reminiscing about him.  By the end of the night, we had a group photo.  And we were so happy.  

When the memorial happened, a group of us formed a messaging chain to just get information out about what was going on logistics wise when we were in Virginia Beach.  After it was all over, I suggested we keep the messaging thread going.  

Along the way, one of my friends came up with a really great nickname for us.  She started calling us “the sister wives.”  It stuck.  We were Herman’s sister wives.  Solidified in this way.

Our messaging channel is still going strong, six months after Herman passed. Recently I found out that Herman had shared the secret of the best halo halo (Filipino dessert) with another one of the sister wives. She had halo halo with him at an authentic Filipino place and that halo halo had 17 layers by her telling. I had been begging Herman for the secret codes to the halo halo for years and all I got was some supermarket halo halo that gave me an idea of what halo halo could be, kind of a Cliff’s notes of halo halo. Turns out he had shared the codes with another sister wife.

I told my church community that I would leaning on them more than ever after this happened.  The pastor said two things to me that really comforted me.  First, he said that grief fills us but we eventually grow bigger than the grief.  The second thing they said to me was that I might have lost Herman but I had gained four other friends.  I knew it would take time before these statements had any meaning to me.  I learned this from a lot of the things I hear in church have meaning over a longer stretch of time, not immediately in the moment.  And this stuff was comforting. I feel like that I am growing bigger than the grief and I am starting to see the things that are growing out of losing Herman.

The months since Herman passed haven’t been easy.  So many times, even now, I wish I could just talk to him again.  He was always able to give me advice in a way that no one else was ever able to, especially when it came to work stuff.  I ride a bus down Commonwealth Avenue every day when I leave work and I sat on that bus so many times and I thought — I am ok.  Herman is gone but I am ok.

Somewhere in there I thought — what about doing a trip this year?  In 2021, Herman and I took this hilarious roadtrip through the south.  Last year I went to Washington and Florida in late August.  The idea of this trip continued to percolate in my head.  Where could I go?  What could I see?

In August too, work got rough.  It was a rough summer.  Summer in Boston has always been just a magical time here, with sunsets, new experiences and things that seemed unbelievable as they happened.  This summer though was just work.  It was the first non-magical summer here.  I’m a positive person, sort of feeling full and happy most of the time but it was a rough summer.  

At the end of the summer, work got kinda rough.  Not super rough but things got rough.  The thing was that usually I would have called Herman to talk about it and get his advice but I couldn’t do that.  And it was really really hard realizing this.  

Throughout the summer, when things got hard, I would work on my summer trip schedule.  I revised the trip schedule many times.  Initially I was thinking of visiting my sister wives but logistically it wasn’t going to work out just then.  Did I mention the salting away of the savings?  Yeah.  Very little summer fun but that doesn’t really matter.  I hang out in my neighborhood most of the time and cook at home.  My life is super boring now and I could not be happier.

Throughout the time when I was scheduling the trip, I kept thinking — this is my Eat Pray Love, a book I hadn’t read that was transformed into a movie that I didn’t much like.  But I saw the parodies of it on my beloved Rich White Lady instagram page.  I love you Nicolas Flannery!!  He’s continually parodying the suddenly single woman who goes out and looks for meaning by traveling, eating and maybe praying.  Except I’m not suddenly single.  I lost my best friend.  So I decided to name the trip “Eat Pray Herman.”

Eat Pray Herman went through multiple revisions before I decided on the final itinerary.  Every stop had meaning for Herman in one way or another.  I chose New York to start because Herman grew up nearby and I had gone down a major YouTube rabbit hole of all of these places in New York that I wanted to visit.  Really un-New York places, places that look more like Europe than New York.  Relics of New York’s Colonial past.  Some deep history stuff.  Herman would have loved that.  Oh and for the eating part, pastrami at Katz’s Deli, which Herman also would have loved.

The next destination was really not on the original plan and there’s a short story about it.  In 2007, right when the “Iceland is cool” thing started, I spent an hour at Keflavik International Airport in transit to somewhere else and decided I loved Iceland.  One hour in the airport.  That’s all it took.  I forever regretted not exploring Iceland.  Around that time, I met this older doctor from Iceland and he said — in Iceland, we charge the least amount of money possible to get to our country and then we take all of your money.  More prophetic words have never been spoken.

Fast forward to last year and I was having a conversation with the pastor at my church and out of nowhere he says — we have a relationship with a church in Iceland.  I nearly fell out of my chair.  Iceland was the one country I had always wanted to visit, always wanted to explore again.  The pastor next said that in a year or so they were planning on sending some church members over there.  I thought — when this happens, you are absolutely going. Suddenly, and I have to believe that this might have involved the hand of God, a trip to Iceland had just popped up.

Even more interesting is the fact that Herman actually visited Iceland in 2002 and loved the place. I took a picture along of Herman to photograph in different places in Iceland, to have him there with me.

The next destination was Washington DC, about which I have done a wholesale reconsideration after thinking I kinda hated it there when I lived there.  I’ve realized recently that I have a lot of happy memories from the place. Obviously also this is where I met Herman as well.

My final destination was to be Orlando, Florida, home of my weird best friend and his gigantic Venezuelan family.  I first visited Orlando in 2008 with Herman on our first road trip, where I was introduced to Gatorland, the Waffle House and souvenir stores that look like space ships and wizards.  Oh and South of the Border in Collins, South Carolina.  Did I mention the Peachoid???? How could I have forgotten that. Herman’s father and a lot of his family members live in Florida, so it was a natural destination for that reason too.

Like I said, it was a rough summer and by the middle of August when work winds down, I felt empty.  All I kept thinking was that the trip was going to maybe make me feel whole again.  I mean you aren’t supposed to use travel to solve your problems.  I mean that’s what I had always thought.  

I guess I wasn’t really going to use the trip to solve my problems.  What I wanted to do was get some space, some time to think and to reconsider a lot of things.  I also wanted to trod the soil of new places I have never been before, see sights I had not seen before and move and feel things I had never felt before.  Eat Pray Herman did accomplish that for me.

There will be four separate entries about this trip because what I experienced and saw on the trip.  For now, here are what I think are the four best photos from what I saw on the trip.  MUCH more to come.

The introduction to Eat Pray Herman: