It may sound cliché, but I have always been drawn to Paris. Just like Carrie Bradshaw, Emily Cooper, and Jo Stockton all are—I knew being there would change me. So when I got an acceptance email from a study abroad program for a spring semester, I knew I was going. What I didn t know was that my entire life was about to change.
The email arrived in my inbox a week before my 22-year-old big sister, Ivy, died by suicide. She was a strikingly beautiful, shockingly brave, effortlessly cool, truly brilliant young woman. Ivy was everything I wanted to be and everything I never authentically could be. Her confidence and intelligence were truly spellbinding; people either loved her or hated her (and one of her greatest superpowers was that she didn’t care which). In the wake of losing her, I could not sleep, eat, speak, or at times even move. I had not only lost the most important person in my life, but somehow, I had also lost myself. Suddenly, I was no longer a little sister; therefore, it felt like I was no longer a person. I was just a body, a barely beating heart, paralyzed by grief.
About a month after Ivy’s death, a follow-up email from the study abroad advisor popped into my inbox. I could barely pull back the covers in the morning, so how could I possibly move to Paris? Everyone, from my family to my therapist and the psychologists whose articles I read online, repeated the golden rule of grief: Don’t make any big changes in the first year of a sudden loss. Be stable. Take it day by day. Don’t put yourself in challenging situations—you might not make it if you do. I deleted the email notification from my home screen and sank back into my state of half-sleep.
Eventually, I found myself able to get out of bed, motivated to find somewhere to cry besides my bedroom, which did not have a real door. I wandered through DC s Rose Park, up the hill, past the playground, to the Female Union Band Society Cemeteries, to a silent, sad, leafy area that I loved because I could be alone. The air was so crisp and unfriendly that it felt like it was back home in Iowa, where we grew up. Through blurry eyes and a haze that only life-altering grief can bring upon someone, I made a decision: I was going to Paris. My life would never be the same, so I might as well make it as different as possible.
Less than three months after Ivy’s death, on a freezing January day, I moved across the world into a lunchbox-sized apartment with a sweet stranger in Paris. The city was a place neither Ivy nor I had ever been. On each of the flights, from Des Moines, Iowa, to Chicago, to Paris, I kept thinking about how much Ivy would have hated the version of Paris I dreamt of: she didn’t gawk over fashion or art museums, and much preferred mountains and beaches over bustling cities. But I also thought about how proud of me she would be. Ivy was so brave in such a standout way that I always suspected she thought I was a coward. And in comparison to her, I was. But not at this moment, I was doing a brave thing. I was doing a very Ivy thing.
A few weeks into the program, my creative writing teacher assigned us to walk 10 minutes in any direction from the classroom and write about what we saw. I made it to the Seine, where black coats, black boots, black scarves were all the eye could see. Gold chains on purses. A Shetland Sheepdog with a coat of marshmallow, nutmeg, and cinnamon fur, like the one we had as children. The gray Seine sparkled, almost sadly, as if it knew Ivy would never get to see it. My cheeks were turning grenadine red in my phone screen’s reflection from the cold, like hers always did.
I thought back to my professor’s question. What did I see? Even in Paris, a place unfamiliar to Ivy and me both, one thing was certain: Her absence made me see differently. It made it so she was all I could see.
After that day, Ivy was Paris and Paris was Ivy. From François Pompon’s statue of her favorite animal, a polar bear, at the Musée D’Orsay, to every all black outfit, overtly carnivorous French meal, and blonde woman sitting at a café having a glass of wine at what most Americans would consider an inappropriate hour, there she was. My sister. I started to believe she might like this magical city, maybe even love it, after all.
After some time, I began to find myself doing things that felt impossible in the immediate wake of her death: I tried new foods I had previously sworn off. I laughed at things she would’ve found funny. I sang karaoke. I packed friends into my apartment and made omelets for them all as they topped off each other’s mugs of 99-cent Champagne. I started listening to music again. I made new friends who thought I was brave.
Slowly but surely, Paris jolted me back to life. Instead of waking up every day in denial as I would have at home, this drastic change forced me to accept the person I was terrified to become: a ruthlessly vulnerable, adventurous, and independent one.
While of course every person’s grief is different, I know that if I listened to that golden rule, I would have seen more of the same never-ending misery I was cycling through when I left, and that that was all I would ever experience. By moving across the world to a city I had never been to, I was forced to do what grieving ultimately is: grappling with a new reality.
Abroad, my heart broke daily knowing my sister would never get to have these various, wonderful experiences that I did then, but now, nearly four years since her death, I realize I have never felt more strongly connected to her than I did during those six months. I was living not just for me, but for us.
My friends from Paris—and life after—have never known me as a little sister, but at least they do know me. I have never been more grateful to Ivy for shaping a version of me who wanted to show her I was brave enough to go.
To go on living, and to go to Paris.
At home, it felt like everything was there to remind me that my sister was dead. But in Paris, it felt like everything was there to remind me that she was once alive.