Losing Bailey

tragedy and the long road ahead

Bailey and her older sister Fiona after her graduation from Aspen High School. She died 3 days later.

“Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.” JOAN DIDION

Last month we put our youngest daughter Bailey on a plane to New York to start her first coveted job on Broadway, not knowing that this was our final goodbye. Within hours of landing in the city, a “friend” gave her drugs laced with fentanyl and she died in her sleep. She was only eighteen. It takes ten grains of salt worth of fentanyl to end a person’s life. It takes ten grains of salt worth of fentanyl to cause infinite collateral damage to those who remain. We are now part of that saga, part of a long list of families victimized by fentanyl poisoning. Fentanyl is now the biggest killer of young people in this country. Of course, we had no idea that Bai was stepping onto the very scary path of experimenting with opioids, so we never got the chance to help her. She certainly knew about the dangers but sped past the point of no return. I am too raw, too close to the tragedy, too gutted to write more about this remarkable soul and this horrendous passage. But I will. I need to keep her vibration and her memory alive, and writing through the agony will help keep me sane. In the meantime, you can read more about her here. I am sharing the eulogy I wrote in the sleepless nights that are my new normal. I delivered the eulogy yesterday to four hundred people. This kind of collective love keeps us moving from long moment to long moment and reminds us that we belong to each other.

Also, please share this post. Maybe, just maybe we can get someone to hit the pause button and prevent another death.

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Wow. Just wow. This gathering is a testimony to the strength of all of our communities – near and far. 

I need to start with gratitude. Thank you for showing up, bringing food and flowers –  there are some amazing cooks in this valley —and sending steady, daily messages of love. And to those who donated to Bailey’s fund to combat our fentanyl crisis and raise awareness for LGBTQ challenges – thank you. Bailey’s tragedy belongs to us all. But finally, I need to thank our spectacular daughter Fiona who has sustained and supported us despite her own heartbreak, and her own turmoil. I know what it means to lose a sister and watching your courage inspires us every day. As for Daniel —  I am grateful, so grateful,  that I get to be married to you.

When a tragedy of this magnitude occurs people reach out and say “There are no words.” Which is true. How do you respond to this kind of senseless loss that ricochets through your cells and doesn’t let up?  But there are words. There are. Words help us show up, words help us process the unfathomable, and words - words were -Bailey’s gift. One of the many. Words are what we need. So here are words about Bailey:

• She took our family’s love for the theater and found her calling. She planned to pursue theater stage management for a gap year or two before applying to NYU. 

• She didn’t adore vegetables.

• She was transgender and determined to show that LGBTQ causes are not niche concerns but humanitarian ones.

• Neil Gaiman was her favorite author.

• She was wicked funny, remembered the good and corny jokes, in equal measure, and kept a list of outrageous band names on her phone like “apathetic nuns” and never failed with a comeback. She understood the absurd and filled our house with hilarity.

• She had more courage than anyone I know.

• She was a professional magician accepted into the very competitive Magic Castle's junior program and was on her way to becoming an adult member of this storied institution in LA. 

• She studied Marxism but had strong capitalist proclivities. She sure loved to shop and appreciated a five-star hotel.

• She was loyal and devoted to her friends and adored her boyfriend Ash.

• She was secretive.

• She sang the body electric.

• She loved to travel

  

  Bailey and Fi in Venice’s St. Mark Square in a more innocent time

• Bai was brilliant. She had a genius IQ on paper and off. 

• She struggled with depression and anxiety. 

• She could do the Rubik’s cube in 10 seconds and was an origami master.

• Before she went to boarding school she was my constant lecture companion and never failed to open up a new way of analyzing anything we learned.

• She made an impression and had an unforgettable presence.

• She had a breathtaking facility for language thanks to an almost perfect auditory memory – which was very vexing once she became a teenager. Here’s an example —three years ago we traveled to Kenya for an eco-safari. Like the rest of us, she was captivated by the vistas and the wildlife but really wanted to connect with  Kenyans. So each day she sat with the driver, kept company with the guides at meals, and they taught her Swahili. At night when there was WIFI she would study Swahili on Duolingo. And then start over the next day conversing with every Kenyan we met. She fielded marriage offers and goat dowries along the way but more importantly, she broke through that inevitable barrier between tourist and local, between black and white, between privileged and non-privileged, by taking the time to see and understand Kenyans in their own language. Her favorite phrase was Poa kichizi kama ndizi which means “cool like a banana.”

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Bai performing a magic trick for Robert, one of our guides She always traveled with a deck of cards.

I have been thinking about what message Bailey would want me to share. And it’s this: Bailey felt her otherness keenly and had great compassion for anyone who felt they didn’t belong. She was trans and neurodivergent and by middle school started to be excluded.  She subsequently developed an armor that she shouldn’t have had to. And she used her prodigious intelligence as part of that armor. Bailey taught me how easily I walk in this world and how much I take for granted. This isn’t some “woke” notion it’s simply the truth. She gave me and many others the gift of a much bigger lens on the world. She helped me transcend a lingering attachment to appearances, to the status quo and to better embrace what I don’t understand. It’s easy to veer away from people and situations that baffle and unsettle us – I have certainly been guilty of this. She showed me how to be a better human, and how to invite more grace into my life.

Bailey wanted us to step out of our comfort zones, expand our tight social circles, and stop othering and dismissing people based on their gender, their sexuality, their appearance, their ethnicity, their faith, their Google presence or lack thereof, their net worth or lack thereof, and our assumptions of who other people are. We need to stop being afraid and take time to see and listen to one another. Every historian understands the importance of returning to the primary source, to the origins of an event to develop a more accurate narrative. This is also true of human relationships. We need to stay clear of hearsay and malevolent gossip and approach each other as individuals. We need to celebrate all of our kids instead of labeling them as off or effed up – labels that were slapped onto Bailey.

We need to pause more, to let people be vulnerable and safe –instead of pushing them away.  Bai believed that we isolate and dispatch each other at our peril. She was right. Biology teaches us that monocultures fail and diversity is the key to our survival. That is true for every species, especially our apex one.

Recently we were staying in a friend’s home in London and on a long walkabout in Chelsea we watched a woman with her young child approach us, watched the mother scan Bailey’s dyed hair and piercings, and watched her push her child out of view. Then she crossed the street to avoid passing us and in so doing the mother was teaching her child to other. Bailey turned to me and said: “ I have to work so hard to convince people that I am not threatening, that I am on the side of good. Being on the receiving end of  this kind of fear is exhausting for me and devastating for anyone who  is not mainstream.” 

Bai thought deeply about our societal challenges and was passionate about finding solutions for homelessness and prison reform, and worried about how our stratified society could move forward in a world that celebrates contempt and is indifferent to our growing divides. And yet. And yet she insisted that individuals were fundamentally good. Even if you couldn’t personally vanquish global strife or a national addiction to vitriol, you could still respond to the world with daily generosity of spirit. And so she did.

One of Bailey’s favorite quotes was this James Baldwin one: 

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”  

So in honor of Bailey and in honor of humanity let’s be more open, more inclusive, and more curious. Let’s take the time to see the magic in one another.

We love you Bai and thank you for letting us tag along on your short, spectacular life. 

We love you all;  thank you for being here. 

Watch Bailey’s Celebration Here

My Husband's Eulogy on Bailey and Fentanyl Poisoning

Bailey’s Sister’s Eulogy

Rolling Stone article on our Fentanyl Crisis

The Bailey Shaw Fund for Fentanyl Poisoning Advocacy and Awareness