Another positive about the way things worked out, merging my firm with a larger one instead of getting an in-house position, is that I got to keep working on an adverse possession case that I had decided to try with one of my best friends. Her and I are both really busy, so we met on a Saturday back in October 2023 to work on the case. She reserved us a room at a local library, so we spread out all our trial exhibits there and worked through outlines.

As a reward for our hard work, we decided to go see the Taylor Swift Eras Tour movie afterwards. My friend had seen the concert live, but I had not. Taylor Swift and I are very close to the same age, she roughly one month older than me. I wasn’t always a huge fan, but I have always really respected her talent and business decisions. The movie was a fun experience. There were people dressed up and dancing. At one point though, she played a song I had not heard before called Majorie. I believe she wrote that song about losing her grandmother, but it hit close to home with me having lost my father. I started crying. It was a dark theater, so my tears and I had some privacy. I looked up the song afterwards and have listened to it several times since then, when I felt like I needed a good cry.

This friend and I are both huge fans of the Kansas City Chiefs. So, Taylor Swift dating Travis Kelce has made us happy in recent months. During one of the games the Chiefs played, Taylor was shown wearing a Chiefs jacket that I had bought at Kohls several months prior. I liked it because it had “1960” on the sleeve. That’s when the Chiefs became a team, but it’s also the year my dad was born, which is why I wanted it. I posted on Facebook how I was, for once, ahead of the trend.

It was a fun NFL season for us getting to watch the Chiefs somehow scrape by and make the play-offs, win away play-off games for the first time in ages, and ultimately win the Super Bowl. There were so many Taylor Swift memes, most of which I loved. Apparently, there was a camp of people who were unhappy about Taylor Swift being shown so much during Chiefs games, but I did not personally know any of those people. Chiefs fans seemed to be happy to be gaining a new fan base.

I have been realizing a lot lately that I cannot control or predict when the grief is going to hit me. I was so certain the first Christmas would be the worst, yet Christmas wasn’t nearly as bad as the first Father’s Day or the first anniversary of his death. I didn’t expect the Taylor Swift Eras Tour would bring me to tears. Being somewhat of a compulsive planner, it is frustrating to not be able to at least predict when I’m going to have a breakdown.