9 years ago today I woke up, and inexplicably found myself in a world in which I had become a 29-year-old-widow. I cannot, on the whole, say I recommend it as an experience.

For 9 years, on pretty much all days and to pretty much all people, I don’t talk in a real way about what losing him was like. I’m still not really going to do that here. If real grief has ever come for you, you understand that even if you have words, there are no words - my thanks, Lauren Haynes, for this. And if it hasn’t, I can’t explain it to you, and wouldn’t have any desire to if I could. May you be forever blessed with ignorance.

But this year, I do want to talk about Sumedh Joshi - the man I married. Because he was so many things for which there are no words, even if I have words. I feel sorry for the people in my life who never had the privilege of knowing him; I feel both joy and the impotent pain of empathy for the people in my life who did, and loved him, and for whom today will never be about anything else. But for him, for me, for those of you who loved him and those who never even met him at all: these words are for you, even if there are no words.

I met Sumedh at our friend Chelsea Phillips’ birthday party, held at a 19th-century-mansion, complete with turret room and intricate wood paneling everywhere. It had been turned into a college co-op decades before - something “kind of like a frat but without the fratty people” - a frat if frats were co-ed and full of hippies who didn’t respond terribly well to organized authority. A little under 20 people lived in Chelsea’s house, and at that moment it was crammed to the brim with about 300 more. I was 18 years old - 20 years removed from today - and I remember the exact moment I saw Sumedh for the first time. He had just gotten a silver eyebrow piercing, and I can still perfectly recall how startled I was by the fact that I thought it looked cool as hell. It was the first - and last - time I thought anyone’s facial piercing (ugh), of all things, looked gorgeous. I was a co-op kid, too, but not that co-op kid - I lived in what was universally considered to be the nerd house, where all of the honors program kids lived, and even the house itself was named after an obscure reference from a 1970s cult-classic sci-fi novel. While all of the other houses were climbing onto their roofs to get high after dinner, or plotting some act of eco-terrorism they never actually got around to doing, mine pulled our books out and studied together at our large dining room table. We weren’t exactly edgy, and I definitely wasn’t cool, by any definition of the word.

Sumedh retained exactly zero memory of the moment he met me - even by the standards of that party, and that age, he was absolutely blasted. Which doesn’t mean he didn’t notice me - I watched as he saw me, and then weaved his way through a sea of drunk children to stand right in front of me. He leaned mock-casually with a shoulder against one wall, and very pointedly ignored the person standing to my left as he started talking to me. That person happened to be my boyfriend at the time, and Sumedh proceeded to completely ignore both said boyfriend and his increasingly strenuous objections, while he tried to make me laugh, and asked me on a few dates. I remember thinking it was, hands down, absolutely the most absurd and hysterical interaction I’d ever had. I laughed so hard at some point I started crying. My boyfriend at the time was significantly less amused. I’d like to think I’m a decent enough person that I would have felt worse about that, but I just couldn’t seem to stop laughing for long enough to feel it.

When Sumedh and I got married ten years later, the New York Times asked us how we met for the article they ran. We utterly, absolutely, and completely lied through our teeth. But I like the real version of the story better. It’s more him, more us. To this day, I still think he’s the funniest person I’ve ever met, and while I’m very much not alone in that (see this and this), in our twenties, while we were giggling over some recurring, joint bit we were doing together for the millionth time (we called it “schticking”), our friend and roommate Eric Wright said, with the constant chill and great love that was all his own, and a functionally infinite patience that we categorically did not deserve, “You know, no one thinks you two are as funny as you think you are.” Sumedh responded, “Eric, no one is as funny as we think we are.” We cracked each other up so constantly and consistently that we had to come up with a safe word for when we had to actually Stop Being Silly (Yoke) and Be Serious Adults About a Thing or At a Time - we landed on “lamp” - the only problem with which was that saying “lamp,” itself, immediately became its own running joke. After he died, so many people who loved him said so many beautiful things that just hit me, but the one that hit the hardest was Sana Kaul saying “I just…I can’t….there were just so many more jokes we had left to make.”

Well, the hardest hit, except by one. What my brother-in-law Sarang Joshi - my brother, before, then, now, and always - said at his funeral hit me harder: “what I think I’m saying is, every part of me, in one way or another, came from him. Without him here, I feel like I don’t know what to do anymore.”

Before I wrote this, I wrote and re-wrote - and re-wrote and re-wrote, over weeks - something different, that was an homage to who he was, and what he did, and how brightly he burned while he was alive. And how even now, every part of me, in one way or another, was shaped by him, by us. That he taught me, or we grew and created together, almost everything I still believe in and value - that it is enough to be benign, to be gentle, to be funny, to be kind - that the best way to measure how well you’ve lived your life is by how negative your friends’ bar tab is with you, both figuratively and literally. That all of the most fun, and most valuable things, are free - and, as a direct corollary, that it’s better to have friends with boats than to own one. That Peter Singer and Martha Nussbaum were both right and both wrong about morality - quantitative effect and abstractions and attachments and emotions matter - but they matter inextricably, each meaningless without holding each other’s hand. That people should only ever get married if both parties feel like they’ve somehow magically tricked the other, much-more-wonderful-person into agreeing to it, and they better hurry up about it before the other person figures it out. That I could be a better person than I actually was, because I was always trying so hard to be who he saw in me - undefeatable, fascinatingly unique, and worth looking up to and fighting for. That I made him better, because he was always trying so hard to make me proud of him. That the absolute best way to introduce your spouse at a party is as your “ex-girlfriend” or “Dr. Husband, PhD” - as long as you’re okay with the fact that no one will ever be as funny as the two of you think you are.

And that when you live your life by treating it like a series of adventures you get to go on with your best friend while having one, long, silly, never-ending conversation together - when even getting groceries or cleaning the house turns into just another fun way to extend one of the games you’re always inventing and playing together - it makes everything better, and even nurtures everyone around you. I think the phrase we said most often to each other was “I feel sorry for anyone who isn’t us” - I couldn’t, and still can’t, tell if that made us super adorable, or kind of assholes. Porque no los dos, I think.

I wanted what I wrote here to be perfect, like he was. And I’m posting this on Sept. 1st, instead of August 31st, because nothing I wrote or re-wrote ever was. And I don’t mean perfect-perfect - just the kind of perfect where everything feels right. That satisfied, peaceful feeling that everything is just how it’s supposed to be. I couldn’t manage it, so I wrote this instead. It’s part of a whole project that I started a few months ago, because I realized that after 8 years and change, I finally have trouble finding and hearing his voice inside my head sometimes. I used to hear it constantly, so much so that it tortured me, kept me drowning in grief from which there was no escape. But now I miss it - I’d take the pain, the void with all of it’s teeth, the feeling of salted earth inside my own soul that it used to come with, if it came along with the sound of his voice.

So over the last few months I’ve spent an honestly, truly unreasonable amount of time updating the source code to his old blog so it would load on modern browsers and I could read it again - although someone took his old url, sumedhjoshi.com, so I had to buy a new domain and host it at sumedhmjoshi.com. I created this one for myself, meant to model the theme and feel of his old one, but built with a more modern tech stack. I read all of his old articles about Texas football - I felt warm with pride all over again re-reading every single post on his twitter feed - especially this one. I read all of his goodreads reviews - (thanks to Chelsea Phillips for the link I had lost). I got the Taylor guitar back from the friend I’d stored it with back when I couldn’t bear to look at it, the one I saved up for months to buy for his birthday, back when we were both broke grad students, and mounted it on my wall. I asked my mom for his computer back, which I haven’t seen in 9 years, and tomorrow I’m going to try and unlock it with a few of his old passwords that I know, for the first time ever. I’ve been re-reading his old papers, and his PhD and Master’s dissertations - one of which is dedicated to me, “without whom I would have been finished in half the time.”

In twelve days, it will be our wedding anniversary. Every few days between now and then, I’m going to post a new article in the Homage section of this website that I created as a pastiche of his. In the last few weeks, I’ve been reverse-engineering how he created, coded, and calculated his articles and graphs, and then re-creating them for 2025 however feels most relevant - either with more recent data, or by using my own, or with my own take and interpretation on the ones he wrote like this one . In this, I feel not proud, but incredulous all over again at how good at everything he was, at the actual casual ease with which he seemed to achieve everything. It is about 10000x times easier to code in 2025 than it was in 2015, and I’m not terrible at it, as a general rule - but even still, it’s been really difficult to re-create even a tiny section of his work. I’m also glad - it means I get to spend more time interacting with it. More time having some form of a conversation with him.

I’m also titling the blog, as well as the new tech stack I’m working on - part of the foundation of which is the math he published in grad school - ℵ₀ - or AlephNull - after the first math he ever taught me, Cantor’s diagonalization argument. That moment was the first moment I’d ever felt my brain re-wire itself around a new concept in an instant - the disorienting and infinitely cool experience of finding something absurd one moment and completely obvious and intuitive the next - once he’d shown me the proof, of course.

At his funeral, I didn’t say that there were just so many more jokes left to tell, or that every part of me came from him, even though I felt those things very deeply. I felt so shattered I assumed I wouldn’t be capable of saying anything, or of facing the reality of a universe that felt so dark, all of a sudden, without his light in it. But 9 years ago, I unexpectedly found myself propelled towards a podium, where I said “fuck ‘till death do us part.’ That is just such bullshit. Whoever decided that? Vows are sacred, and I intend to keep mine. I am on his team, forever. All of his light, and humor, and absurd silliness, and love, and oddity that he put out into the world, I will try to put out for both of us. I will show up, to love his friends, to hold his brother’s hand, to take care of his parents when they get old enough to need it. As long as I am here, I will do my best to shine bright enough for both of us.”

I have done my best. But if I had to rate my execution over the last 9 years, I have to say I’ve flunked - horrifically. Especially in the last two years. It’s been hard, without my best friend and hype man here to keep me giggling through everything life has thrown at me. But I’ve been picking up my game lately. And it doesn’t matter what I think about how I’ve done, anyway. Because right now, I can hear his voice inside my head, telling me it’s all been perfect. And I’m so grateful.

“Nothing you love is lost. Not really. Things, people—they always go away, sooner or later. You can’t hold them, any more than you can hold moonlight. But if they’ve touched you, if they’re inside you, then they’re still yours. The only things you ever really have are the ones you hold inside your heart.”

And thank you to Blake Fechtel for this next poem. I still have this dream, too, all the time.

“When Balder, Odin’s beloved son died, not only did people weep. But fire wept. And iron, and all the other metals wept. The stones wept. Earth wept. Farewell, voyager. Farewell, my heart. Farewell… for now.”