I always find it hard to start blogging again after Burning Man; there's just a cognitive transition that has to happen before you're able to deal with the "default world". This year was especially difficult, as I found that my aunt had died while I was away.

Two years ago, I returned from the desert to find that Hurricane Katrina had ravaged the Gulf Coast and all but destroyed the city of New Orleans. So distant from the conventional vectors of information distribution is Black Rock City that I had remained completely isolated from the reports of devastation and subsequent tribulation until my return. This year, I quickly scanned the newspapers while gassing up the borrowed station wagon in Reno. Any calamities? Seeing none I had assumed I was safe, my week spent in the desert a welcome departure from the mundane plodding of civilization.

When finally reaching cell range, my phone lit up with three messages from my father. A sense of dread filled me instantly. My father is not a loquacious man and is normally content to leave one message and wait for a return call. Something had happened. I called him and his first words were a shaky, "have you talked to your sister?" Unfortunately I hadn't and he had to tell me the story himself—an ordeal that I could tell was difficult, as he was just starting to make sense of the grief dealt him a few days before.

My aunt was barely fifty, her birthday back in June, and in many regards still the baby of the family. She was my father's youngest sister and, due to a combination of maintaining a relentlessly youthful spirit and never having children of her own, had taken decades to escape the "Kids Table" at Thanksgiving. Her room, when we'd visit, was called the Magic Room, because each shelf contained fascinating objects, artifacts, and gadgets that would delight us to the point of requiring the door to be locked unless we obtained adult supervision. She was a constant ally to we children, letting us watch television far too late and do dangerous things with fire when our parents were distracted. Despite being in my father's generation, she was one of us.

She had survived a heart attack three years ago, which betrayed her vim and vigor as finite. Taking her for granted as the heart of the family ceased, poking fun at her for arriving late to Christmas seemed less funny, and goodbye hugs (of which I shared many with her, living on the other side of the country) became lingering and immensely thankful. For three years, we all felt terribly lucky to have her. I can say, with colossal gratitude, that our last goodbye hug was the most devout perhaps of our entire lives.

But a goodbye hug is a poor exchange for a human life and Mary's passing resounds the indisputable truth that my interactions with friends and family are all too often goodbye hugs. This is the cost of "following your dreams" and moving over two-thousand miles from those who raised you, loved you, and taught you to follow your dreams. As my father, sister, aunts, uncles, grandmother, and cousins all crowded a hospital room to offer whatever support they could, I was in the middle of a desert in Nevada on some journey of self-exploration and self-expression that seems woefully shallow in comparison. My only solace is that, just like with that unstoppable storm two years ago, all that I truly could have offered was another heart to share the burden of loss and another shoulder to cry on.