Yesterday I published I Am Trying to Remember What I Lost — a piece about finding a church history video and breaking down crying at my desk before sunrise. I didn’t expect what came next.

By evening, my sister confirmed the year of the youth group trip to Disneyland — 1992. She remembered the earthquake from west Phoenix, water sloshing out of the pool.

My cousin Michael confirmed it too. He was in 8th grade during the Disneyland trip. His family left for Rio Rancho, New Mexico in January or February of 1993.

Reading his comment, it came back to me — in the first week of January 1993, before they left, we sat together at my mom’s two-story house and wrote interview questions for Phoenix Suns head coach Paul Westphal. A “What If?” scenario we began to plan out. I interviewed Westphal alone in March.

The title of that post is a question I thought I was asking about a church, about faces in a video, about names I couldn’t place. Why did I have a difficult time trusting church institutions? What was it about that season that changed my childhood forever?

It turns out I was asking about Michael. My cousin. My childhood best friend. The one I lost when his family moved to New Mexico in 1993.

I didn’t have words for what that meant. The gratitude I have for those at St. Paul and those within my family living locally had been blocked by one bad story on repeat in my head. I had to get beyond the story to see what was really missing.

It didn’t take much for me to begin acting out after that. By the summer of 1993, I had moved from my mom’s house to my dad’s house, less than three miles away. New school. New church. New friends to meet. A story for another day.

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