I found myself calling Jo a lot, when I was lonely. I never used to be a phone person. But I found I began to rely on her guidance and insights—about Ashley and Paul, about feeling like a pariah among my friends and colleagues, about feeling adrift without purpose, about my fears around future employment, and what I was supposed to do with the rest of my life. She sometimes just led me through breathing exercises. Kyle once joked that she had become my spiritual guru. He said that to irritate me, as he knew my aversion to anything New Agey.

He then told me that I had something of a secular Western arrogance about me. That I was too closed off to the possibility of wonder. He kept sending me Simone Weil quotes about making space inside myself for the divine to enter. Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void. I told him that I found Weil’s mystic Christian koans slightly insufferable. I preferred my voids empty, thank you; I didn’t need God cramming himself in there. I was a dyed-in-the-wool atheist, a pragmatist, and I took pride in that. I felt it was actually an important position to defend in an age when reason, logic, and facts felt so assailed and devalued. That said, when Jo led us through guided meditations, and said that we were approaching a great mystery, I could tangibly feel this, even if I might not have fully understood it. It did feel as if we were collectively scaling a mountain towards something. Perhaps a shared catharsis, or some greater understanding of The Hum and its potential.

Because Jo seemed to rise with such grace above the daily drudgeries and degradations of life, she could sometimes feel a little remote, particularly when presiding over our meetings. As if she had ascended to a higher plane, just out of reach. But in those phone calls, she made herself completely open and available to me. We spoke very candidly about my situation with Kyle. Her early relationship with Howard was also a fraught educator-student scenario, though of course quite different than ours. It meant a lot to me that we were able to open up to one another about it, and sort of fascinating that we were coming at it from opposite sides of the dynamic. Jo said she had been dazzled by Howard when she first met him. He commanded a great deal of respect at the university at the time, and in their field.