For the last two and a half weeks I’ve been co-leading a writing/meditation retreat in Kathmandu, Nepal. Two days into our trip, and 7,600 miles away, my friend and my assistant, Bree Smith was having what I can only imagine was a very dark day.

That morning she’d assisted us in a live online Wild Writing class for 80 people. I wasn’t there, but people who were emailed me to let me know how bright and kind Bree was on that call — which was pretty much what Bree was like everyday; teenage sunshine in a bottle, an energetic young woman with a heart to serve, a woman who bounded into every situation like a puppy, happy, expectant and alive.

By the end of the day, at 33 years old, she had taken her own life.

Whatever happened between Monday morning and Monday afternoon will forever be a mystery.

A few days before she’d hosted a book signing for a good friend. Friends flew in from out of town and she was surrounded by people who she loved. After our class, she drove a friend to the airport, and whatever was brewing inside of her got very real fast and she didn’t make it home.

One friend said that she didn’t think it wasn’t premeditated, but was more of a sudden moment, not planned or built over time, but more like a weather system that moves in fast. The pain feels absolute and her ability to see past the moment collapsed.

I never saw a hint of that weather system. What I saw was the Bree who was a cheerleader for people’s work. The Bree who hosted writing classes and poetry salons, and who created spaces where people could show up and write true things. That’s what she loved, that’s how she lived, that’s why she was such a good fit for our Wild Writing community.

And she worked hard for it. She’d been brought up in a tight Mormon home, but by the time I met her five years ago, she’d shaken all that off, had left an early marriage, let her long blond hair grow into dreadlocks that reached past her ass, was covered in tattoos and had established a deep and loving relationship with a woman. Bree fought for it. She was determined to live a true life.

I’ll never forget the day last year when she stopped by on her way home to Salt Lake City. She’d been roadtripping in Babs, her tricked out trailer, and she went out of her way to come by. I remember the way she bounded into my house, barefoot, wearing a short, tight dress, her curvy body spilling out from it. I remember how gorgeous she was, how she seemed to occupy that body with a zest that made me hungry to occupy my own like that — no apology — as though she green-lighted her own hungers, not just on the plate but in life.

It’s no small thing to live in this world. It’s a lot. I think of my kids, who are Bree’s age, and how much pressure they feel to figure things out, to know what they’re supposed to do, to become something. And for all of us, I think you need to be fairly high functioning to be able tolerate the energetic assault of the everyday— the noise, the worries, the traffic, the pressures we put on ourselves; who we are when we’re alone versus how we feel when we’re with others.

I don’t know what kind of pressure Bree felt, and what led her to silence the noise, and I’m sorry for that. Sorry for how hard that day must have been for her, this bright light, this teenage sunshine in a bottle. She had a lot of good things in her life. Her partner of four years, who she loved, work she loved – with me and with the poet Rosemary Wahtola Trommer, a house she’d just moved into, a dog she was crazy about…

Maybe that’s the hardest part of being human — you can be surrounded by love, doing the work you were born to do, and still a sudden wind can blow through and whisper, not today.

I keep thinking about something a woman named Rosemary said to me last year in front of a large group of people. “I wish you could see yourself the way we see you,” she said to me, and it silenced me. What I think she was saying was something like, you are wonderful and I wish you saw that too. Her words changed me. They helped to silence the voices that told me otherwise, that had me keep trying to earn my place in the world. I never forgot.

I also remember this. When Bree left my house after her visit, she was literally running down my brick path to Babs, and she turned around and shouted, “You know you’re magic, don’t you?”

“Yes!” I shouted back.

“Good!” she said, and kept running.

That’s what I want to say to her now.

Bree, you’re magic, baby, you always were, and I’m sorry that got lost for even one moment.

And if you’re reading this, and you’ve forgotten too — even for just a moment — let me say it to you now: You’re magic, baby. You always were.

I’m holding a candle for Bree tonight.

And maybe for you, too — for anyone standing at the edge of their own light, wondering if it’s still there.

Breeanna Kjerstin Smith
June 14 1992 – November 10, 2025