Time brings both fruit and grief... a New Year's Eve Reflection
I’ve been wanting to reflect on this intense, monumental year for a while now.
Life has been so full and captivating that I haven’t had much time to think about it, to make sense of it. The things I longed for this time last year have almost all appeared, an incredible man who loves the hell out of me, professional growth & stability, a sense of being in the right place in my life.
It also felt like a gauntlet much of the time. Losing sleep over work fiascos and new personal and professional challenges to navigate. I didn’t anticipate that all these things would limit my capacity for the impromptu nights with friends, creative hobbies, the magic that comes from being a little bored. Sometimes I feel like I’m missing the value of these amazing experiences because I just don’t have time to truly notice them.
Another profound event happened this year that forced me to reckon with time and how precious it all is.
A little back story for those who didn’t know me in my roaring 20’s: After graduating from New York City’s Fashion Institute of Technology, my best friend Shannon’s vivacious cousin Jessi got the idea to start a fashion brand. I was to be the designer and a one-third owner. We designed the trashcan logo in my Brooklyn apartment and my dad and I drove a U-Haul to Atlanta to start Filthy T LLC.
Brittany Russell (pictured right) was to be our other business partner, and I don’t even think we talked on the phone before signing the contract. I was in for a wild ride.
She was a force of nature… wildly precocious for 22 years old. She had chef-knife sharp insights, could see the soul of a person from a few words and suffered no fools, which I most certainly was at 20. Those first few months I got my ass handed to me regularly. I don’t think anyone had ever been so brutally honest with me. So when a friendship started to develop after our rocky start, I was as surprised as I was delighted. I am proud today to call her my most hard-won friendship.
Our foray into fashion didn’t last forever, Brittany ended up in Denver running Estate Brands, a boutique alcohol distributor with her husband Aaron. I, of course, stumbled into alcohol licensing and eventually started Proper Pour Co. But we always stayed in touch through various relationships, jobs and adventures. That brutal honesty that marked the beginning of our friendship remained, although now I knew how loving she was at her core.
Brittany was a gastronome and a PI and a poet, a truth teller and a business partner and a true friend. She could wrangle hospitality maniacs (no small feat as many of you are aware) and help you heal from a bad relationship. She had amazing taste in restaurants, wine, books and travel. Britt expanded my palette and my mind; she helped me have high standards in life and learn to work harder than anyone else. She was also wickedly funny.
To say she inspired my career to work with hospitality is an understatement. I didn’t realize just how impactful she has been in my life until I got a call between speakers at a business conference in September that she had stage 4 cancer.
November 15, she passed away after a two- and half-year battle that she barely told anyone about. She was 43.
I was lucky to be able to spend a week with her and her amazing husband in October before she died. A week I had kept clear with work things for a jury duty summons. It was surreal how it all happened, friends and family coming and going, long, difficult nights, those poignant conversations and humor that only come in the darkest moments of life. I (and about 1000 of her closest friends and family) was absolutely gutted by the situation. She was a singular individual to many, many amazing people.
I’ve now lived enough life to recognize the gravity of such losses. But I was also left with the intense, overwhelming, mind-altering gratitude that life had brought us together to begin with. The ebbs and twists and upside-downs that result in loved ones you’re heartbroken to lose. There are so many of you that I’ve grown to love and cherish through the years. There are ways you’ve impacted me I may not fully realize until the road ends, one way or another.
Time brings both fruit and grief. Many professional relationships are blossoming as we build trust and answer calls and connect over cocktails. There are mornings I wake up astonished I get to experience my career and the stories that come along with it. Who I get to talk to. The problems I get to help figure out. It’s an adventure and a privilege.
I am heart-broken but also so full of gratitude on this New Year’s Eve. I thank all of you whose lives have intertwined with mine this year and all the others. And I wish you joy and presence in 2026.
