Shortly after I moved to Atlanta, one of my co-worker’s daughters got pregnant at age 16 and somehow managed to have an abortion without parental knowledge or consent.

Okay, so let me preface this with a trigger warning: This story relates to the death-by-firearm-suicide of a young person, and includes some description of his body post-mortem. Just putting that out there for people who find that difficult to deal with.

I went to a funeral for a teenager and the service sheet was written in Comic Sans.

I basically babbled. Something along the lines of, “I’m so glad he has such an open minded and loving family, but I’m not a sex worker and I really only know him from the amazing stories my new coworkers tell me. I’m so sorry for your loss, and I’m sure I would’ve loved him but maybe not that way but maybe that way…

So a week after I started this job, a guy who no longer worked at the publication I worked for died in a car accident. I never met him, and he was a copy editor so it wasn’t like I was familiar in any way with him through what he wrote.
But nevertheless, the EOC said everyone needed to go. So I went. And somehow the…