Seattle Cohost Wake
As soon as it was announced that Cohost was shutting down, I knew I at least needed some way to grieve it in community. I'm not a particularly observant Jew, but I do take to heart the idea that grief is a community experience. Cohost was never an experience of any individual in isolation, so its loss shouldn't be experienced in isolation either.
I talked to my wife and Xandra who had also made some rumblings about some sort of meet-up, we decided on a place and time, and I sent out an open invitation[1]. We knew Seattle was a pretty big Cohost city, but based on the Philly and Boston turnouts we expected maybe thirty to forty people.
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A large group of masked people in a park posing together, many holding Eggbug plushes.
The last dedicated count we got was fifty-eight, but people kept showing up after that so I believe in the end we had more than sixty attendees. Lydia even came up from the Bay Area, shocking everyone there who knew her! I was completely blown away by this incredible outpouring of love for Cohost.
It was an intensely emotional mix of mourning and joy. We had a moment of silence for the loss of Cohost, we came together in a cheer of "Eggbug Forever!", but most of all people just hung out and chatted. We even had our very own rainbow:
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A photo of me, wearing a brown, navy, and tan knit dress, posing jauntily while standing on a concrete rise in Capitol Hill. A rainbow is visible over my shoulder. Photo by rilight.
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A blurry eggbug in the foreground gazes at a rainbow as the sky darkens. Photo by Alyx.