I was working at my computer Tuesday morning when a notification from a friend popped up with the headline that Kate Spade had died. I did a double-take and stopped everything to click on the link she sent. It was 9:41 in Los Angeles, 12:41 in New York. Spade had been found less than three hours prior. Her death an apparent suicide.

It seems almost everyone has a Kate Spade story. I vividly recall my first bag: black and rectangular, serious but not uptight. My husband gave the purse to me for my birthday before we were married and I wore it until I wore it out. Somehow it made a statement but didn’t over-reach, personifying exactly how I wanted to be in the world. I remember her first tiny shop in SoHo that you would miss if you blinked. And wandering twenty years later with my daughter into the Kate Spade store on Broom Street, bright and airy and filled with colorful classics–like fine architecture powder coated in a giant dose of whimsy. My nieces came of age wearing Kate Spade accessories. I bought one of them a Kate Spade frame for her wedding shower just last year. And only a few months ago, I put an old KS make-up bag into a bin of keepsakes because I wasn’t ready to give it up. Even though Kate Spade hadn’t owned her company for a decade and had parted with her name long ago, those pieces still meant something. Represented something.

But all that nostalgia isn’t what rocked my world. Nor the fact that a major fashion icon was gone, that she died by suicide, that she left behind a 13-year old daughter. What rocked my world was reading her age at the top of every news story. Kate Spade, 55, dies. Seeing those digits, close cousins to my own 51 years, made the tragedy feel deeply immediate and relevant. I never met Kate Spade who, I’m learning, had a life far more complicated than most understood. And I wouldn’t begin to speculate about what drove her to suicide, out of respect, but also the indisputable truth that we can never know someone’s interior world. Yet I feel an enormous amount of empathy and kinship and understanding for her as a woman in her 50s. Because I know how tender a time it is; how bruising can happen so unexpectedly; how suddenly the body you’ve known your whole life turns foreign and unresponsive. I understand how change becomes painfully laborious and status quo an easier route. This decade is tough. One that I’ve come to respect immensely. One that I am treading upon with the lightest of touch. I don’t know, maybe she felt some of these things too.

It takes a few days for the headlines about Spade’s death to peter out of the news cycle. And then like whiplash another icon dies. My friend texts me again. This time with the news that Anthony Bourdain had killed himself, and in the same manner as Spade. She knew this one would hurt. And she was right. I was a huge fan.

At the age of 45, after spending several years working non-stop to help open a charter school, my health tanked. Perimenopause may have flipped a switch, but suddenly my heart was out of whack, my temporal artery a pulsating nightmare. I was told by doctors to stay calm, not workout, not get stressed. I saw every specialist and endured temporal surgery, immune suppressive steroids, massive doses of beta blockers. When everything failed to help, and no diagnosis showed up, I changed my lifestyle. I started walking miles, gave up coffee, went to bed early. And I watched Anthony Bourdain. I watched everything he ever made, and when done I read his books. And when done with that, I watched everything he ever made a second and third time. When my heart pounded so loud and hard that I couldn’t fall asleep, when I felt very alone, I put in my earbuds, picked an episode of No Reservations and let him sweep me away to some gin joint eatery in some tiny corner of the world. Bourdain’s narrative lulled me to sleep and carried me through my recovery. For a long time, he was my constant.

He also demonstrated everything I wanted to be as a writer: honest, vulnerable, compassionate, discerning. I saw him speak a couple of years ago at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art following a screening of a Parts Unknown episode on Rome, just before his relationship with Asia Argento became public. I had already seen the show, but it didn’t matter because, well, I was used to watching him over and over. At one point, I leaned in and whispered to my husband that he had to be involved with Argento. The way he looked at her, like someone falling in love. Though I’d missed it the first time, on that big screen his affection and admiration were so apparent. That night he spoke passionately about filmmaking and story and his team, always praising and deferring to his team. But my favorite moment was something he said. A rule that he and his producer lived by when choosing their partnerships: “No assholes.” I chuckle even writing those words because he definitely embodied that belief. In fact, I can imagine him turning those words on himself. Maybe even now. He candy-coated nothing.

Two icons gone in a matter of days; two legends taken by their own hands. I have no button to wrap things up. No bigger idea or warning to heed or message to impart. Frankly, I’d be the asshole in attempting something so base. But I am feeling the loss of two human beings who put their creative energy and voice into the world with such a force that it resonated around the globe. Two human beings who meant something to an extraordinary number of people. Who definitely meant something to me.