This time last year I had my phone with me at all times, and carried an extra charger. I checked it every time a notification came in. I’m sure it bothered people, this sudden proof that I was not present, and it’s not that I didn’t care, but I was glued to the proof that you were still alive, until the moment you weren’t.
I woke several times a night and reached out to check my phone. I figured when the news came it might be from your mom, which was stupid of me. She was far too devastated to be reaching out to anyone. It was D. who sent the message, D. who I haven’t seen since the two of us visited him, still with G., back in Hawaii. I will always remember that trip, how we went to the splashy hotel on Maui with the balcony that hung out over the ocean, how we slept with the window open to the night air and the quiet constant sound of the surf.
I knew the moment my phone pinged in the very early morning of the seventeenth day of the month that I already feared you were not going to live the full way through. No, I said aloud. Hearing the emotion in my voice, my husband rolled over. What’s wrong? he whispered.
He’s gone, I say. And then I see D.’s message confirming it in those exact same words “Our dear C. is gone” and I wailed without words and my husband held me as I wept as though in physical pain which I was.
Later that day D. would send me a link to the funeral home notice with the hammerblow sentence ‘cremation rights have been accorded’ and I stared at it, understanding but also refusing to understand, and then the knowledge hit me and it was like being stabbed and I am sobbing again as I write this thinking the same thing I thought then, your beautiful face in flames. But we’re going to be cremated, said my husband. My parents said they are too, to my eternal surprise. All of this is true and I expect to be cremated as well except I can’t help it, I would way rather you be buried. I would way rather be close to you with just a few feet of earth between us, even as you decay and become unrecognizable bone.
I’ve been in touch with D. lately - we’re going to intersect our travels in Italy this summer. It will be very emotional to see him - who would have ever thought, back in the day, that he of all people would one day be a precious and loved last link to you. We messaged back and forth, your name coming up. I marvel how much D. has changed, and how he is so much more like *you* now, something that he acknowledges is deliberate.
Talking to someone who knew you well is like drinking after being in the desert for so long you didn’t know how thirsty you were.
D. remembered our trip to see him in Hawaii with G., and even sent me map coordinates of that damp little house on the beach that we stayed in, with the house full of triathletes next door, the ocean quite literally part of the back yard. We slept with the windows open. Going to Hawaii always makes me realize how we chose locations to live *despite* the weather and not because of it, the natural side effect of going where our corporate jobs took us.
I miss knowing your wisdom is out there in the world being a force for good. Your Aunt J. made no secret of the fact that she’s a right winger but softened by grief remembered your constant pressure to get them to stop listening to certain influences. It was an uphill battle; Grandma M, just two years ago, asked me if I had met (insert racial pejorative here) which is how I learned of you and T. getting together. Yes, Grandma, I told her, channeling you. She’s a good friend, I know her well, talking loudly because Grandma was in her late 90s by then and kept her hearing aid turned down most of the time. I wondered if she was equally unwelcoming to R., and if these attitudes were suspended by love of her great grandchildren.
It says something really special about you, that people who knew you disagreed with them nonetheless liked you. It’s because everyone felt respected by you; you were a gifted listener. As they came to know you well, people felt flattered by your attention. And people who would benefit from change often did - look at D. now, the biggest liberal full of hippie love you ever did see. It’s not age that does that to you - it’s loss. He is one of the few people in the world I can share the deep pain of losing you with.
I dreamt of you, finally. I was down at a familiar-looking creek with a small sandy beach that mounted a slope and became a light woods. I was sitting in the sand crying and you came out of the woods and sat next to me, and we chatted for awhile. You were wearing that old worn blue and light gray and white buffalo plaid check shirt, and a well worn pair of jeans, and your old Nikes with the red swoosh. Your hair shaved using the #2 setting, the way I used to do it for you.
Hey baby! you said in the old lilting rhythm. I should have written it all down when I woke up; foolishly I figured *of course I’ll remember THIS* but though we talked for awhile, or seemed to at least be together there for awhile, I only remember a few things you said. You told me that I had been the love of your life, and that you don’t regret anything. You said that having kids changed everything, and I felt like you understood when I said, thinking of my own two, yes. I have to go back now, you said, and I stayed seated there on the beach watching you walk back into the woods, your shirt gradually merging with the shadows. I can remember the dream so clearly, even the familiar way you walked - the old way, before the achilles injury. You stopped at the edge and turned back and gave a little wave that made my heart glad, and I waved back and felt such peace and woke up happy. I told K. and she said you were checking in on me. Even if it was just a delusion brought on by dehydration, or my subconscious supplying a shadowshow of wishful thinking, I don’t care. I can’t imagine why my mind would put me somewhere like that, somewhere unfamiliar and not a place you and I had been together. Also I would never in a million years put you in that shirt and those jeans, and *especially* not those shoes. But you getting up and leaving like that made it feel so real. Your eyes were so blue.
Talk soon,