Grieving, Forever
Yesterday I spent over two hours on Facetime with my friend Sam. She is the only person in my life I regularly Facetime; it’s almost a tradition, the way we dedicate the time to one another every month or so. It used to be a tradition the two of us shared with our friend Mary. The three of us were close friends since 2014 when we each completed a two-year master’s program at Kent State. And although Mary was living in Alabama, Sam in Ohio, and me in California, we spoke regularly in our groupchat and on our Facetime calls. If one of us had to cancel we’d offer dates for a reschedule. We were devoted to one another, a devotion that crossed time zones.
The last time the three of us were physically together was in 2019 when Sam got married. It wasn’t enough time. I was home for her wedding and another friend’s wedding, had to leave Columbus early the day after Sam’s. I saw Mary again in 2021 when she had a twelve-hour layover in Los Angeles. I took the day off work and we went to Beverly Hills for expensive coffee and expensive weed. We sat on the beach in Santa Monica and giggled off our highs, laughing at seagulls. Now that she’s dead I search for her face in my Google photos constantly. Like if I look harder there will be more of her. I look in my Instagram story memories and find a photo of a seagull on the beach with a caption: Mary called this a pigeon. I hate that the two photos we took together that day are bad quality, pixelated and stupid looking. I hate that at Sam’s wedding the three of us didn’t get a photo. Had I known Mary would be dead four years later I’d have demanded a photoshoot and a year of the three of us living together.
I love that Sam and I continue holding this torch of our triumvirate tradition, but it makes us both sad. Sam told me that her phone still writes ‘Facetime with Erika and Mary’ when she calendars a call with me; a groove it’s used to. Sometimes when I go to text Sam our groupchat comes up first; neither of us can read the last few texts, how the two of us reached out with concern when she didn’t make our July Facetime date. I sometimes think of Mary dead in her bed, her phone buzzing on her nightstand, and nothing feels just or joyous or even possible.
Sometimes I feel like I’ve written this all already. Maybe I have. Certainly my last Substack post featured Mary, specifically detailing a morning when I actually felt connected to her in death. The veil felt thin that morning in Kyoto, Japan and I felt comfortable talking to her. But the truth is that I don’t feel that often. I maybe haven’t felt it since. I don’t feel her with me and I don’t know how to talk to her. As time goes on and the months of her being dead increase, a thorny lump of guilt grows inside of me. Some days I don’t think of her at all until I lie down for sleep and then I can’t fall asleep because I hate myself for not remembering her properly. I chide myself for the lack of photos (there could never be enough), for deleting message threads that time I got obsessive about phone organization (stupid stupid stupid).
Mary loved Lemonade by Beyoncé. We were a few months from leaving Kent when it came out and Mary and I were the closest we’d ever be. I remember us driving around Kent, us in the Taco Bell drive thru, us parking on a street for a house party and waiting until Hold Up was over to go in. Her screaming BOY BYE and calling me Becky with the good hair. I remember how much she loathed the guy I was seeing then, how she’d add his name to the lyrics. On my birthday last year I complained to her via text when a group of women were loudly shit-talking Cowboy Carter and she sent back a thesis on why the album was The Best. I reread that text a lot now that she’s gone. When Cowboy Carter won Album of The Year a few days ago something in my stomach pinched, wishing Mary was here.
That’s what this grief is. Missing her, feeling a strange guilt for continued life. And, too, there’s now this familiarity with death that sits beside me. Every day. I wrote in my Putrid Shades of Summer piece that after Mary died I’d wake up and check Hans’s breath. Because she died in her sleep. Unexpectedly. But it’s more than that. I sort of feel like I’m the mouse in a cat-and-mouse chase. Death is the cat. There’s a shadow over so much of what I do, plans I make. A ‘what’s the point’ logic that I really can’t talk my way out of. I keep thinking about the Lorde lyric remember what you thought was grief before you got the call. There’s a before and after that I’m only aware of because I’m in the terrible after. And I forever will be in that after. There’s never going to be a before again.
I was at work when I got the call. In a hospital, orienting first year medical students. Mary had been missing for two and a half weeks. Sam and I checked in with her and each other daily during that time, the two of us offering different explanations for her absence: tough mental health episode, family emergency, a breakup. We both had a viper pit of knowing somewhere inside of us. Mary would have never let us be scared like that. Sam called me on August 1, 2024 and told me Mary had been dead since July 9, 2024. The day of our scheduled Facetime. In the time between her family alerted the friends closest to her, organized a funeral, mourned. Her father couldn’t get into her iPhone for weeks. It was then that he found our manic texts and calls.
I can’t really talk or write about that day. It passed, somehow. I had to work four more hours, smiling for the students. The effort made me puke. I somehow called an Uber for myself and got home. I don’t remember anything else. Just staring at my bedroom wall. Trying to remember her smell. The sound of her laugh.
Her death was the final component to a terrible, grief-ridden summer (see Putrid Shades of Summer). A friend from high school had also died. My friend group in Los Angeles had splintered. After Mary died I hated myself if my grief dipped into the friends rather than her. Near the close of 2024 Sam’s dad died, an event that involved traumatic and nightmarish scenes for Sam. When we spoke yesterday on Facetime she told me she feels terrible that Mary got short-changed, that she only got four months to properly grieve Mary before this other heavy grief demanded her attention. Both of us, I think, want to be told how to do this. How to grieve. And more impossibly how to grieve for the rest of our lives. She is going to continue being dead for as long as we live; it’s a fact we cannot fathom.
Sam tried out grief counseling and I tried out a buddy system where I’d be matched with someone who also went through a friend death. But Sam didn’t feel heard by the grief counselor and the person I matched with stopped replying to my emails. I’m in therapy and talk about Mary there sometimes but I don’t know the right questions to ask, the right skills to learn. I find myself longing for constant togetherness with Mary’s spirit; I want that morning in Kyoto to happen like, all the time. Sometimes I force it— I stare at a line of crows on an electrical wire and say her name over and over again hoping the effort alone will bring her to me. It doesn’t work. I feel foolish for trying.
I don’t pray because I don’t know if I believe in god. So all I can do is dive again into my search for photos and voicemails and screenshots of texts. I reread my journal entries from 2015, I flip through my binder from the last class Mary and I took together hoping she wrote me a note in her gorgeous script. It’s not enough. It is so not enough.
And there will be more calls that deliver more grief. It’s inevitable, it’s already in motion. My friend Farwa Zaidi had a beautiful post a few weeks back on death. I especially appreciated her reflections on her Aunt, who has had to bury so many people she’s loved. How she keeps on living. I don’t know how a human goes on. I want to believe that maybe the more you experience death the closer you get to the veil between our worlds. You are invited, kind of, into the dead’s kingdom because of the weight of grief. I really want to believe that. Maybe I need to believe that.
My husband said something in passing a few months ago that I still think about. We were talking about the future and he mentioned how we’d have thirty-forty more years together in life. I cried. It’s not enough. If I think about him dying (and I do think about it, all the time) I can’t breathe. Lately I look at my eleven-year-old cat and beg him to live forever with an earnestness I’m embarrassed to admit.
Sometimes I think I want someone to tell me if I’m grieving right. Sometimes I know I’m not. Sometimes I think I haven’t spent enough time thinking about her, crying about the loss. Saying her name. Sometimes I know there’s nothing I can do but keep living, try to be open to her spirit if it comes. I still have days in the grocery store where I feel out-of-body. Like, what’s the fucking point of buying rigatoni when Mary is dead? It doesn’t make sense, but neither does her not being here.
I read Louise Erdrich’s The Sentence recently and found myself relating to Tookie, the main character. Tookie is haunted by a ghost but also by all the deaths she will have to mourn in her life. Future deaths.
Sometimes as I am waking, between sleep and consciousness, I am afflicted with a wave of crashing sorrow. Where this wave comes from, or why this moment is so bitter and deep, I don’t know. It just happens to me. I stay still as though I have a knife in me, afraid to jostle this feeling and make it worse. But I know that it won’t go away unless I submit to it. And so I feel it.
People have mostly stopped asking about Mary. And that’s okay. It’s normal. I’m not quite to the point of believing I need to live joyously for her. For the big life she deserved and didn’t get to have. Or had only briefly. But I’ll wait for another morning like that one in Kyoto forever if I have to. Until then: the not-enough photos that have to be enough.
I’m leaving this quote here from When Death Takes Something From You Give It Back because it’s the only piece of writing I gripped onto in my grief and still do. “Here lies the hope. A hope that what you gave me will grow in others, if I am able to share it. And that my love is strengthened and made more beautiful because now it contains your love. This must not be destroyed by sorrow. It says in the poem, ‘give it back.’ As if giving goes back and forth all the time. From the living to the living. From the dead to the living. And from the living to the dead.” I have to believe something stays.
You are grieving just right. Thank you for sharing her memory with us. Her smile is so beautiful, so full of joy <3