Savoring

Things to Love, Even in Grief

During my senior year of high school the friend group I’d been a part of for years suddenly decided to cut me out. It started with my friend C— something about the boy she liked having an old crush on me, something about a football jersey she wanted to wear on some Friday that I got to wear— and then it continued in my AP Literature class where two girls talked aloud about me without using my name. Before long I stopped being invited to Friday football and basketball games; somehow a narrative had been written about me and it took hold. I remember being hospitalized for the Swine Flu for a week and then coming back to school— my absence worked to evaporate me from all of their minds. I could not believe how easy it was for them to do.

Here’s the thing: I was probably annoying as hell in 2009! God, I know I was not a good friend all of the time as a teenager. I had big and sometimes existential dreads that exasperated everyone. Sometimes my friends audibly sighed getting into my car and hearing The Spill Canvas yet again. But the ability for my trusted friends to pull the rug out from under me shocked me— it really did feel like The Tower card, a foundation-shaking event that changed me, reorganized my cells. In the aftermath of that I leaned hard into student government, Honors society, all of the nerdy shit I was good at. Shawn and I, always friendly but never around one another too much, fell into a deep friendship then. We shared colorful pens for our biology notes and argued over who would dissect the frog (he had to do it). I wrote essays for English and read my favorite lines aloud to him, which he didn’t even make fun of me for. He was more feminine than most of the boys in our small town and I knew people called him gay as an insult. I knew too that his home life wasn’t great, that his parents weren’t nice to him. I think we bonded because we were both so ready to get out. I felt, that year with Shawn, like he had more energy than the sun— infinite talent, insatiable curiosity, a huge heart that had time for every one. I don’t know what he saw in me— a sad girl dejected from the popular crowd?

He came to my house a few times that year to work on a Chemistry project. I had stopped having people other than my two oldest friends over that year because I was terrified of more evidence being collected on why I was worthy of being abandoned. My dad was unpredictable in his drinking and I could never guarantee he’d be the kind of drunk that made him bearable instead of mean. But Shawn understood; when we took photos for Tumblr in the woods behind my house he said ‘my dad drinks too’ and touched my shoulder. Those four words made me feel so, so seen.

I went to college and so did he, two of us first generation college students on campuses where we could be something like ourselves. We’d Facebook message here and there, always meaning to come visit. We never did. I don’t know what happened but eventually he moved back to the place we needed out of. He started using. Sometimes he’d post a concerning Facebook status and I’d reach out but I couldn’t make sense of his replies. In hindsight, of course, I know both that I didn’t do enough and that there’s nothing I could’ve done.

The Facebook statuses that mourn him all allude to a tragic ending, lost years, wishes for re-dos. My classmates post photos I barely recognize myself in and I refresh my browser hourly to make myself hurt. I read every single post, look at every single photo. I find a photo of us at homecoming and can’t stop looking at it: his face was so red because all night he and I danced, jumped, giggled. We knew that night that the high school cafeteria was finite, that there’d be more for each of us in so many other places. I knew in my bones he would prevail.

I get a text telling me he’s dead. Thirty-one years old.

Every bone that holds my carcass erect feels broken.

---

I go to my book shelves and I pull out every poetry collection I own. I flip through Sharon Olds and Ada Limon, ask Tracy K. Smith to give me the words I need. The perfect stanza to say goodbye to Shawn is illusive. Nothing feels right.

My thick book of Emily Dickinson’s poetry also comes off the shelves. I try flipping through but I’m caught on nearly every page, a fish hook snagged by her pentameter. There is so much Death in Dickinson’s poetry; but also there is so much acceptance, so much peace. Dickinson’s prioritization of her writing astounds me: at 30 she had amassed nearly 1,000 poems in her writing desk. She wrote despite the demands of the times (depicted quite well in my beloved Apple TV show Dickinson), carved out time for her practice in some genius ways (like faking Tuberculosis just to be left alone). Her dedication feels especially tender because it wasn’t fueled by the need to publish. Although a handful of poems were published in journals and newspapers while Dickinson was alive, publication was not readily available to her. It was not the hope of external validation that brought Dickinson to her writing desk— it was the writing itself.

As a bookish kid I read Dickinson. I remember my parents gifting me two kids poetry books, one Edgar Allen Poe and one Emily Dickinson. The morbidity was evident to me even as a child, but I was fascinated at how these two people constructed language around what was unsayable. Dickinson in particular stuck with me; I’d memorize the poems and walk up our stairs reciting them ‘I’m Nobody! Who are you?"‘ Her rhythm made me want to read every poem aloud. I’ve been doing that again

What begins as me hunting down the perfect grief poem for Shawn becomes an act of reading intensely. I read every single poem with attention and care, reread them aloud if they echo in my chest. I am mesmerized at how Death sits alongside her; still there are black birds to write about, still there is a tree to sit under.

It feels a shame to be Alive-
When Men so brave- are dead-

Endow the Living - with the Tears-
You squander on the Dead.
And They were Men and Women - now,
Around your Fireside-

Instead of Passive Creatures,
Denied the Cherishing
Till They - the Cherishing deny -
With Death’s Ethereal Scorn -

---

On the day Shawn dies I am dumped by someone I love. I do not know yet Shawn is dead or dying but in hindsight I wonder if my body knew. I feel heartbreak, shame, embarrassment, anger, sadness, confusion. Embarrassed that I lived believing we were friends and they lived waiting to rid themselves of me. I can’t pinpoint one emotion before the next comes flooding in. Afterward I sit in a parking lot trying to talk myself out of a panic attack. I call one friend and then the other, apologize for being needy, newly afraid I am detested by even my most beloved people. My blood feels like it’s all rising up through my throat and I cannot breathe. I don’t remember driving home.

The next two days feel incredibly long. Paranoia takes root; so many text threads I wonder about now, my heart breaking anew. I hate feeling this way, like a black hole of need. I delete Instagram for a day and a half and then feel angry I’d let them do this to me, make me feel friendless. I shame myself for my sadness and even more for my paranoia, my brain moving on and on and on trying to look for evidence of my ineptitude, my badness. I am being disgusting, I am being too much the victim, even just in my head. I run through attempts at self-soothing: Maybe it means nothing that they can go out together like you never existed; maybe it means nothing that other friends now feel distanced too, launched into another corner of the galaxy, convinced too of my Too Muchness/Not Enoughness. Suddenly the text thread of a friend looks, not for the first time, one-sided; I delete that text thread and others because I can’t stomach the way I’ve behaved, like a girl desperate for her friend to like her. I call my friends who have known me the longest and I cry as they get angry for me, tell me who I really am, assure me just how easy I am to love. My husband holds me and rolls me joints, cooks me dinner and then gently wipes the uneaten food from my plate after I’ve pushed it around for five minutes. He watches as I spiral myself into another crying fit, his brown eyes the only things that steady me.

We don’t know what to watch while in this kind of pain but somehow X-Men ‘97 is on our For You page and so we hit play. For the next three days we watch an X-Men movie a night. I savor the stupid way Logan extends his claws, I savor the way Hans shuffles his toes when he’s getting sleepy on the couch beside me, I savor the smell of our hands pressed together, the way he floats toward the one light when it’s Movie Time and I float toward the other, how we meet at the couch and our skeletons fold into one another.

I am still in heartbreak but things are feeling clear. I am, somehow, getting through without hating myself too much. Sometimes I shrink from talking about it, ignore my writing mind asking me to write about it, but then a powerful knowing comes over me. I am so, so tired of feeling unallowed to write about the things that have hurt me. I am so tired of the preambles and justifications. I really believe for a moment that this pain is mine to process however I need. And then I get a text message that my friend from high school, the one who used to ride with me to National Honors Society events, the one who told me once my bubble letters were ‘too hideous’ to be on our shared Chemistry poster, is dead. Shawn is dead.

---

I am in some kind of double grief and the two pains no longer exist separate from one another, the two losses slithered around my heart. I hate that I can’t grieve Shawn’s death pure of this other loss. It feels, somehow, wrong.

In moments of clarity a mantra comes to me: You could have done no differently with information you did not have. Sometimes I swallow the truth of being uncared for and I actually feel something akin to relief. My friend Kristin’s words: ‘I am thankful to have been left.’ And I am. I am also so, so angry at the betrayals. I am so mad.

But there are other moments, unfortunately.

I imagine the things they say I am— too needy, too ready to share, too self absorbed, too cringe, too invested. I imagine each of them speaking their complaints against me and I can hear their voices because they are voices I’ve sought to know, voices I’ve valued, treasured, loved. I imagine they place my soul on a moral scale and find me lacking. I imagine that I evaporate in their minds, no longer a person or a friend but a Bad Person, a Bad Friend, a storm cloud finally passing. I imagine it is easy to do, this collective abandonment.

Once I’m through imagining that— once my anxious brain has walked down every hallway and opened every door in the house of things that could be said about me— I imagine something different. At the dinners I’m no longer invited to, they don’t say my name at all. If a word that begins with Er floats into their conversation they all sigh and say ‘she probably thinks we’re talking about her, she thinks everything is about her.’ I hear the tone, the self congratulation, the therapy speak. I hear each of them dismiss any thought of me, my friendship, flick it from their consciousness.

I move through moments of sadness that feel like a cramp in my body. The urge to separate the losses, dismiss the one as juvenile or unworthy of devastation. I want to honor my friend Shawn in my grief and crying over imagined slights of girls here in Los Angeles feels wrong. I pile shame upon the sadness, want to punish myself when my grief dips into the other loss. He died alone and in pain, addicted— isn’t that the bigger tragedy, the one deserving of my grief? Each time I cry I ask myself what I’m crying for. Crying for Shawn is allowed but crying for the other thing feels juvenile, stupid, dramatic. I want the boundary lines around both pains to be clear but they are not. I fall head first into intense bouts of sobs multiple times a day.

In the midst of this life goes forward. Hans and I hang out with our best friends and their children; I read them a book while they sit together on my lap and yawn, their little fingers rubbing each page as I go. The book is about self-soothing, and it tries giving helpful ideas about what to do when you’re experiencing outsized emotions. Make a craft, take a long bubble bath, walk through a forest. The book keeps emphasizing that first though you have to acknowledge the feeling, let it side beside you. I am not good at this, I know. My approach is to replace the ‘bad’ feeling with an action or a reason. I am scared of how ugly these feelings will look beside me.

With the girls on my lap I think of Shawn. I think of the two of us giggling through the woods that one time, desperate for the perfect Tumblr photo. I show the girls a picture of my old friend and one of them says ‘a beautiful smile.’ And it was.