examining absence: what i've learned so far

I was feeling sad today. I thought maybe all the feelings of gratitude from Thanksgiving left me with a hangover, the way filling yourself with alcohol leaves you dehydrated, and disappointed with the reality you wake up to. But maybe it wasn’t that. One year ago today, I was supposed to meet a friend for coffee. Just as I was about to leave the house, he texted: “I’m sorry to cancel last minute but I’m feeling terrible.” He died that night from a heart attack. He was 39. And I miss him.

Most people close to me, or who follow my posts, know that 2016 brought a series of lessons in loss. It felt like a coming of age film in fast forward. 2017 seems to be continuing the trilogy. What might be an even more painful truth than having a loved one die, is experiencing that life goes on without them. I am still having trouble making sense of the world without the people who made it make sense, if that makes sense. It feels as if it goes against hope, against love, against time itself. When a person is an intimate part of your experience of life, no matter how much or little time you actually spent with them, their absence is not an end to your journey together. Their absence is a blank canvas for you to paint all your longings, regrets, secrets, and wishes. And like any work of art worth a damn, it’s fucking painful to create.  

It’s easy to walk through life thinking you will have another chance. In rare cases, we may have that opportunity. In even rarer cases, we may actually take it. But when people around you die, it puts all of those excuses on trial. All the, “Yeah, we should get together sometimes,” and the, “I’m sorry, things have just been so crazys.” I am as guilty as anyone. My phone is a graveyard of good intentions. Text messages lingering awkwardly by the snack table. Looking back, there are so many situations I would do-over in a heartbeat. But it begs the question, for whom?

If the person is no longer here, but I knew I had been kind, or gone out of my way to spend time, what difference would it make? Surely no difference to them, wherever they are, if anywhere at all. So then, is it really about them, or is it about me? Maybe regret is just a way to make sense of the crater our loved ones left behind, and how gravity isn’t the same without them. It’s an alluring idea, that we may have found relief in a parallel universe where we’d called back, or said I love you one last time. But more likely it’s that the pain is all too much. My heart crumbles in the vacuum of their absence, and my regrets eventually dissolve with the realization that it’s supposed to hurt, and the hurt is how much I love them.

This circuitous route to self-acceptance is one I travel often, and I don’t always reach the finish line. Forgiveness can be a wild beast. I have spent days replaying an exchange with my dad, as if through some loophole of modern physics I could change history with my mind. That by rejecting myself, I can somehow even the score.

I may not be able to change history, but I can change how history changes me. Does it make me kinder and more accepting? Or does it make me closed and more judgmental? It’s a fight. Perhaps one of the few worth putting it all on the line for. One of the few where surrendering isn’t defeat.   

One thing I can say about my journey so far is that I am definitely more affected. I don’t know if that’s the right word for it. I mean I am more easily moved. The same way someone who has never skied can’t appreciate a bluebird day, someone who hasn’t experienced loss can’t truly understand the space it occupies in your heart. I cry more. I hurt more. I laugh more, at least the real, deep, belly ones. I am more comfortable in the pain, and I roll up my sleeves instead of running away. I’ve lost the innocence that accompanies endless summers and bottomless sodas. I know now that everything comes to an end, and too much of anything is probably bad for you. With one exception: the ability to love and have compassion for this curious journey called being human.

remembering to care

I was really nervous to go see her in the hospital. Even though we’d shared so much, spent whole summers at each others' houses, riding our low-rider bikes around town, co-ordinating our outfits, and playing Super Mario Bros on bean bag chairs that spilled their styrofoam guts everywhere. We had gradually grown apart in high school. I resented her unsubtle attempts at fitting in with the “popular” girls. I wasn’t willing to be, what I perceived as, humiliated the way she was. Even if I did want them to like me, I would never have admitted it. She changed the way she dressed, started listening to different music, drinking a lot, and even obeyed their juvenile orders when they said she had to walk 10 feet behind them. I wasn’t sure who I hated more: them for doing it, or her for letting them. Either way, even though she started to hang around with them more and abandoned her social status as a “skater” (a label I’m still not sure I’ve outgrown), I maintained the feeling that she was my friend more than anyone else’s. Maybe because she was my friend first, or maybe because I felt like they didn’t understand her the way I did, or maybe because I just wanted it to be that way. Yet when I visited her in the hospital, I felt like I was visiting a stranger. Words abandoned the part of me that speaks them.

She sat propped up in her bed. A television mumbled from high up in a corner. I remember it being bright, she could see out into the world, but not truly be in it. I can only assume she spent months in that bed, as that’s how long she was gone from school, nearly a year. I remember the fact that her toilet had a bucket in it to catch whatever went in it because she wasn’t trusted to use it responsibly. They measured and regulated everything that went inside and everything that went out. I never asked her what that was like. I never asked her why she did it, or what she was afraid of. I probably just talked about things that were going on at school and asked her about the other girls on her floor. Talking about other people is always easier than talking about oneself, especially when the truth is uncomfortable. But the thing I regret the most is not telling her how much I missed her.

I began to miss her even before went into the hospital. I missed her when she started acting differently, losing weight and dramatically giving away all her food at school. She wasn’t the girl who had tried to drink milk through her eyeball or left fart bombs on my pillow. She wasn’t the friend who would skateboard with me for hours before going inside to eat white bread cucumber sandwiches. She wasn’t the person who did a wicked imitation of her Scottish dad: “Go shite up a trrree ya wee harry!” She was different. She wasn’t just losing weight, she was losing herself, and I was losing a friend.

I didn’t know it then, but I wasn’t a very good friend to her. I didn’t tell her how I felt, I just pretended I didn’t care. Pretending not to care is so much easier than feeling the pain, the loss, the heartbreak, but it limits your ability to love. Thinking back, I realize it was my own petty fears that got in the way of being there for her. For the same reason she stopped eating, I stopped expressing how I felt. What would people think? Will I be rejected? Will they think I’m weird? Get mad? That age comes with a bag of insecurities, and I let mine weigh me down.

It’s incredible to think about how much time we spend creating fears about these things, rather than sharing ourselves with the people we care about most. Or most importantly, just experiencing ourselves, in all our beautiful quirks and imperfections. I may never know what that year was like for my fifteen-year-old friend in the hospital, nor the years that followed when she went to new school and started a whole new life for herself, but I do know that I want to be the type of person who thinks about it. And cares.

this made me think of you!

Receiving a message from a friend saying, “This article made me think of you!” can be a slightly unnerving experience--at least until you find out what it’s about. Sure, they say it’s the thought that counts, but articles include everything from how to diagnose that pesky rash to in depth analyses of psychopaths. I would hope anyone sending an article with such pretense would be mindful of the implications woven within, but you just never know. Have you ever been having a conversation about liars and blurted suddenly, “Oh by the way, how is so-and-so?” Ooops! Let’s hope they didn’t catch the linear trajectory of that one! Anyway, I digress. Just a little dose of Nicki neuroses (nickoses?) before I share this article my friend sent this morning (that reminded her of me). Quite honestly, it’s nothing new, and I’ve even read articles who articulate it more eloquently, but there’s a certain frankness, like it’s coming from a successful relative who sits you down and says, “Look kid, all you gotta do is this. Stop making it so hard for yourself.” And I appreciate that. Hope you do too!

I particularly like this quote, “As Douglas Pagels wrote, ‘Each new day is a blank page in the diary of your life. The secret of success is in turning that diary into the best story you possibly can.’”

Writing for Your Life

Thanks Adrienne!

from awkward pose to awesome pose!

Today I decided to squeeze in a yoga class after having lunch with a friend across town. I’d only been to this particular place once before, so I wasn’t really familiar with the facilities, the sign-in process, where you put your shoes ’n shit. I was a little disoriented to find all the rooms empty, but I was still a little early, so decided to get changed and await further instruction. While I was changing, I heard someone else come in who seemed to be greeted by a voice with a hint of authority. I felt reassured, but when I came out, there was no responsible party to be found. The woman who had just arrived, also there for her second class, kindly showed me the ropes as she had just learned them, and I continued to wait around awkwardly reading the bulletins on the walls. Five minutes after the class was supposed to start, there was still only one other woman there, which made three of us. By ten after, I went and knocked on the door at the very end of the hall. Apparently there was some sort of teacher training going on. My knock was received with an abrupt, “WHAT!” Then a laughter-infused, “Come in.” They glare-smiled at me as I opened the door, jokingly upset about the interruption. I’m never quite sure how to take gestures like this because it feels more like a weak attempt to cover up real pissed off-edness with lame sarcasm than any sort of actual joke, but—I digress. A woman came out to help, but only succeeded in confirming the uncertainty of the situation by checking the website (why didn't we think of that? oh wait, we did. thanks) and calling the owner (who had no knowledge of a cancellation).

Fifteen minutes after the class was supposed to start, one woman decided to call it a Sunday, but the other lady and I looked down at our bare feet and figured, when in tights, stretch! So we plopped down our mats and proceeded to breathe deeply and crack our bones. I told her about this cool yoga website I’d been using to practice at home. Quicker than I could say downward facing dog, she had pulled up a video and placed her iPhone between us saying, “Do you mind?” By this point, there was really no decision to be made. I had untied the ropes, placed my foot firmly on the dock and set the boat in motion. Besides, the experience was worth far more than any story of somewhere more productive I could be. Not to mention the pattern completion of actually squeezing in some yoga.

So that’s what we did. In a big empty room with shiny hardwood floors, Indian fabrics lining the walls and statues of goddesses as our audience, we did our yoga practice bowing to a leopard print iPhone (we kicked it over for the standing poses). We also got to know each other a bit and even came up with the genius premise for a comedy where two women get locked in a yoga studio overnight with nothing but yoga props and an iPhone to pass the time. Actually, now that I say that out loud, it sounds a bit different, but I’ll leave that to your own conscience.

I wanted to share because I love little experiences like this. Ones that can so easily be overlooked or passed by, like throwing out an important letter in a pile of bills. I could have decided to go home when the teacher didn’t show without hesitation, but when I came to that fork in the road, for some reason I chose the uncertain path over the familiar one. You never know what’s going to happen, but that’s the beauty of it. You might solve a problem, you may even create a new one; you might make a new friend, or quite possibly an enemy; but in the very least, you will likely end up with a funny story to tell. And that's always worth it.