Mortality

Death has never been something that was far from my life. I lost a lot of family at a young age, and the earliest person I could call a best friend died in a car accident when I was eight. Death was not something that just happened to old people, mortality has always loomed around the corner, and the awareness that someone I love, that I myself, could die at any moment has been a constant in my life.

No wonder I had a goth phase.

It’s not a sense of mortality, then, that makes this death so difficult to bear. I couldn’t understand why I couldn’t sleep last night. Why I tossed and turned, why I eventually got up and took a long bath, then worked for hours at a project that requires manual dexterity with shaking hands before giving up at dawn and collapsing into bed.

He was the first of my “adopted sons.” Not legally adopted, of course, because we were both in high school. Also, if memory serves, he was only two months younger than me. But whatever. He was the first of my boys. And he’s gone. They’re not sure why.

It’s been fifteen years since I graduated high school. I’d fallen out of touch with him, been years since we’d talked. But if he had called me up yesterday and asked me to follow through on sixteen-year-old-me’s promise to allow him and his future partner to use my womb to incubate a baby, I’d have said yes in a heartbeat. Instead, the call I got was from my mom, because she’s better at checking Facebook than I am, telling me that he’d gone.

He had a beautiful singing voice. He was incredibly talented. Brilliantly smart. Sweet as adzuki bean, with a smile that lit up the room. Gifted beyond belief. And we were all gifted with his presence.

It seems a bit trite to say that there are no words for this. The grief I feel is something that’s a bit outside of my ability to comprehend. Why do I hurt so for someone who hasn’t really been a part of my life for more than a decade? It seems selfish to cry over it. And yet.

Processing through this with my husband, he posited that what I grieve for is something which previously I’d only been separated from by time. The feeling, the friendship, a million intangible things about that place and time, laughing with a friend in theatre class and feeling like it’d go on forever. Now a wider divide than years comes between me and that feeling, and it’s for that which I grieve. More than that, though, I know I grieve for the fact that in a world that often seems so awful, we’ve lost one of the few souls who truly made it better.

I don’t know what comes afterwards, but I hope that whatever comes next, wherever we end up, that there is a stage for him to perform on. That there’s a cozy corner with pillows and tea where we can catch up. That I can hear his voice again.