November 2023

Three years ago a guy who was once the love of my life was walking alone by the side of the road in Macon, Georgia when a truck hit him. He died, probably instantly. The driver didn’t stop. They found his body the next morning.

His friends and family knew nothing of this for five weeks. He’d spent the last years of his life homeless and very difficult to reach. If you texted him in May, he might get back to you in September, if he replied at all. It was normal not to hear from him for over a month. If another one of his exes hadn’t spontaneously Googled him one day, we might not have known for much longer.

I mean it when I say “love of my life.” I knew we’d be together forever like I know the sky is blue. When we broke up I almost had a nervous breakdown.

Until last Friday it hadn’t occurred to me that I should grieve him in a specific location. I’d gone to my local Zen temple for a talk by an author of a book which takes seriously the practice of communicating with the deceased. I don’t know if she believes that dead people retain something like consciousness, like if she thinks they can actually talk to us. Maybe she was describing retreats into solipsism vis-à-vis heaps of magical thinking. Pinging one’s own heart. Her metaphysics is irrelevant.

She told us that her parents and siblings are buried in her home country and she has to visit their graves to speak with them.

I don’t know if my ex has one. I thought about it for the first time after hearing about this woman’s place-dependent encounters with her own dead. From what I gather, the state mishandled Will’s death so badly that his family couldn’t make funeral arrangements. I know he was eventually cremated. If I had to guess, his ashes are in a house in Tennessee where I am neither especially welcome nor especially unwelcome.

***

My life has sustained some “ambiguous loss.” I don’t trust myself with the specifics. I’ll just say that there are a lot of people who I might be forced to mourn twice, like Will. Resentment poisons the data… what philosophers call events… memories that make me go numb since I assume the other parties stopped caring first.

I can say this much: what’s decayed into pure quantity — data — was once alive and given to seemingly infinite creative rearticulation. So much unwritten music became isolated parameters. I’m not talking about food for ghosts. It’s inches of skin without nerve endings. I sleep in peace. 

When I try to be any more concrete than that I lapse into sentimentalism. But I can write about death and grief in the abstract: exhibits A, B, and C. 

Re: A: it’s still the case that images of decrepitude set me dreaming. When I was a little girl I liked to imagine the roof of my bedroom dissolving into the night sky. I could reliably thrill myself that way. To this day I still drift towards zones (in the Stalker sense), and I look for places that render the subliminal in more exquisite detail than any mental trick. Since the social relevance of the shopping mall dwindled to nothing a long time ago, decommissioned mall buildings are doubly exciting.

B was inspired by my mom’s second bout of cancer, which for a while looked like it was going to be a hospice situation.

C is political, which is where I wind up a lot as an adult. For the last year or so, I’ve forced myself to regularly think a thought that would have been very hard for me to stomach when I was younger. This is that the world will be in objectively worse shape when I leave it than it was when I was born. 

I do not believe in objective worseness or betterness. This is a contrivance that I need to accept as reality.

Because … the future will be more bearable to those who can mourn it in advance. 

Because … the future is a muse to those who can treat it like a roleplay partner. 

Because I want my mind to be spacious enough for absolutely anything to take place there, which is another way of saying I want to be seriously surprised. I am preparing myself for a surprise bigger than any thought to come along and clear the grief-slate.

***

March 2024

Writing that last sentence, I knew it was stupid to hope for a surprise to congeal from nothingness and rip out grief’s vital organs, put an end to its breathings and compressions. Epiphanies melt into air before I can learn from them…

actually I don’t try to learn. I don’t envy the enlightened who distribute capital-e events among the living. Once I thought I would by dint of routine or profession: become a philosopher or a Buddhist nun or (my vanity) a muse.

My friend Alex died last week. He was about my age.

This time I learned right away. One week ago (not even, technically) he went to sleep and didn’t wake up. It was totally unexpected.

I don’t know where my grief ends and others’ begins. Wednesday night his mom sent Mario a Facebook message asking him to call. I was standing in the kitchen when he came in from work and asked me to sit down.

Alex and Mario were best friends. I’m sure there are others who considered Alex a best friend. He was an arch-friend, a group-bridger and convener of people, known for throwing parties. We were tasked with notifying his circles in Virginia. The replies cascade… can’t look, can’t look away.

I can’t write the anagnorisis / real event / convergence that’s shot through with surprises and noetic indications, the truth that can only be wrung out by nimble fingers. I am writing against the deafness of the ego. I don’t know what exists outside a certain crystal sadness, something that looks alive from a distance.

Mario wondered out loud what would happen if we called Alex’s phone now. The cops have it, he said. Then there was nothing else to say. We only know where we are because it’s where he’s not.

If I’m okay at the moment, it’s because I’m in company. My friends, my friends, my friends. Our shared DNA and a song I’ve put on at parties for years: fuzzed out guitar, some guy singing in the softest voice I figured out what matters.

***