Still, I Heal

It was a Saturday.

A cold, bright, windy upstate New York spring day — too cold to be outside, but sunny enough to know that better days were just around the corner. I was drunk with friends, pretending we were Irish instead of English, German, Lebanese. A cocktail made of cocktails — cherry vodka and lemonade, coconut rum and orange juice, all mixed with anticipation and the excitement that comes with celebration, with togetherness, and with music.

We had to pretend to be sober. A mother’s watchful eyes and her daughter’s disapproval of a nation’s culture becoming cultural appropriation meant we giggled under our breath, stumbled over our feet, laughed too loud and screamed even louder. The music soared over our heads as we held onto the stage and each other for dear life. With every passing song, the music and my emotions washed over me in waves, bringing me an almost out-of-body experience. I could see myself from overhead, feeling as though I’d reached some kind of heaven, or maybe nirvana, because this theater couldn’t possibly be large enough to hold everything that I was feeling.

The night ended with a cover. The band was silent, and the lead musician perched his violin on his neck for the last time. He played a single strain of notes — it took me a moment, but then I knew. The song was “Bittersweet Symphony” by Verve. A one hit wonder from the nineties that was hitting me hard. The music made me feel a thousand things, but mostly, I felt as though I knew exactly who I was.

But I didn’t. I didn’t know anything.

I didn’t know that earlier that day, 137 miles away, a man had dropped off his wife and children at the St. Patrick’s Day parade. I didn’t know that my music theory professor, a man that I trusted more than my own flesh and blood, had driven up to the top of a parking garage overlooking the arena where so many who looked up to him moved their tassels from right to left. I didn’t know that on that Saturday, March 17, 2012, Dr. Carl K. Wiens made the choice to leave the world, his family, and me behind.

The night I thought was over restarted with an email.

“Our Sad News,” it said in the subject, as though something menial had happened. The rest of the night was spent trying to fill in the gaps. What had happened? He was so young, he loved his kids, his job, his students, his music. He couldn’t possibly have done the unthinkable. Articles and my mind were torn apart as I laid in my bed on that cold March night, trying to find any evidence of an accident, or an explosion, or anything else that could explain why this man was gone.

After too little sleep and far too much caffeine, I got in the car with an old friend, and ended what was supposed to be a week-long break for my mind with a two hour exercise in trying not to run off the road while driving through my tears. I had a purpose. I had to get back to the place where he was supposed to be, to find him not there. I needed to see for myself, and I needed to see my music family, the people who I knew would all be doing the same as me. We came from all over the country, the world, and we were united in our absolute lack of a cause, because how could we believe in anything anymore when a man who had provided light to our world had been put out?

When I arrived, I saw so many people I had been yearning to see since the early hours of that morning, including a friend whose exit from my life I am only recently no longer mourning. She and I embraced, and made our way inside the building we called home. We used the door that was as far away as possible from his office. We weren’t ready to see the place where he should have been.

We ran into two other professors, people we loved, but who couldn’t hold a candle to the man we were still looking for. We stopped, we hugged, and we asked. They confirmed what we had been praying wasn’t true. We fell into each other’s arms, sobbing, holding on as if we believed we could reach over the edge of the concrete and lift him out of thin air. If we just held onto each other, maybe we could send some kind of cosmic energy into the air. We could call the Doctor and his sonic screwdriver, or Harry Freakin’ Potter with his Deathly Hallows; Hell, I would have even been happy with a stupid plot device from an ABC Family Original Series. ANYTHING to bring back the man who had left the world too soon.

There was a big sheet of paper taped to his door where we could all write to him, as though somehow whatever we wrote would reach him wherever he was. I knew where he wasn’t — behind that office door, where he so often was on a Sunday afternoon, getting ready for the week to come. But I wrote anyway. I wrote about my rainbow sandals, and how I wore them that day because I knew how he would make fun of me for wearing them. I told him that I hoped whatever dissonance he had been facing had become consonance. The dreamer in me hoped his spirit was standing over my shoulder, laughing at my feet. The atheist in me knew he was never coming back.

He’s not the only one who never came back.

It’s been just over four years since that day, and while I am still standing here, it is as a person who can never view the world in the same way I did before. The little girl who once jumped up and down on the glass floor of the CN Tower, a quarter of a mile into the sky, is now the woman who recently had to pop an Ativan after watching someone jump from a second story window to the safety of the snow on the ground. The teenager who Irish danced her way up the streets of Utica, NY during the parade has become the adult who had to pull over and make someone else drive after encountering hordes of drunk people, clad in green, celebrating a holiday that was really never meant for them.

A few weeks ago, on the anniversary of the day my life was changed, I had my own fucked-up version of a celebration. I went to the mausoleum with a ceramic thermos of Sam Adams in my hand. I parked up at the front, put my headphones in, and walked. The sun was fighting its way out from behind the clouds, much like it was on the drive back to school the day after he died. I entered the too-cold building, the music given to me by my best friend drowning out the ambient music I knew the man I was visiting would have hated. I clinked my thermos against his name, plastic letters hot glued to the marble door that his ashes sat behind, and I cried once again for him, and for me, and for everything I had lost.

Still, I heal.

Even though the day he died stays with me so vividly, the memories of his life have started to come back into focus. The old Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert clips don’t make me cry anymore. Just this week, I walked across a bridge high above the highway all alone without panicking. Each baby step I take is a tangible reminder that I am alive, and that I must remain present in this new world. I cannot fill the hole he left, but I can build a space around it, full of friends, laughter, music, and more love than I could have ever imagined.