Love Letter As Elegy: Jeff, There Is So Much To Tell You
Let’s get the important stuff out of the way up front: when you met me I was an absolute mess and you almost immediately decided to love me anyway, which by itself probably counts as your first lesson to me. You were very good at seeing potential, and when I look back on it, I think it must have been for you like walking through an old house: move this, fix that, open this up. Good bones. It was October and we were fourteen (which in my opinion excuses the “absolute mess” a bit; who among us, etc) and you said “I love you” to me for the first time in November. You said it first, because of course you did. If we’d been waiting on me, at that time in my life, we might have been waiting forever.
The “absolute mess” part seemed insurmountable and unexplainable at fourteen, but half a lifetime later I can sum it up very simply: I spent the first half of my life as a wildly anxious person who tried very hard to become less anxious by pretending not to be anxious at all. You were the first person to take a critical look at that strategy and say, “Yeah, I don’t think this is going to work.” (If I had to sum up your love language I might take my first stab at it by saying “taking a critical look”.)
Before I could say “what would you have me do instead” you rolled out the plan: for some reason that I actually genuinely still do not understand, you were ready to dive in and spend five years teaching me how to use my voice, and stand up straight, and sit with my feelings — how to move through them instead of around them. We did it. The same rules as any other fixer-upper applied: improve what you can, accept what you can’t, and then take a good hard look around and a deep breath and fall in love with the whole thing anyway. Make it a home. Live there. I am not sure of much in this world more than I’m sure that this work is the foundation of how I show up in the world, even today.
I said this to you a hundred times while you lived, but I’m not sure you ever really grasped it: I am so grateful for you. I would never have thought to imagine you; if I could have dreamed you up, I wouldn’t have felt like I had any right to ask for you. You gave yourself anyway. We said “I love you” to each other the entire time.
You died when we were 25. Nothing, before or since, has ever changed me so fundamentally. I don’t say that lightly. But then — there’s not much that I do say lightly, on the other side of this line, when it comes to you.
I spend a lot of time at my desk. I try to keep it minimal but you made the cut. This is what I see if I turn my head to my left while I’m working: you and a light and a pile of books. The more things change the more they stay the same. I love this picture of you: backpack on, door closed behind you, curious and happy at the exact same time and asking, probably, “What’s next?”
For the first year — the one I spent just trying to survive — it seemed like all I could write were letters, but about a year after you died, I started writing about you instead of writing to you.
Some of that was: it didn’t seem right to make it about me. Everyone else had lost you, too, right along with me, so if I was going to detangle you using writing, I wanted to take myself out of it, and I couldn’t do that if I was writing anything other than the most detached, clinical descriptions I could muster. What I wanted was more like a Christmas card — to: you; love: me — and for ages I insisted instead on writing analysis after analysis and wondering why I never felt any warmer inside for the effort.
Some of that was: it felt too real, and too sad, to keep writing to you. Right after you died, it felt too sad to be anything but a joke, a temporary mix-up. Of course he’s not really gone. That would be too sad, too unfair. Nothing so painful could ever be permanent. This feeling settled into me and made a home behind my ribs, never ever too far but never really close enough to examine: it doesn’t feel real, but it must be real, because — he is gone. He is not coming back. So I stopped writing to you. What else was there to do? You were gone. It felt like the natural end of a long arc of trying — sometimes frantically, sometimes exhaustedly, always angrily — to understand.
I started writing about you. Using your name. Jeff. I wrote this a few months ago, grappling with the idea that writing about grief sucks and also is necessary:
My best friend died five years ago. I’ve been practicing saying that sentence for years and it has, in fact, gotten easier. It’s just a fact about me now. It hurts, but it isn’t sharp. Our birthdays were a little less than a week apart and he was older than me. He would have turned 30 last week. I wrote a long essay about it. The words didn’t ring right, but I didn’t want to scrap it, so I didn’t. I folded it up and put it in my pocket and it’s okay if nobody else ever sees it because the essay wasn’t important. I can summarize everything important about it as follows: a really really lovely person died before we were ready for it. I loved him very much. I’m sad about it a lot. Sometimes I need help with that. Most times I don’t, but sometimes I do. Last weekend I needed help. What is much more important is as follows: I write a lot about Jeff when I’m sad, but those aren’t the only times I want people to think about Jeff.
You’re making too much of it, you’d say, if you were here. You’re writing when you should be living. You’d say that a lot, I suspect, but probably never more often than when I am trying to figure out how to write about you.
And in the end, you’d be right (per usual, you’re welcome). After a while, I figured out that it was okay to want to write about you and me — which, in a world without you, sometimes (often) feels an awful lot like just writing about me.
You’ve been dead five years now, and for the first time in a long time, my instinct when trying to figure out how to write about you is to come back — finally — to writing to you. So, for the first time in ages: Dear Jeff. There is so much to tell you.
As long as you knew me you knew what I was afraid of: never changing away from someone scared. Never getting smart enough or brave enough to make a break for it: apply for the job, ask for the coffee date, hit “publish”.
I applied for the job the day after your funeral. We talked about it the last time we saw each other. They don’t love hiring people straight out of grad school, I said, to explain why I hadn’t put in for it the first go-round and to hedge not putting in for it on the second, and you laughed and insisted: no one knows anything until they give it a shot. I’ve been there almost five years. I’m good at it. It’s been my whole career, and there’s never been a world where you got to see any of it.
I ask for almost every coffee date I imagine. Most people say yes. No one knows anything until they give it a shot.
I usually don’t hit “publish”. The words often still feel convoluted, not straightforward, maybe better inside me than outside. You can’t unring a bell — you can’t tell a wildly sad story and then say, just kidding. I have always been happy. Is it helpful to share every pain with everyone else, every time?
No. But some pains are bigger than pain; some pains hurt because they’re an emptiness first — a hole in the same shape that the love grew up in — and an ache only secondarily. But the love did grow up, and love is worth celebrating. And your name is worth saying.
Jeff. You caused me so much pain. I did not understand how much pain loving a person could open me up to before you died. And. Jeff. You and all of the pain — ours, mine and yours, because I never forget how much you carried without telling me — are bigger than pain. Jeff. You are a really really lovely person and you died before we were ready for it. I loved you very much.
I will never stop losing you. The hardest thing — the thing it seems I have to relearn over and over again — is that every time I grow, I lose you again. Each time life moves achingly, inexorably on, each time I add a tiny new line of script onto a page that gets fuller every year, each time my heart stretches to accommodate more grief or joy than I knew I could hold… each of these represents a new way that I’ve lost you, and the newer the loss, the farther I am from you. In the end, I’m sure, life will take me farther away from you than I can imagine.
I very often wonder if you would recognize me now. My hair is long and my skin is tough (though my heart is still soft, I remind myself whenever I feel too far away from you to breathe; this gentleness is probably what would carry you home to me). My values, which by definition are those pieces of ourselves most core to who we are, are different from when you knew me. I know this because we did a values card sort together at Panera three months before you died. I was learning about them in school and I knew you would enjoy it as a basic exercise, so I brought it to lunch with me. I’m grateful to have done it together, even if it’s served all these years since as a reminder of how much the years can hold.
It has taken me so (!) long (!!) to understand that this is a good thing, this inability to stand still; for a long time, I resisted growing into someone that would be very different from the person who loved you while you lived. This is one more way that it has been hard to be the one that stayed: after years of relying on you to anchor us, I’ve had to learn that it is okay — perhaps even preferable — to entrust to myself, instead, the entire business of remembering each detail of our friendship. All things, great and small.
In short, I have had to learn the hard way that the only life I can promise anyone is my own. Though I would have preferred to love you as long as you lived, I can instead love you as long as I live (which in this case is the better deal anyway). There is a certain overarching rightness to the idea that you taught me the single most important thing I know about how to love: don’t overpromise. We are fragile. We don’t have control over how long we love a person, just how well we love them today. And even that gets away from us, doesn’t it? You and I loved each other so well for so long that it was easy to coast. What a world, where an overabundance of love makes it easier to go unsaid.
I did everything you told me. The summer we turned sixteen we drove down the street with the sun in our eyes and I was complaining about boys and you said: I really hope someday you get better at letting people in. I did.
My first semester in college I failed a speech class because I couldn’t get in front of people and find my voice. I’d never failed a class before. I’d never really failed at anything before. I told you about it, so ashamed that I threw up, and instead you just taught me what it felt like to confess something I thought would make me unlovable and then feel exactly as loved as before when I said it out loud. You just rubbed my back and said: the worst part about all this is that you have so much to say. I learned to start saying it.
You would be so proud of me. I sometimes can’t believe how many things took root and grew up. And the best part is: you’d recognize most of it. You’d point to every good thing about me and say: that one came from when you were fifteen. That one came from your first week of grad school. That one came from when Billy Wright kissed you for the first time and you knew your whole life had just changed and it stressed you out so much you puked but then you kept dating him anyway. Nobody would have been more pleased to see us get married than you.
After you died, I kept working. Some of the things I love most about myself — the things you’d be most proud of, and oh, boy, I know I’m lucky for how often those things coincide — grew out of the last five years. An understanding of what it looks like to put your life back together, for example. (Like a bird building a nest: you use what you can find because it is not an option to say that you chose not to make a home with what the world gave you.) An understanding of what it looks like to be hurt so badly you think you’ll die from it but then to wind up living through it anyway. (Like a cat falling out of a tree: you hit the ground before you realize you were falling and you land on your feet out of instinct, and you only let yourself panic after you touch every part of your body to convince yourself you’re still whole.) An understanding that it feels good, a little, to rebel against a world that could hurt you so carelessly by saying: guess what, I lived.
That one came from you, I would explain, as you studied the parts of me you wouldn’t recognize. After you left.
You’d point to all the things I’m still working on — all the sharp edges I’m still filing down, all the dark corners I’m still exploring — and you’d say: I can’t wait to see what grows up there. (Above all else, I remember you as hopeful.)
It took me a long time to understand that the soft, patient, insistent, unyielding voice in the back of my head is often yours — or at least, you’re the one that watched over it carefully as it grew, building a trellis to hold up and shape every tiny green shoot. Other voices of mine that ultimately have their roots in your meticulous handiwork: the one that demands gentleness, after trying and failing, before getting back up into it. The one that never runs out of eagerness for a new project. The one that makes liberal use of I love you, because God and goodness know that the universe does not make liberal use of time.
I wish you weren’t dead. That’s actually the long and short of every single one of the 50,000 words I’ve written about you since September 2014. At the end of the day… Jesus, what else even is there to say? I can’t explain — I actually suspect that I can’t even begin to imagine — how much I wish you weren’t dead.
You are. You always will be, for the rest of my life, because your life was 25 years long. Anything after that was never real — it only ever lived in my own expectation, the bright gasping vivid realness of which is most of what makes this hurt so badly. But your 25-year-long life was so good, and so valuable, and so important, and I am so desperately grateful that so much of it intersected with my own. Learning to think of you this way helped mitigate one of the things I hated the absolute most about your death: we had eleven gorgeous years together, but for ages after you died, the pain was sharp and in-focus, and the eleven years leading up were blurry and faded into the background. You were one of the most important people I’d ever met and it made me unfathomably angry that I couldn’t even think about you through all of my sorrow.
Some of the important heavy lifting of the last five years has been being able to see you for everything you were and weren’t and are and aren’t — your life, your death, the after — all at once. At first it felt like looking into the sun. As time passes, it feels more like trying to understand the scope of a mountain: step back. Further. Further. Keep going. Further. There it is.
(There you are.)
At the heart of everything is this: you taught me a lot of what I know about how to love myself and others well, and then when you died, you taught me how to lose love well. You taught me how to really deeply love parts of myself that I wish didn’t exist. Because while it’s true that the kindest and most empathetic parts of me were borne out of your death, it’s also true that if there were any universe where it was possible to say “I’d like to exchange the loveliest pieces of me to have my best friend back”, I would in a heartbeat. I wouldn’t even have to think about it. Take them back. They are beautiful and I love better because of them and I do not want them.
In this universe, that is not an option; in this universe, the choice was made for me. So, in this universe, the option I have is: an ugly death made you more beautiful, and you can cultivate any part of that truth you want.
You taught me how to do that — where to place the trellises, how to decide what to cut back and what to water. It isn’t quite true to say that I don’t want what loss gave me. What’s true is I don’t want the loss. And if that doesn’t matter — and it seems very much like it doesn’t — then what matters is that I am going to cultivate the fuck out of everything I learned from loving you and losing you.
The first essay I ever published contains the following lines about losing a baby and then sitting in the room that was going to be their nursery. They remain some of the truest things I know about loss:
I went into that room the next day, and the next day, and the day after that, and for every single one of those days I sat on the floor and I cried. I’m not here to tell you anything magical about any part of this (because every part of it is terrible and unfair and you do not deserve a single moment of it), but what I will tell you is what I wanted someone to tell me: someday, my dear, you will be able to sit in the room and the pain will not crush you. And: if today is not that day, that’s okay; it doesn’t mean that day isn’t coming. And, most importantly of all: when you sit in the room and the pain doesn’t crush you, you will love your baby just as fiercely as you ever did.
The pain fading does not mean that the love faded, too. Your love for your baby is more than the pain you felt when your pregnancy ended.
And that’s it. That’s the essay, the letter, the elegy, the joyful noise: the pain didn’t crush me, and I love you as fiercely as I ever did.
I have always thought about what I’d do if someone gave me a little more time with you. When you first died, the questions were mostly centered around understanding: what happened? why? Later, the questions were the answers I needed to be able to wrap you up: are you warm, are you safe, are you happy, is there any part of you that exists somewhere you’re okay? Now, it’s not questions at all. It’s: I love you. I miss you. I love you incredibly.
And it’s this, too. It’s: you taught me a lot of lessons that shaped me into who I am, and you loved me before, during, and after; you changed me because you loved me, not because you wanted me to be different. And I was grateful. And then your death taught me the hardest lesson I’d ever learned, and it was so heavy and I thought holy shit there’s no way I can carry this but then I realized: I didn’t stop learning how to do what you taught me, just because you died. And so I carried it. I still do. I never set it down. It never stopped being heavy. I just got stronger. And then I lost a baby, and I’m still not sure I’ll ever be able to carry one again, and for a little while there I looked at everything I’d learned how to be, with and without you, and I genuinely thought that I’d never learn my way back to any of it, but I remembered: no, I know how to do this.
And I am still, always, only ever, so grateful.
I still don’t know what the future will bring me, but I know I will meet it with strength. That’s what I would tell you, now, if someone gave me a little more time with you. It’d be a good follow-up to “I love you”: I love you, I’d get to say, and while you lived I took good enough notes that eventually, I turned into this.
This is how I loved you! I loved you like this: I met you and I’m better for it and it’s real. It’s deep in me, and I am very very alive and so, then, still, are pieces of you. Five years out, the only difference between the good things you gave me, then, and the good things you gave me, now, is that time has bloomed everything up.
You would be so, so, so goddamn proud of me. In the meantime, I am proud enough for both of us.
I wish you weren’t dead, and you are, and that is neither the beginning nor the end of the things I know about the way you were loved. You’re dead, and the pain didn’t crush me, and that is neither the beginning nor the end of the things I know about the way you’d love me back.
One thing you wouldn’t recognize: when you died I learned what it meant to really, really love someone, in a way that you’d thought implied permanence, to the extent anything can — and then to lose them anyway, and this freaked me right the fuck out. Some things in my life had been scary before then, but they were mostly bad things, you know? I was scared of the sorts of things we’re taught to be afraid of anyway; learning to avoid a bogeyman isn’t nearly as scary or sad as learning to avoid a thing as good as love. This was the first time that I’d learned that love can fold fear up into itself, too. I was 25 which I think is too young. I wish I’d had longer. I don’t think you were afraid of love in that way. (At least — I hope you weren’t. But maybe you were. When you died, I learned that there are some really deep truths that we’ll never get to share or understand, about even the people we love and know best.)
And I was afraid of the love, at first — especially that first year, when I was still writing you letters. I was afraid to love someone else the way I’d loved you: naive and child-like and borne out of fears and unusual vulnerability before being forged into strength and resilience. You died around the time I was learning to value the kind of confidence that for me involves faking it until I make it; that is, you died when I was finally learning to compose my own image. For a long time I was afraid that the newly-written grace I was learning to carry with me as I walked in the world, combined with how scary it was to think about loving someone the way I’d loved you if it wasn’t possible to inoculate myself against loss, meant that I was always going to struggle with genuine vulnerable love.
But it didn’t mean that. And I am so proud of what I’ve cultivated in myself in the five years since you died that in absence of being able to show you everything, I’ve fallen in love with the whole rest of the world and I’ve learned how to be the type of person who loves things about myself and shares them with people who love me. I am strong and kind and brave and tell stories with my whole self.
I don’t know of a love letter I could write you that would serve more effectively as a coda to everything you taught me while you lived. There’s a lot I don’t understand about the universe and God, but I know that I trust that someday, at the end of it all, I will be able to read it to you. We’ll pull up a couple of chairs at the end of the world and I will sit with you with my baby on my lap and I’ll tell you: I had such a big life and there were so many lovely parts of it. Listen. I missed you. I love you. I have so much to tell you. Listen.
I can’t tell you all of it yet because I haven’t gotten there — but by the time I’m done there will be so much to say, and you’ve always listened so well. Thank you for being there at the beginning, with a floppy cowlick and a brilliant smile. Thank you for being there at the end, with a hot cup of coffee and all the time in the universe to hear every story. And thank you for being there still, all throughout the in-between, deep in the messy beautiful heart of it: the thread stitching up every loving action, every ringing laugh, every hug, every birthday card, every phone call, every borrowed book. Every tiny triumph, every sunrise — everything, everything, everything. Listen: I’ve missed you. I love you. I have so much to tell you. Listen.
