Bidding Mystery Goodbye
Finding closure after losing an enigmatic friend to stage 4 cancer
I’ve wrote about it before, in brief. Slightly over a year ago as I made my way home from a sleepover at a friend’s on misty weekend morning, my phone toss and turned in my pocket.
“You’ve got a new message.”
Hey Terry:
My cancer is probably going to kill before the year out. That’s the big secret I’ve be hiding from people. But, listen. I’m not tell you this because I want you to feel bad for me, seriously, I’m not. I’ve lived a really great life. Right now, I’m just going around tell people who I think are awesome, just how awesome I think they are. And you, Mr. Munn [sic], are realy awesome. I wish you all the luck in the world and hope all is well in Denmrk.
XO
Sterling [full name redacted]
My hands trembled. Tears streamed down my faces, whipped across my cheeks in the cold morning breeze. Being an emotional creature whose heart rules the brain, I know goodbyes were never my strength.
I felt it coming. I am losing a dear friend to stage 4 cancer.
The Cryptic
Sterling’s entrance into my life is as mysterious as the gentle breeze picking up under the vanilla twilight. His presence on the Internet is foggy at best. When I first met him in 2010, I tried the old school trick of Googling him — but Google had almost nothing on him.
Besides having a blog on Tumblr, via which I met him, and a Google Wave account, you can easily discount his presence as the ghost of the Internet. Given his quizzical yet coherently-written rants, I thought Sterling was, perhaps, simply the manifestation of undiscovered intelligence and unchannelled angst lurking and eventually bubbling up to the surface on the vast world wide web.
Even after writing to each other a few years, I only know he formerly worked in the modelling industry in New York City in the early 80s, and was professionally trained in ballet which earned him roles in some broadway performances until his retirement at the Melbourne Arts Festival in 1995, .
The blood of Kawānanakoa line flowed in his veins, but he jokingly told me that he wasn’t in line for the throne and it didn’t matter to him anymore because the Kingdom of Hawaii was officially overthrown.
Ah, Hawaii. I have always wanted to visit the charming island nestled in the middle of the Pacific. I could drop by for a visit someday, I naively thought.
Sterling was fiercely intelligent, stubbornly righteous and unforgivingly persistent. That was the triple-edged sword (if it even exists metaphorically) of our personal ties. I looked up to him as a carrier of truth unafraid of speaking his mind; a brewing academic who has a personal zero-tolerance towards bullshit and pseudo-science; and a gay man confident and comfortable in his own shoes — and sexuality.
I wrote to him when I felt wronged and sidelined in life. Vehemently private, Sterling offered his phone number to me.
I just wanted to know, that if you don’t have anyone to talk to, you can always always talk to me. All that matters to me, is that you don’t feel that you don’t have anyone who understands or cares. That’s all.
When I got comfortable with it, I came out to him in an email dated 16th June, 2010. I was scared like a wet cat as I waited nervously for his reply. Will he think I am coming on to him (which was not my intention)? Will he think I violated his trust for not telling him straight on? His reply was hilarious, yet very heartwarming.
Oh I knew you were gay, but it’s not the basis our friendship. I don’t view sexuality, gay, straight, or bi as an important issue — well, or I should say, a “relevant” issue to whether or not I like somebody. To put it simply, I like you a lot, and like I said, somehow I knew you were gay, but it would not have mattered to me what you were. I would still like you just the same.
Also, moving to Denmark was a life-changing and stressful event to me. It was during those long winter nights when I was lonely, depressed and homesick that I seeked solace in Sterling’s emails. He undestood my pain. The solitude that I was suffocating in, that endlessness that I feared. He was that stranger who, after seeing me soaking wet in the middle of a downpour, handed me his umbrella and told me that it’ll be okay.
Our interactions on a professional capacity was, however, transient. We were working on a website together, me being in charge of mostly code-checking and backend programming. The project never really came to fruition, and we had a major fallout towards the end. We had a disagreement on a topic unrelated to work on the then nascent Google+, and it unfortunately spilled over, soured and poisioned our professional relationship. I still had the chat logs from that day, timestamped 30th of July, 2011.
Under the graces of Murphy’s Law, the joint site we were managing just had to go down after a server crash, and Sterling sent an angry, stinging email accusing me of sabotaging the project.
We didn’t talk for a day. Uncommon for Sterling, he admitted his mistake, and we banded together once again, got the site up and running.
The Loss
10 months ago was when I stopped hearing from Sterling. After he sent me an email telling about his diagnosis, we had a few brief exchanges. I figured that he was either rendered too exhausted by the chemotherapy, or that he was spending his remaining time with family and friends who are the dearest to him. I didn’t take offence — if ever placed in the same situation, I would have done exactly the same.
Sterling’s sister put up a message on his blog, announcing his passing from our realm on the 28th of July. Despite her intentions of taking down his blog a month after the announcement, she never did. Did she forget about the collection of Sterling’s ramblings, or did she stopped caring? Did she lose administrative rights to access the backend? The answer is up in the air, but that was not the answer I was looking for.
After that announcement I found myself crying. But why? Our relationship was platonic. I have never seen his face before. He could be anyone.
Still, a life lost is a life lost. I don’t care if Sterling was part of the bloodline of the aristocratic ruling family. I don’t give a monkey if Sterling was a model-turned-professional-ballet-dancer. Sterling, just like any one of us right now, was a living, breathing human being — each with a unique life story and experience that defined the person we are today, right now, this very moment.
More importantly, Sterling taught me how to belief in myself. As a person who has battled the demons of bottomed-out self-esteem and almost non-existent self-worth, Sterling gave me the strength to stand on my own two feet. He was the one who made me not shy away from my own reflection in the mirror, for telling me that I am who I am, that I should be unabashed or fearless of the image in the looking glass.
He taught me that humans are complex, dynamic and multifaceted creatures. Going through a major depression episode in life forced me to simplify people I see in my daily life, reducing them into cutout cartoon caricatures of single dimension. Not wanting to hurt myself further, I had chosen not to look any further, dive any deeper or explore any wider of the human psyche.
Yet, in his own flavourful and candid way of seeing life, and being such an enigmatic person himself, Sterling taught me to appreciate the flair among the flaws in people.
Learning to let go
I still have Sterling’s emails on my phone. I have always been reluctant to let that part of his memories disappear. Letting him go feels like burning down a bridge that has helped me cross so many rivers and ravines.
I still dream of Sterling. Be it him and I getting into a major argument over the most minuscule, ridiculous topic at the heat of the moment; or be it us discussing about something utterly nerdy and complex. His image, an embodiment of his attitude and personality, lives within the deepest recesses of my mind.
Letting go means I relinquish the wish-you-were-here thoughts whenever I visited beautiful, new places. Sterling, an advent skiier, was the first thing that came to my mind as I travelled to Interlaken and the nearby foothills of the beautiful Alps. The gentle Danish seaside summer breeze reminds me of how Sterling adores the warmth and the briny sea breeze of Oahu. When flying halfway across the global on an airplane, flying away from my comfort zone in Singapore to Denmark, I feel myself living in the shadow of his jet-setting life.
Letting go means I need to forgo the thoughts of how Sterling would have happily jumped on board on my pro-vaccination stance on public health and medication; of how he would fawn like a little fan boy over Martin Kongsted’s songs.
But I more importantly, I learned that letting go does not mean erasing Sterling’s memory, or about deleting his emails. Letting go means that I have to come to terms with his permanent absence from the physical world; that I have to learn how to walk out from the past — reminiscing the good and bad times is a bitter-sweet experience, but the very act itself also ensnared my own progress of attaining a much-needed sense of closure and completion.
Moving on means taking in the good things that Sterling has taught me — to love myself unconditionally; to be appropriately stubborn and persistent at the right moments in life; to continuously educate and improve myself. But that doesn’t stop there — I also want to learn from Sterling’s mistakes. We share the same hotheadedness, the very trait that almost strangled our relationship. Our rush to judgement, and that occasional slip-up where the heart rules over the brain no matter the overweighing evidence.
I will carry on a part of Sterling’s legend. When I shed another tear for Sterling, it was not for his death, but my gratitude of having the honour of meeting someone so colourful, inspiring, intelligent, stubborn and fierce.
If you shall indulge me, allow me to finish this tribute with a quote from Sogyal Rinpoche:
…when we finally know we are dying, and all other sentient beings are dying with us, we start to have a burning, almost heartbreaking sense of the fragility and preciousness of each moment and each being, and from this can grow a deep, clear, limitless compassion for all beings.
