on death and friendship
Dear Zavian,
A dear friend of mine is moving away this week. Tomorrow, I’ll go to help pack and move his last few big things into storage. It may well be the last time I step into the beautiful house near Ladd’s Addition where I’ve spent hundreds of hours over the past five years cultivating one of the richest friendships I’ve ever had.
The timing of his move is meaningful for me. Healing, even. This week, many many years ago, another dear friend of mine chose to make his exit from this world. He didn’t pack, and left without letting me know.
That hurt still lives in my body, somewhat, although it lessens a little every year. You could say that, in some ways, I’ve been trying to heal that wound for a long time. It’s probably not far from the truth, even, that the depth and types of friendships and connections I have in my life now, particularly with men, are a result of the trauma of my losing a foundational friendship to suicide.
Some people lose a beloved dog and go on to become veterinarians, or survive a car wreck and become ER doctors. Part of my path, I’m accepting, is to build healthy and deep connection with and between men.
I recently spoke with my biological brother, your uncle. He has lost a couple of people—elders—who were really special to him. He pointed out that it can be helpful for him to speak with others who knew the person you lost. He is one of the only people in my life now who knew my friend before he took his own life. To my surprise, my brother was right. It helped, just to talk for a while.
For more than a decade, for reasons that are both clear and mysterious to me, my brother and I didn’t talk. I’m especially grateful for the conversations we get to have now.
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Today I played tetris in the back of a moving truck. I love packing, the energy of releasing all the things, for a while, from their daily duties. I love the opportunity the act of moving offers, if we choose, to engage with the materials in our lives, and recommit to them, or pass them along. The inevitable paring down. I love how our things interact with one another in a moving truck: chairs on desks under tables upside down and sideways, supporting each other in new and unique ways, unknowing of the adventure ahead. To protect and organize the belongings my friend chose to keep was my way of blessing his journey onward.
That’s part of the healing; to get to say goodbye in the way that I want to say goodbye.
I’ve had a lot of practice at goodbyes. I was even proud of it for a while, referred to it as a “skill”, as if separation were something to be revered. But it was deeper than that—there was something about the practice of letting go that helped me breathe easier. For a long time before that, I held everything close, protective of the rare but potent connections I felt with material things and also humans, and fearing above all else the absence of connection with them.
Fear is a powerful teacher. There are times when it says go or stay and it is the right thing to do, but how to know what’s right but to listen when it is quiet, and to feel what’s underneath the fear. To befriend the digging beneath the surface of things, and to practice that, often.
And so now, with regard to my friend, I choose to let go, to allow freedom and ease and breath to happen, and to practice knowing that a goodbye is not a goodbye necessarily, unless it is, and then to be present and open in those moments, for we can never know what might come through.
In the last few weeks, you’ve started to wave. It’s delightful, not just a little wrist thing, but your whole arm, and a smile to boot. What it means, or whether others wave back seems to be immaterial at this point, but once or twice, you and I have waved as I’ve headed to work.
te quiero, poco mono.
*wave*