grief

“Meet me on the Moon,” I’d said. “If one of us ever dies, that’s where we should meet. We should bring raincoats and flashlights, just in case.”

I said this to a third grade friend, whose name I can’t recall, and then we immediately got into a fight as to whether Snoopy or Garfield was cuter. (Obviously, Snoopy, right?) But it was an excellent plan and one I made, at least in my mind, with nearly everyone I’ve ever loved.

Earth's Moon among the stars. Photo by Josh Miller on Unsplash

In just a year and a half's time, my two “in case of emergency” people died. One was my Dad, whose presence in my life was colossal. He was the loudest, smartest person in the room, full of radio stories and Topps baseball cards. You will never meet a person who loved dogs more than him (except possibly myself), and even though he hugged like a Texan— which is just a hard pat on the back—his life force was like a giant swaddling blanket. He’d hate hearing that, because he didn’t like the gooey stuff. But too bad.

I was always making him take “personality” quizzes online and he never understood the point of them. “So I can understand you better,” I’d say. “I like Monty Python. And bacon. What else is there to understand?”

The glow itself didn’t come from him. Warmth wasn’t really his thing. But when I was super young, he’d wake me and my brother up sometimes in the middle of the night to look at the icy rings of Saturn through his telescope. Or the Moon when it was in a particularly rare phase. I’d occasionally sneak into the room when he was watching the original Cosmos on PBS. I’d stroll past his bookshelf, full of theoretical themes and astrophysics. This is where his glow was kept.

We emailed each other YouTube links of songs we liked. I’m not sure he always listened to mine, but it was our way of talking without talking. “Listen to the lyrics.” Or “Get to the bridge when the slide guitar kicks in.” It was between the notes where we found a Dad/Daughter language in which we were both fluent.

-Don Henley, Jackson Browne. Blind Pilotwww.youtube.com

Once, not even that long ago, I proposed this to him: “What if what scientists perceive to be “dark matter” is really just ghosts? We sense something is there, in the fabric of space, but we can’t account for it, because it’s just spirits who were once here and are now gone. Do you think that’s possible?” He didn’t even look up from his iPad. “No. Absolutely not.”

When he got sick with leukemia, I was sitting with him when the hospice chaplain came to visit. My Dad, who certainly wasn’t religious, surprisingly asked, “Do you think we’re reincarnated? Because if so, I’d like to come back as a professional golfer. If I come back as a ballroom dancer, please shoot me and let me start over.”

He then mentioned a fear of coming back as a “water bug.” I said I didn’t think that would happen and he asked how could I be sure. I said, “It’s just the kinda thing you know.”

I didn’t believe he could ever really leave. He’d announced he was leaving for at least 20 years before, (cancer twice, clogged arteries, you name it) and this time around, I thought it was impossible. He had a big birthday party and passed the next morning in his sleep.

Just a Thursday like any given Thursday. I cried noises I didn’t think I could make and then I went to the Moon. I hunted through the cold for remnants of life. I combed through layers of dark matter, asking spirits or professional golfers to reveal themselves. Nothing answered me back.

silhouette of man holding flashlight Photo by Linus Sandvide on Unsplash

On a different Thursday, a year and half prior, I saw my best friend (and second-in-command “case of emergency”) Jordan for the last time. I’d dragged him to a dumb “Awards Season” documentary screening, wearing the completely wrong dress that he’d said looked like an Atari game.

He was off that night. But Hollywood is off, so tilted backwards that if anyone stumbles inside of it, they actually seem balanced. Who isn’t off when zombies roam Sunset screaming obscenities and no one seems to notice? The CNN building blink, blink, blinks its red light into our hopeful smog, mistaking us for Time Square, daring us to report how f-ing crazy it all is.

Jordan and I had been sealed the summer of 1997. Boyfriends, apartments, girlfriends, roommates, and dogs came and went, but we were sealed. My romantic crush on him ebbed and flowed until we finally made out for a year in 2005. That put a crimp in the pureness of our friendship and we had to take a few years off for the resentment. I wonder, now, what kind of memories we could have filled in those missing years.

He was that kind of friend who made up nicknames for EVERY. SINGLE. GUY I’d ever even so much as gone on one date with. Star Trek Man. Loud Talker. Crunch the Numbers Guy. The kind of friend with whom you have so many inside jokes, you can’t keep them straight. We wrote lyrics to movie theme songs and would just voice memo them to each other all day long.

He’d gotten really sad around 2016, but hadn’t we all? He got mopey. Started eating poorly, stopped making eye contact. I don’t know if that’s the year he went and bought himself a gun, but that’s what he did.

Four weeks after I saw him, he texted me alternate lyrics to the theme song for the movie Meatballs (which was oddly and hilariously just something about Bill Murray’s face), and then a few days later, he took his own life. I’ve always hated the expression “take your own life,” because it begs the obvious question…took it where? Where did he take it? It makes it sound like he took it to Hawaii on vacation. That life—it was so heavy on me, it seemed impossible to lift. He was my boulder. He was an unmovable green stone that lived inside every tunnel in the gray matter of my mind, dipping in and out like sugar in rum, exploding into light like a Supernova.

an artist's impression of a green spiral in space Photo by Javier Miranda on Unsplash

And so when he left, I got untethered—and not in a good way. I just couldn’t keep my feet in this atmosphere. My darkness turned to rage and then to guilt and then to darkness again. And yeah, that’s all laid out in those pop psych books about grief, but what they don’t tell you is how quiet the in-between moments are. How still and creepy and unkind your own thoughts can be, as if a piece of sepia-toned gauze has been stuck between you and the rest of the world. Once people stop texting “How are you?” you realize the world has continued to spin, even when people you love fall off of it.

So for the last few months, I’d leave my Moon expeditions and bounce back down to Earth to try and fall in love or reconnect or watch the news to understand the nature of man and power and all that comes with it. Ya know, whatever it is we’re supposed to do when we’re alive. But as it turns out, Tinder dates don’t like to hear about this kind of stuff.

Him: “Would you like another martini?”

Me: “…And ANOTHER thing about death and dying is…”

Him: “Check, please!”

So, back up I’d go to the deepest craters, digging for proof of death. Holding my flashlight in its brightest position, searching for signs, as Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot loomed in the background. This same blue dot containing all of my Dad and Jordan’s old photos and trophies and passwords to social media accounts that seem impossible to have ever held such meaning. Wondering if I found them out there, will they know me? Will they remember me?

Earth with clouds above the African continent Photo by NASA on Unsplash

But it turns out I have not been standing on any rock at all. I’ve been in a billion mile dust cloud made up of all the things I wished I’d ever said and done. There is no point of singularity I can return to, as it all just keeps churning outwards. And as you’re hurling through the milky swirls, you don’t have time to grab on to a single thing.

It doesn’t matter how many trillions of times I forget and command Siri to “Call Jordan” or “Call Dad.” Those sound waves become slack tides, and sit stationary, motionless, unable to surf. Though lately when I’ve accidentally asked my iPhone to “Call Dad,” it chooses to “Call Dan”— a guy I went on one awful date with on Bumble. Poor Dan must be so confused…and terrified.

So, I’m touching back down to re-enter the atmosphere for as long as I can. To stop banging my head against the same walls. To try not to turn every heartbreak into “ninth grade Cecily, listening to The Cure on repeat.” Or maybe the opposite…DEFINTELY turn every heartbreak into “ninth grade Cecily listening to The Cure on repeat.” To accept the fact that I’m drawn to people with flaws bigger than my own, perhaps so I can hide inside them like a puzzle piece that never quite fits.

Two pink hearts float on a black background Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

And yes, while the “How are you?” texts stop coming, love, even in death, is stronger than any answer you could even give to that insipid question. It exists on its own, whether you’re of sound mind or not. It exists, even if the Moon contingency plan seems elusive.

Reentry from the darkest corners of time, space, faulty neurotransmitters, and loss is a birthright we can’t afford to ignore. So we shouldn't ignore it. We must remember that although we are sometimes left with a void bigger than any black hole, we are the light that escapes. I think of that light, much like time itself, as though it were handfuls of glitter, floating aimlessly through our bodies and the bodies of everyone we've ever known. Our dogs, our late-night strawberry wine crushes, our family, Jordan—and yeah, even that weird Bumble date, Dan, (I guess.)

We must find a way to tether ourselves into the present, even those of us who are constantly searching. Because we will always be searching—for what we once knew, and what we haven't met yet. For me, it's in my dreams and it's always my dad. We're supposed to go to some play or football game or concert. Keys in hand, I call out for him and he doesn't answer. I can still smell his vanilla pipe tobacco lingering in this in-between space, but there's no trace of him for what seems like hours and then I wake up. (Although in one dream, we were headed to the Super Bowl and he briefly appeared just to taunt that my beloved Cowboys were gonna lose. Jokes on him because we hadn't been to the Super Bowl in decades.)

I’ll get back to the Moon soon enough. Until then, I’ll try to stop asking first dates, especially those I meet on Tinder, to be my “in case of emergency” contacts. Too soon, Cecily.