The Folly of Looking Back: A Treatise on Grief. Part II

 "Everyone I've loved has gone away

Died, 

or left

or just forgot to stay"

       Garbage. ©1995

 I used to love this old song back in the 90’s by the band Garbage.

My junior high love of that song is a profoundly tragic irony.  

"Sometimes took for granted, Sometimes turned away

Sometimes didn't say what I meant to say" 

The first of my grade school friends died the same schoolyear I discovered that song and wore it out.  In another twist of brutal irony many of the major players in my life story were present or part of that first time I watched helplessly as time stood still.

 I was at C’s house when the call came.  C’s mom had just picked us up from a movie (Romy and Michelle’s High School Reunion) when Lolo called and told us that Calvin had died.
It's been 27 years this May, and I still remember exactly where I was standing when that call came in.  If I close my eyes I can still see the long parlor room of C’s house, I can see where she was standing and what she was wearing. I can smell the quintessential 90s fragrance C and I had doused ourselves in before heading out that evening. But I can’t remember exactly what day it was.  

Memory’s tricky like that. My brain remembers it being a Friday; the date on Cal’s headstone would have made it that Friday, but the obituary says one day later.  I know for sure her accident happened on May 1, 1997; that call forever seared into my brain, I remember immediately connecting the time of her accident and fusing it into memory I can't ever escape. Because it happened exactly at the time of the play I was in at the end of 8th grade.  I recall vividly getting the videotape from my grandparents. 

Rewatching it.

Thinking about being on stage, trying to pinpoint exactly where I was the moment of the accident. Wanting to have a definitive marker in my mind.

 Before. 

After. 

Rewind. 

Play. 

Before. 

After. 

Watching myself walk on stage and having absolutely no clue that at that exact moment life was changing, and it wouldn’t ever really be “normal” again.
I was the youngest of the group at 13.
My friends had all already turned 14.

 Babies.

 All of us. 

Less that 6 months later, my neighbor (and long time semi-secret crush) died at the start of Fall Break.  A tragic accident on what should have been a camping trip to look back on fondly in later years.
M died the night before the Homecoming dance Sr yr
Sway died in 2013
Lolo died in summer 2014
C died in 2018
J died a few months ago.*  

And of course this week** I said good-bye, permanently and irrevocably, without chance for reconciliation, to the most formative friendship of my life. ***

Trauma is a funny thing.  For some, it makes you scared to live.  Every bad outcome bumps one more thing right to the top on the list of "never do thats" that you keep a running list of in your head. 

 For others, the things we said we’d never do become the very things that entice us to try to dull the pain. Not long after we lost our first friend, one of our group went on to lose a sibling and a second best friend in the late 2000s, before we lost her in 2014. I often wonder how different things would be today had she never had to make that call to us that balmy May night. How much of a catalyst for her own untimely death was the tragic stacking of so much great pain in so few years of life?

The most significant childhood friendships I had are gone. One after another, they all fell like dominoes.

But I am an amalgamation of all the things I’ve picked up from them through the years.

 I can’t smell a stick of Cinnamon gum without being transported right back to monthly Friday night junior high dances. To dancing to BoyzIIMen (if you'll believe it, One Sweet Day) with Sway.

 I can’t make French Toast for my own children's sleepovers without reminiscing about waking up early, long before Lolo would wake when I would stay at her house. Sitting at the island talking to her mom about clothes and boys and if I should cut my hair while she made French Toast for us for breakfast.  

Lime green nail polish will forever remind me of J and our foray into what we thought were such edgy fashion choices. Of her giving me shit for years for my absurd press-on nails, an obsession I developed after a summer spent watching Real World Miami on MTV. 

 A hundred million things will remind me of C, from a quick trip to Wendy’s on a warm summer night, to a Jewel song on a 90’s radio station. C, with whom I spent the vast majority of my junior high years. C, who knew me longest, knew me best, stood by me through my worst phases, and took me as I came, eccentricities and all.

 So much of me is taken up by memories of those who have gone before, that sometimes I wonder how much of me is actually really left; if maybe I’m not so much me anymore as I am all the bits and pieces of what’s left of them. 

But there’s one thing I know, for certain and without any hope to change it, I’ll never smell CK One without thinking about Calvin, and the first time I ever got a phone call that made time stop for a minute.

*at the time of this writing. It has since been a more than a year.

**this post was intended to publish in April, however, life had a different plan

*** this list, while extensive, is by no means exhaustive, sadly.