Loss

A content warning here for death and grief

This week I have to write about death. I’ve lost a lot of people, and this is something that still, years later, feels impossible to talk about. Putting something into words is a way of making sense of it, and how can you possibly make sense of death?

Last month, my cousin died. She was beautiful and vibrant and had the most amazing laugh. We spent summers together when we were young, stayed together somewhere in Maine near a lake. We went into the woods and pretended to be lost children with no parents - this was a favorite game - pretending to have no parents. We wrote each other messages on birch bark and looked for interesting bugs and pretended we could navigate by starlight. We were fascinated by anything cooked over a fire. I was scared of the canoe, scared of fish, but she was brave.

In high school, I lost two friends in a car accident. I lived in California by then and we’d gone on the strangest overnight bus trip to Disneyland with the senior class on the last day of school - there is nothing weirder than being sexually harassed by Donald Duck. They hadn’t gone with us, and we got off of the bus after being up all night and blinking hard in the sunlight at the school’s edge to have teachers meet us there to tell us about the accident. Graduation was marked by memorials. They hadn’t even been drinking, just enjoying the freedom of being young and finished with the stifling institution of public school.

I lost a lot of friends to overdose in the years that followed. One day we were doing poetry readings at the bar and the next, someone was gone. Just absent from this life.

In 2014, I lost my best friend. How to even talk about it? So much of grief feels private because it is the most vulnerable I know how to feel. That kind of loss can’t be put into words, the words cheapen it. And yet I’m tasked with putting this into words in a book. Because her death changed me. One day she was my best friend and we laughed until we physically couldn’t. She was so funny, acerbic and brilliant. She could make anything - a painting, a photograph, a song. To lose her was to lose a kind of light that we can never get back. Never again will we see the way that she shone. She would have laughed at that sentence. She would have said I was being too sentimental. But how to talk about death without sentiment? What is a human being but a light? An illumination. Another way of seeing.

In the years that followed, we lost so many of my coworkers, I can’t tell you how many. I list their names in my head and I fear I’ve forgotten someone. Someone whose body I knew like I knew my own. Someone I talked to on set about the joys and problems that were everything at the time but have faded to this trick that is memory. This is the thing about grief - when it is sharpest is when we remember the most about a person. When the smell of their hair still lingers, the scar on their hand, the way they mispronounced a word. All of the little details that make us up. When we can remember all of those details, their loss feels unfathomable. It hits so hard you can barely remember how to breathe. There is no pain I know like that kind of pain. And then the pain eases. You can’t stop time from passing, and over time, you breathe again. In and out, you breathe, but the loss is almost worse then because it is total. Because with the pain fades the memory. There is no way around this.

I’ve made these deaths into political work. That’s the only thing I’ve known to do with them. I’ve gone to the Capitol and I’ve talked to Congresspeople, to their staffers who are crass and cynical in the worst way. They’ve asked me why I was there and I’ve told them. Too much death. Too much cutting to the bone. And once in a while, they’ve seemed to listen. I’ve screamed the names of my friends at a protest in Washington Square Park, surrounded by red umbrellas. That was a kind of grieving and a kind of healing.

But some days it feels as though this pit of grief inside of me is the deepest well. Like it will never run dry. There is no amount of political change that can make a death redeemable. I think now of Gaza and Lebanon. I think of Iran. I can’t make it make sense. At the end of the day, words do cheapen. At the end of the day, there are no words.