Three years ago to the day, I was basking in the Florida sun with six of my beautiful friends. Photos of the trip find me every once in a while and always give me a laugh — they’re on Facebook, in a frame or two in our homes, floating in the Apple cloud somewhere.
This morning, they’re sprawled across my kitchen table. It’s strange to see photos printed out anymore — it seems like the only time memories are tangible like this are huge episodes in life. Weddings. Birthday parties. Baby showers.
And of course, after a death. Preparing for funerals or memorials is often one of the only times we hold a photograph, stroke the face of a loved one we’ve lost. In this digital age, where we share photos constantly, quickly, passively, a printed photo seems so much more finite. Concrete. Real. Sad. Holding a photograph is reaching for one more moment, one more memory.
My dear, sweet friend Steven passed away last night after a year-long battle with cancer. He was 24, almost 25. He was engaged to a wonderful woman. He was the cousin of my best friend’s husband, also one of my closest friends. He was my next-door neighbor for a time, one of my first friends in college, my vacation buddy. He was an amazing fraternity brother to some of the greatest men I’ll ever know.
I found myself trying to lock eyes with him in all those photos, flipping through them faster and faster, as if to say, “please tell me this time hasn’t passed. Tell me you’re not really gone.”
Tell me you’re kidding. Tell me I’m going to see you at the next party. Tell me you’ll eat all my chips again. Tell me I’ll hear you yell “Go Cards!” louder than anyone else. Tell me you’ll sing to us. Tell me tell me tell me.
After a while, I adjusted my eyes, and I remembered there were more people in the pictures alongside Steven. I had forgotten, and when I looked at them, and at myself, and all I could think was, “tell me that I am not watching these people I love change forever.” But I am. We are.
Death feels so abstract to most of us, until it hits this closely and strips us of our innocence and makes us question all that we thought we believed about the universe, and the sun and the moon and the air and the energy and everything that allows us to continue our state of being.
Seeing my best friend and her husband during this time has shown me how differently we all grieve. For hours last night after Steven passed, we sat. Cried. Stared. Laughed. We drank whiskey and Cokes. We held hands. We talked when we felt like it, thanked each other, called ourselves selfish for certain thoughts and apologized for others. We anxiously checked Facebook, waiting for that first post we’d see, wondering what we’d say.
It was an experience everyone has eventually, one that we’ll carry with us for the rest of our lives. It is an experience that came too soon, too early, too unfortunately. It always does, I suppose.
Our generation gets a lot of knocks about social media habits, but if there’s one thing I’ve realized in the last year — especially through watching how friends and family are coping with the loss of Steven — it’s the importance of transparency, and of truth. Of raw, complete feelings. However they come and go, rise and fall, they’re real and meaningful. However embarrassing, or stupid, or angry, or mean, or joyful, they help.
This morning, and for many mornings hereafter, those feelings will come through in waves, as 140-character messages or captions or Facebook posts on our laptops; as poster boards or scrapbooks or wall art; as stories around a table; as lumps in our throats; as crackly, hardened tears on our cheeks. It hurts. To the core. To the bone.
Steven was one of those people that felt deeply, and acted honestly, and shared always. Our photos can’t do that, and he can’t any longer, and he won’t ever again. But one of the most beautiful things about living is that we can — we can feel a million things at once sometimes, and nothing at others — and we should. For him. And for us.
“Heavy,” a poem by Mary Oliver, found me this morning, and this quote offered me a brief moment of peace while we mourn the loss of our Steven.
“It is not the weight you carry
but how you carry it —
books, bricks, grief —
it’s all in the way
you embrace it, balance it, carry it
When you cannot, and would not,
put it down.”
Rest peacefully, my friend. We miss you. We love you.
