Last night, in the Faneuil Hall Hyatt in Boston, full of too much espresso martini from a neighborhood bar… I read an obituary that made me cry. I had only a very indirect, long-obsolete association with the departed.
My partner was planning where to sightsee the next day. I cried silently in the bathroom for about three minutes, then came out and rejoined him.
There was no reason for me to have Googled what I did, when I did, beyond the passage of still more time, and the enhanced fellow-feeling that booze tends to bring forth. Whatever the reason, I did it, and one puzzle piece led to another, and now I know.
Something that stings – aside from a person who was just alive no longer being alive – is that there are a lot more of these moments to come. People I didn’t know, but knew of, with no present relation to my life, dying and my learning about it, a steady-mounting pile of knowledge with no outlet, no purpose, and in some cases accompanied by the salt burn of some deep but fleeting connection from long ago.
I recently watched a video Natalie Wynn of Contrapoints did with a lesbian comedy channel. The main reason for her appearance was to recount a tragic vignette from a few years prior in which she had fallen helplessly in love with her best friend – an experience the hosts deemed heavily relatable to a lesbian audience. In the throes of her fixation, Natalie, of course, had felt positive it was all over, that she was done for, that every thrill from then on would pale in comparison to that one unrequited love.
Equally predictable was the fact that none of this doomsday scenario came to pass. She made it out the other side.
If you come here with any frequency, you know I’ve spent most of my life going hard, like Natalie. But I mention this only to say that my sodden simpishness is matched in intensity by my strange and unforeseen resilience. Once bandaids are cruelly ripped – once that initial dread is dealt with – I am often alarmed at how quickly I move forward.
Perhaps this is clearer here in Boston than it could be anywhere else, seeing how nearly twenty years ago, I too was in love with my best friend, and she was in love with Boston, and so I felt, vicariously, like I had a heart full of Boston, had her affection for the city coming out of my own pores. Now, it’s simply a fun place to visit and doesn’t carry additional significance in any way I can still feel.
This crazy pattern of impassioned attachment, then scorched-earth detachment, lends itself to a trail of broken associations – a constellation of conceptual beings sans status updates. Which is why unwelcome nuggets of knowledge about people ceasing to be will continue to find me as the years pass.
And I have to trust that, like all the other things I thought would end me, I can handle it. I can cry in a bathroom for a few minutes (or more) in whatever city I’m in.
A quick note: I’ve been meaning to write something like this ever since last year when, via social media, I witnessed a friend of a friend lose her ex-husband, and I discovered there are think-pieces and support groups out there devoted specifically to that unique sort of grief – grief that could easily be de-legitimized by others on account of the mourner having (or no longer having) any “claim” to the deceased.
Here’s a good quote to sum all this up; it lives rent-free in the ole noggin and comes from a now-deleted Redditor whom I’d surely credit if I could.
The Sold Kingdom 