Fifteen Redux

I know I should feel concerned about what I am sitting on, here on the concrete in front of the mall. But my mind is so filled with his voice repeating over and over: “He’s gone. He’s gone. He’s gone.”

There is a rush of noise around my head but my face is buried in my arms which are braced on my knees. I feel like I may pass out or throw up or both, but I can’t do more than just sit and focus on the torn cuffs of my jeans. I can’t even cry. I tried to force the tears—my face crumpled and my throat closed. I felt my eyes squeeze shut but there wasn’t any reaction. There wasn’t even a puddle up. I can hear my friends trying to get my attention, but my thoughts have turned to Megan and how her heart is going to burst and how I can’t wait to tell her until I see her because I have no way of getting to her. I hear my friends now, “Are you ok?” “What happened?” “Who called?”

What do I tell them? I can’t even tell my best friend that the boy she fell in love with years ago is dead. I can’t dial her number and tell her that because of the extension cord cutting off his air supply, his brain was damaged beyond repair and there wasn’t a chance of him coming back to be him. There. There is the honesty I’ve needed for the past week. It’s so simple, spelled out in terms that can’t be misconstrued. But words like “possibility” and “maybe” have been thrown around so often this past week that it felt ok to pretend he wasn’t in the hospital and that he wasn’t dying.

But I knew he was dying. I knew it, Colin knew it, and Megan knew it. We had been telling ourselves he’d be ok and by this time next summer we’d all be out in that field pretending the world wasn’t going on around us. But Chris’ deliberate actions wanted this. It was one of those moments where I didn’t know whether to accept his decision or vehemently fight it.

Fighting it wouldn’t have fixed things either way.

I looked at my phone and dialed Megan. How do you decide when the right time is to tell someone that a person they love is dead? School won’t teach you that. Life doesn’t either, really.

When I hear her voice, I start crying. Only then does it hit me.

I tell her to sit down and take a few deep breaths, but she knows from the traitor tears in my voice that this will be her darkest day yet. I make sure Brandi takes her home, and then I hang up the phone.

I don’t really know where to go from here.

* * *

It was just a week earlier.

I was cleaning my house. Summer was tangible now—I woke up every morning to the sounds of the summer baseball league at my high school, just across the street. Sometimes the neighbors would be in their backyard jumping on their trampoline, or playing in the sprinklers.

My phone rang. It was Colin. We hadn’t talked in a long while.

“I have something to tell you.”

The first time he said those six words to me, the context was a late night conversation between two phones, stretched over miles of the state. He’d whispered ‘I love you’ and then made me promise to call the next day. That had been five months ago.

My heart stuttered, only for a moment.

“Chris is in the hospital.”

He spared me the details. I’d find those out later: through my mother, who just so happened to work with his; Megan, who was a sucker for details or maybe just couldn’t help overhearing; from Colin, in the drunken phone calls that would occur more often in our future.

My hands shook and I collapsed on my floor, but I dialed Megan. I had to. Colin had said there was hope. I was very much wishing for it, regardless.

Megan acted numb. Unaffected. I understood why. I couldn’t judge her for it.

* * *

The Colorado Springs Memorial Hospital doesn’t list any strict visiting hours on their website. Apparently, visitors can stay as long as they feel necessary.

I was hoping someone could define necessary for me.

The Intensive Care Unit is on the 4th floor. That’s where he was. That’s where he died.

Hospitals have always reminded me of my own failings. I’m in a perpetual state of clumsy. Scars cover my body. I’ve been in a cast twice. Crutches once. Still no stitches, knock on wood.

I can only hope to be this lucky until I’m ready to leave the Earth.

The floors are too shiny for me. The lights reflect and trigger headaches. The scent of sanitized plastic and sickness, covered by that specially scented doctor soap and the rubber of gloves triggers my allergies. The security guards scare me and the nurses are intimidating.

He’s plugged into a machine. It’s breathing for him. The doctors use terms like “damage” and “swelling” which really just means he’s not cognitive and probably will have no brain function for the rest of his life.

I can’t recognize him. Maybe a part of me doesn’t want to. Denial runs deep in my family.

Beeps reverberate around his room, signifying breath but not life, not really. The TV is on but the irony is lost on me in that moment. At least the sound is turned down. It’s not like his eyes are open.

I’m feeling trapped by the gray walls and the cheap décor.

I leave.

* * *

I lied. I didn’t go to the hospital.

I don’t know what floor the ICU is on. I just know that’s where he died.

I wasn’t feeling brave the day Colin called to have me come say goodbye.

* * *

Megan’s house is an old, low sitting brick monstrosity. Before her parents started renovating, it looked as if it was still harboring the original orange shag carpet as well as the avocado and tan linoleum. The cabinets were dark laminated wood and the western style swing doors into the kitchen saw many smashed fingers.

This was where we mourned the most. The darkness and age felt fitting for this youthful, naïve idea of mourning.

I came home from the mall to find my house empty. The garage was bare and the driveway clean. A part of me was grateful for the emptiness. I still hadn’t called my mother, though I cried the entire way home in the car of my friend’s older sister.

My parents are no strangers to loss—death is not an unfamiliar entity in our home. I’ve seen my parents mourn their loved ones and I’ve watched the effect of ripping away an intricate part of the carefully crafted unit called family can have on its members. A sort of panic sets in once it’s realized that this person is really gone—whether in the ground or burned to ash or an un-recovered corpse, gone is gone is gone.

This was all after losing Chris, though. I only learned this through death.

And then hysteria sets in. Uncontrolled sobbing interspersed with bursts of laughter that take your breath away, more than the ache of missing the person you love could. Comfort can come in cleaning out closets and donating now useless clothes, or cooking large amounts of food and keeping the mourners well nourished, or laying in bed for hours trying to hold yourself together.

Most tend to mourn on their own, preferring solitude and quiet reminiscing to the way I’ve been taught to mourn—through laughter and happy memories.

I was sitting on the stairs when my dad came home. I was trying to make it to my room, only a few more feet away from me, but I couldn’t. Grief was heavy on my shoulders, chaining me to my sobs and the way my chest ached. I couldn’t escape it. It did allow me brief comfort, as I distinctly remember running outside when I saw his truck pull into the driveway. I tripped over the door jamb, which usually elicited a self-deprecating giggle, only this time it didn’t slow me down. My dad probably heard the cries first, and that probably frightened him the most. But I didn’t stop until I found his hug, and even then it was hard for me to use my words. I just used my choppy breath and held on tight.

He dropped me off at Megan’s, kissing me on the head and telling me to take as long as I needed.

Her stepmom called my mother at work, and explained the situation. I couldn’t. I didn’t know how to talk to my mother back then, scared of her judgment and frustration, but mostly afraid of losing her love.

My mom was probably worried I was injured at first. She acted like it was me who needed saving, and not Megan. She was at the house in less than an hour.

The beauty of my mother rests in her ability to find optimism in bleak situations. She has this innate sense of what to say and do to relieve tension and point me in the direction of the light at the end of the tunnel.

She came into Megan’s room (this was before she painted it orange and declared it the best room ever) and sat on the edge of Megan’s bed and soothed us. She made us laugh and she made us cry and she made us feel human in a situation we were entirely unfamiliar with—almost too young to even consider intimacy with.

That night Megan’s dad cooked a meal that was untouched by us both, and I left her house with red eyes and a chapped nose.

* * *

The funeral happens on a Friday. I’m not in Colorado. I’m not where I need to be.

I am sitting in a van, traveling through South Dakota, watching the lightning play on the horizon. Everything feels too happy for me: the golden plains, just past that solid yellow line. My brother laughing at my uncle in the seats in front of mine. The family reunion I am about to attend. The breath in my lungs.

When I was three I attended my first funeral. I can’t recall anything about it. My grandfather passed away, and I’m told I kissed his cheek and told him I’d miss him.

When I was eight I lost my great-grandmother. I remember the long car ride through a North Dakota blizzard, six-foot snow banks, and sleeping in the back of the van. The service was Catholic, and I sat in the back with my cousin Andrew, watching him play Nintendo while these people simply referred to as family mourned with tears and prayer. After, we ate a large amount of food in the basement of the church and I had too many strangers tell me how much I looked like my mom. We spent a few days at a house I’d never been to, that belonged to a great-grandmother I couldn’t recall, sorting through knick-knacks and watching my family argue over china and crystal and memories.

I’m told Chris’ funeral was packed with my fellow classmates, and a few teachers, and family.

I can only imagine how his younger brother felt that day.

Megan calls me after the funeral. There will be a memorial service at our old middle school in the cafeteria. Where I can remember him throwing plastic bottles and laughing at Amber and smiling at Megan and falling out of chairs. Where I want to remember him the most. I would describe how she sounded if the words existed.

I find out later that she left during the memorial service and got stoned behind the gym. It’s befitting, like some sort of after school special gone wrong. It would have been his idea, if he were still here.

* * *

I return home and find Megan in one piece, barely.

The next few weeks belong to us. To our healing.

I wake up one night to my phone ringing. It’s Colin.

Anger has a funny way of creeping up after someone dies. Sometimes you can feel it coming, feel it’s presence from the last breath. Other times it hits you in the middle of the grocery store and suddenly you can’t explain why but you just have to get out of the bread aisle and into the safety of your car. It hit Colin in the middle of the night after too much Grey Goose.

At this point in our relationship, and after losing Chris, I was his best friend. That title is funny, because sometimes it translates to your favorite person and other times it can mean emotional punching bag. This time, it was the latter.

I cried for Colin that night. I cried when he cried and I laughed when he laughed and I did my best to make sure he was calm enough to fall into an alcohol induced sleep.

We weren’t the same after that.

I’m not sure if the alcohol has left his system since.

Megan dealt with it better, relatively speaking. She found comfort in things I didn’t condone, people that didn’t like me. But she’s back. She’s happy. She’s content.

I worked through it on my own. No one really asks me if I’m ok about it anymore.

Sometimes I still dream about him. So does Megan. I haven’t seen his face in nearly six years but I can recall his smile and his goofy hair and the silly plaid shirts he always wore.

I wonder if I will ever forget about the boy that stole my best friend’s heart. Some days I wake up and forget he died. Other days I am miserably aware of the space he left behind.

Mostly, I’m just grateful he taught me how to live.

* * *

The idea of losing someone is incongruous to me. I understand death. I understand the biology of it—your body shuts down. Your brain no longer functions. Fluids drain and skin shrivels and you turn into a zombie version of yourself. Morticians don’t have an easy job.

But losing someone can only happen when you yourself die. Because I haven’t lost many memories of Chris. And I’m sure his brother hasn’t lost the image of orange extension cords and closet bars. And I’m positive Megan hasn’t lost her first kiss.

After losing him, death hung around for a bit. I lost my great-grandmother on my dad’s side—Alzheimer’s had been the true harbinger of death, long before she lost her strength or her health, however. A month later I attended the funeral of my second cousin, a man my dad considered a brother. The funeral was beautiful and to be called family of this person is an honor.

But I still can’t wrap my head around the term “loss.” Was it a notion brought by humans to explain the deep ache that never leaves your stomach? Sometimes you don’t realize it is there, but there is a difference between the person I was before this death and the person I am after. Maybe it’s an explanation for the way your throat will close sometimes and you can’t really use your words because it would be uncouth of you to mention this tragedy you’ve experienced.

I am aware that death is a natural part of existence. It can happen at any second of the day. It’s hanging in the unseen world, watching and calculating. I’ve not tricked myself into thinking there is a maximum amount of deaths allowed per person, please-take-a-number-and-hope-to-God-it-remains-in-the-lower-double-digits.

Emulating my mother, I’ve found a light to help navigate this necessary evil.

And to put it simply, it’s living.