He died while I was sleeping.
Tomorrow morning a year ago, I made the worst phone call of my life.
I was in New York, and I had worked out and taken a shower. It seemed like he’d been online a few hours according to Facebook Messenger, and I thought it was odd he hadn’t messaged me. But you never knew if the app was accurate, and I never wanted to wake him up because he worked the late shift, so I let him message me first because I was three hours ahead.
After I finished getting ready, I was going to message him and tease him for being a sleepy head, as it was almost 9 a.m. in Seattle and he must be being lazy.
That’s when phone flashed a message from his sister.
He wasn’t being lazy, he was dead. He’d been dead almost 8 hours. An hour and a fifteen minutes after I talked to him and he said, Goodnight, sleep well, I’ll talk to you tomorrow, babe, he ran into the car. An hour later, he was gone forever. It’s still such an unreal thing to think about. That a person can live and breathe and be a life force, so present in your daily life for one minute, and then gone in an instant, with no warning, no reason.
It was just an accident. There is no deeper meaning. He didn’t die so I could learn a greater lesson; he didn’t die because it was fate or for some higher purpose. The platitudes are infuriating and meaningless.
He died doing what he loved. He lived a full life. He died happy.
He died.
I am living in an alternate reality, one that I don’t want to be in, that I could never have imagined, one that I thought only happened movies. I have deviated from my path. My path is no longer clear. I don’t know where I am supposed to be or what I am supposed to do.
One year later, I am torn between moving and staying, torn between going somewhere else, changing careers, I am even torn about changing my hair color. I feel stuck, underwater, trying to swim to a surface just to get slapped in the face with another crushing wave.
In the weeks after he died, I kept thinking how just one more action would have changed everything. In the immediate aftermath, I felt tremendous guilt because I hadn’t been talking to him as much that day as usual—I was in meetings and interviews and had a long dinner with old friends. I kept thinking if only I had texted him more or called him or done any single thing different, he’d still be alive.
For days and weeks, I do what is called bargaining.
If he leaves one minute later, it doesn’t happen. My boyfriend doesn’t die in a motorcycle accident.
If I text him one more time.
If I call him instead of texting or sending a Marco Polo and we talk for a few minutes in real time, he doesn’t die in a motorcycle accident.
If something breaks at work, he has to stay and fix it. He leaves 20 minutes later.
If he decides his eye hurts too much to ride and goes home.
If I am in Seattle, instead of New York, and he comes over that night instead of going on the drive, my boyfriend doesn’t die in a motorcycle accident.
If he decides to go home and play video games.
If he stops at Metropolitan Market and grabs a bite to eat.
If he takes a slightly different route and gets to the freeway 20 seconds later.
If he sees the stopped car sooner, just one second sooner, he doesn’t die in a motorcycle accident.
If I am in Seattle and we are texting till he leaves, and he has to send one more video or text and it means he doesn’t ever hit the stopped car.
If he doesn’t get the loan for the motorcycle from his friend, he can’t buy that motorcycle.
If he gets the loan from a bank, and it takes two or three weeks to go through, he doesn’t buy this particular bike, at this particular time, and doesn’t go on that particular ride.
If he waits till he’s worked enough overtime to buy the bike outright, sell his old one, he doesn’t die in a motorcycle accident.
If he never gets the motorcycle at all, he doesn’t go on that ride at that moment. He goes on a different one. Or he rides that route, but it’s his old bike, one that he knows like the back of his hand, because he’s ridden it across the country several times. He knows how it handles, how it turns, how it speeds up and slows down. He doesn’t die in a motorcycle accident.
If he drove his car to work that day, he doesn’t go on that joy ride. There is no car to crash into, there is no accident, he is here.
If he drove east instead of west, he wouldn’t have been at that place, at that time, my boyfriend doesn’t die in a motorcycle accident.
Grief counselors say you can’t go through the what ifs, but I can’t help myself. Everything about what happened was a preventable, slow motion horror show.
I look back on the last two months of his life and there are so many warning signs and red flags and things that seemed like omens. And I don’t believe in omens. I am not superstitious. I am an atheist. I don’t believe in the afterlife. I don’t believe in heaven.
But sometimes, I allow myself to daydream that I hire a medium and she’s real, not a fraud, and we connect, and it’s like Demi Moore and Patrick Swayze in Ghost, and he inhabits me and I feel his soul, and I can be with him one more time, tell him all the things I didn’t tell him, tell him I’m so sorry for not appreciating every single second of our time together, tell him I’m sorry I was in New York for so long, tell him I’m sorry, so sorry for everything.
I let myself believe that he is here in the room with me somehow, that he is whispering in my ear, telling me to get up, that I can do it, that I look great and happy and my eyes are bright even when I look terrible and sweaty, that he is still here, my number one cheerleader in life. I try, but then I can’t because the couch next to me is empty, the shirt he wore, the one he called his “hug,” hangs next to the door, limp and lifeless without him filling it, and my house is silent, his bad music not playing over the sound system, because I can’t remember his Spotify username, and now I so desperately want to hear it all and love it as much as I loved him.
If, then. If, then.
The outcome can’t be changed, and now what? What does year two look like? I’ve had many people tell me it’s worse because the people around you think: you made it past the year mark, you must be over it. You’ve been anticipating each minefield anniversary with so much dread, and expect relief, and instead, your person is still dead.
I hear after a year, it becomes really real. The chemicals in your brain that have worked overtime to keep you from truly losing your mind have worn off, and you are operating without anesthesia. You know they are never going to come back, and the truth settles in more deeply. There is no if. There is only then. There is only now.