It’s the anniversary of the last weekend I spent with him. An anniversary of the last time we made breakfast, had sex, had dinner together. The last weekend I saw him alive, in the flesh. I saw him over video chat for the 2.5 weeks I was in New York working, but it was not the same.
The chats were meant to keep us in touch, but it created an anxiety borne from the distance, a false sense of closeness captured through the screen. I know now that nothing could replace the corporeal world.
All weekend, the anniversary looms over me. It is mocking my choices, and heightening my loneliness. On Friday, we went to a bar a friend of mine owned; they were celebrating their 10th anniversary. We ate cake. He rode a Limebike over and video chatted his sister on the way.
I see the video now. I am there, gazing lovingly up at him, my hair unusually styled in its natural curly state. I smile coyly at the camera. That night, he said, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you so pretty.”
This Friday, I do nothing. I make spaghetti and fight with the Roku on my TV.
It has been 11 months and change and I am still figuring out this grieving thing. I am still unused to not always having a plan on Friday night, on the weekend. It’s a big open hole and I don’t know what to do with that time.
On Saturday, I see friends at brunch and remember that we’d spent that day at his house. I had read my friend’s book in almost an entire stretch, sitting on a chair on the lawn, his dog beside me, him working on his motorcycle, the one I came to think of as the “good” motorcycle, the one that didn’t kill him.
I nearly finished the book, and I was restless because it was a beautiful summer day, and the sun was going down, and I’d wanted to take a walk at sunset. But the motorcycle was presenting an unsolvable riddle, one he couldn’t figure out quickly. We became frustrated and hungry. Afterward, we went to my house, and I made him a salmon dinner. I don’t remember what else we did.
This Saturday, I go to the waterfront and have dinner alone at an Irish pub and try to read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. My concentration is shot, as it has been since he died. I don’t get more than a few pages. But I still think, he would love this book.
What would have been, and what was, covers everything I do right now, like a piece of cellophane over the glass. Except it’s a reverse of rose-color. It’s muted. Gray.
On Sunday, I am restless and anxious. I want to Kondo my apartment, my storage unit. And then I remember that this is what we did on the final weekend we spent together during his short life. I can’t bring myself to mirror this, and decide that it will wait another day when it is not the Anniversary of the last weekend I spent with him.
The last thing we did that weekend was go for a walk to a tiny, off-the-beaten path garden. It overlooks the Lake Union, high above the freeway. You can’t see it from the garden, but you can hear it, the noise of the cars and the highway disrupting the tranquil view, creating something else entirely. I had only been there once before; I wanted him to see it, and I wanted to see it at sunset.
I decide to go. I take the walk, and I am not present. I am not here, I am There. In the Before. And I get to the garden and I can see him, us, where we stood, where his dog walked, and remembered my tender ankle, the same shoes I am wearing now not providing quite enough grip to walk down the steep parts. Then, I held on to his arm to steady myself. Now, I grab the ropes on the guardrails that are set around the garden. I remember how he knew all the names of all the flowers and the plants. I still don’t know them.
He was more in touch with nature than I am. I admired that about him and wished I could keep up with him hiking in the woods.
It’s coming up on a year, and grief is still with me. It is true that time has made this more bearable, that I am better than I was in the weeks and months after, but I am not better than Before. I will never be like I was Before. That person is gone.
When he died on June 22, everything changed. The only writing I could do was about us, about grief, about loss. I have been mortified by the things that people have done, things they’ve said, or by the things that they have not done or said. I have been surprised and heartened by the acts of kindness from my friends and family, as well as complete strangers.
Grief, like love, is a universal experience. But unlike love, no one really wants to talk about death, dying, and the painful act of grieving. This newsletter aims to be a portal into the worlds where grief, love, and loss collide. Subscribe and come with me on this journey.