grief, best expressed by living
someday, i'm going to die. some of my loved ones will die before me, and already have. So...
It’s been over 6 years now since I published grief, best expressed like shitting, a tribute to my past best friend Aasav, who had died less than a month earlier.
I was in the throes of agony, listlessly skipping work in D.C. even though I was credits away from graduating college, unable to resist sobbing on the metro and reevaluating my life choices.
I’d wake up in the middle of the night shaking from the fact that I’d never see him again. It’d hit me like a wave, stopping me dead in my tracks so often.
This is how it feels to lose your silent protector, the kind of person who would listen to a traumatized, awkward 15 year old when no one else did. He believed in me. I, who felt underestimated by everyone around me, needed the hope he gave me as a kid. In a town that felt too small for me before I realized that that was okay, he told me life was simpler than I knew — and better in the future. He told me to not let the terrorist voice in my head win. He remembered me when no one else did. He saw me.
After he left, who would do that? It wasn’t just the fact that he was gone — it was realizing I couldn’t replace him. I vowed that I had to replace the hole he left by living out the legacy he imparted.
The legacy of how I’d memorialize me, which I previously had leaned on him to help me with. Remember and see me, when no one else would.
Ultimately, his death changed my perception so much that I left my career behind before I even graduated.
I didn’t want to waste a single moment waiting for my life to start. And I haven’t. To thank him for this, in the years since, I’ve taken the time to memorialize him on his birthday in June and in November on the anniversary of his death.
But this year I forgot.
I looked at the calendar around Thanksgiving and blinked. It’d been so long, that I didn’t write something this year. I didn’t say anything.
I stared at my hands. My eyes widened. It wasn’t that I forgot he died… it was that I had finally achieved what I hadn’t thought at 21 I could — I’d fully integrated his essence into my life. What he meant to me.
I had moved to New York City, made the best friends I felt safe with, successfully achieved financial stability without a full time job, and honored believing in myself when the going had gotten tough.
The latter was something he used to help me with as a young girl. Now, I could do it myself to where I didn’t have to sit down and remind myself every year, Aasav died, so you’re on your own now. You have to fill his place with yourself now. That’s why he died!
My inner monologue had completely shifted. I’d never be able to replace Aasav, but I’d honored his legacy in a way that sustained me daily. It was great.
Woohoo!
… Except for one little thing. I may not have consciously remembered the calendar date, but my body sure remembered.
And so — if you’ve read this far, know that this essay isn’t about Aasav dying. It’s about another fact that mortality leaves you with.
Let’s look at my old post for a second —
“I had mini panic attacks for much of that first year. I assumed every day that [my mom] came home [from work] was the exception, and on the days she wasn’t punctually back on time, I’d dread the rule had come true. The worst had happened: she was dead, a car accident taking her life, or a stranger with a gun to her head, or a freak accident at work I hadn’t heard of yet. My imagination rendered clingy in the anxious sense; if I didn’t hear from my loved ones, I was sure something had happened to them. “
What no one tells you about your best friend dying, is that after you turn it an obstacle to surmount, storyifying it to cope with the trauma, after you make your daily life inspirational because you want to never forget his impact —
You still miss one key aspect of grief.
Now that you’ve had your life so profoundly shaken up by waking up one day to one person being gone, it permanently alters how you see everyone else in your life. You start to see people, not just as how precious they are to you, but as ephemeral beings that will not be here forever. You start to hallucinate, subtly, what it’d be like for them to leave your life forever.
Now it’s dark undercurrent of all of my interactions with my friends. We’ll hug as they get off the train at their stop, and when I watch their backs retreat into the crowd, I suddenly worry: what if I never see them again?
This goes for the recent ones, the ones who made me feel at home in New York. Old and new loved ones alike, it doesn’t matter. The last time I felt this much safety with anyone, they literally left me one day.
The PTSD churns, probably because my circadian rhythms still remembered when something bad happened this time of year in New York. Where I’d received the news of Aasav’s passing.
I don’t know if my body will ever forget even if my mind can.
Even if it’s been long enough to where I’m no longer sobbing — my psyche may be.
For a while, death desensitized me to a lot of things. It made me able to say, “fuck it,” to anything that didn’t bring me joy because I began remembering I was living on borrowed time. For years, I’d disarm panic attacks of mine by reminding myself I’m still alive. I’m still here. They’re not. It got me out of my depression.
It didn’t get me out of the fear of losing other people.
Many people know about Aasav’s impact on me, but they may not know that by the time he died, I’d already lost three other people from my high school era. My friend Paul was killed in a school shooting. My friend Arthur died of leukemia. My high school lit teacher took his own life.
After Aasav died, my freshman hallmate Matt, and another friend Austin who I’d made on a trip to Notre Dame, also took their lives. Another hallmate Andrew followed soon after.
Those years were wracked with subtle darkness. I used to go to their Facebook profiles and stare. “Remembering So and So.” I’d flip through photos with these people, replaying their alive animated selves in my head, trying to block out the image of their bodies that my mind began to conjure. It was hard to reconcile.
And while I didn’t necessarily feel the weight in my daily life, death subtly began looming to me as a sobering reality of where we stand today as a society.
It’s intensified, especially in 2022. This was the year I felt true security and safety in all of my relationships. And with that, I’m so scared that this happiness will be ripped from me because I have it now. Feeling unworthy is one thing — what of the feeling that the people I love will be gone tomorrow suddenly?
I’d already had disordered attachment from the years in elementary and middle school where I got bullied by people and I’d feel raw grief every day from being abandoned. Physical abandonment felt akin to that, like ripping out the part of me capable of attaching.
When I lost relationships after Aasav died, I’d panic over the idea of giving space, because what if tomorrow they’re gone?
When I fought with my parents badly after graduation, I would shake over how I couldn’t will myself to forgive them yet, but I’d feel so guilty. What if tomorrow, they just were gone, and that was the last time I ever talked to them? I’ve already had so much guilt eat me up over loving the people I love. To this day, I also feel guilt over the friends and lovers I’ve lost. If I heard tomorrow an ex-friend had died, what would that be like? This would never stop me from actually taking space from others, but boy did the pain rise to a fever pitch.
This is incredibly morbid, I know. But this is also highly motivating! It reminds me to never be a prisoner of my own mind, to remember the bigger picture, to remember that I could literally be dead right now, or worse, that you could be dead.
It disarms so much panic for me. It makes me grateful for what I am given. Because I do not have to be here. I do not have to have these amazing ideas, this amazing city, this amazing life made up of awesome consequences of choices I made. I could be dead. I can look around and see what didn’t happen too, the bittersweet inverse imprint of the things I didn’t decide to have on the other side, and somehow I always look at that as highly motivating to be appreciative, because there’s a version of me that’s living a more tragic life and has lived a more tragic life before. Even then, I am still alive now. I can focus on not having regrets too, in a way.
This also makes me unable to say anything to someone I’ll truly regret. When I was younger, I’d never raise my voice at my mother, because I was so afraid of every single moment I had with her being the last. That’s been a good aspect.
It’s a dicey balance. I don’t think anyone should look at my life and go, nice, that’s a cool perspective you got there because I’m dead ass certain it’s straight up PTSD that I have to pay money to therapists for. Maybe someone else would’ve had more anxiety about dying or loved ones dying that sprouted up enough to inhibit them. I just started having mine mildly sprout.
But it’s always been there, at least a bit. Since I was a little girl, I’ve been able to remember details like a hawk — I can replay entire scenes of weeks on end from a given year of my life. I think I’ve always been this way because I’m trying to hoard enough happy to get me through sad.
Now it’s turned into — I’m trying to hoard enough love and presence to get me through the day I won’t see you anymore. When I’m happy, I’ll sike myself out a tiny bit that maybe the next happy train won’t arrive anytime soon, so I have to cling intensely to this one, soaking everything up, making my heart expand with it.
In the movie Everything Everywhere All At Once, it struck me that the theme really was I could be in any universe, any timeline, but I’m here in this one with you. That’s how I feel every time I’m with someone. I somehow end up in the timeline where each person I love inevitably goes either before or after me. And this horrifies me. It makes me want to hug them to my chest and feel the loss in advance, so either of us don’t have to worry about it once it’s here.
Just this past year, before I decided to move to New York, I was walking with a friend down the street after we had a good day eating lunch at LACMA. She paused. “Someday this will be gone, won’t it,” she laughed nervously, gesturing at the moment we shared together. I didn’t tell her at the time, but I already think about that every day. It made me have extra compassion toward others, but even now my heart breaks thinking about it.
It’s almost meditative to face those feelings around death, around endings. You are always unsure when death is going to be, and after you get over the fear and sadness and anxiety of that happening to your friends and yourself, you start to realize — oh. Death is for the living too.
I haven’t read the book Man’s Search For Meaning, which is about the people who survived the Holocaust and how they psychologically reacted to it. Some took it badly and never recovered from the trauma. Others lived life fiercely, in defiance of the horr of the fate they’d escaped, and became beacons of light in their community.
I always wonder how people who’ve seen mass, mass, unfathomable death would process that. I’ve gone through nothing compared to that, but I can say I’ve gone through death a lot more than most people I know, and once you get over the intense anxiety of it, it’s interesting how it puts you in a headspace of balancing gratitude and humility. I can see a life where I didn’t make it out ok. But instead, I am always able to ground in the knowledge that I won’t take anything for granted.
I even look at my creativity differently. Now, the ideas in my head remind me of the day I’ll have dementia and won’t be able to write them down. Of the time where my friends will have to grieve me, and wonder what I would’ve said. I feel I owe it to my future self, in the grave, to write down everything I thought just in case someone in the future needs it.
It’s funny that I still cry a lot, like I used to about Aasav right after he left. But now I cry because, someday this won’t be here. I also cry because, wow, at least right now it’s here. I remember when I was dating this guy in 2019 and we’d go on dates for 6 hours at a time. I would come home, sit in my living room armchair, clench my heart and sob. Because somewhere deep down, I already could feel the day this might end, that this wouldn’t be forever, aware that life is fucking ephemeral. But oh how precious it was that I ever had it.
Years later, as my family and I get along better, I’ll walk down the street after a call with my mother, who is gentle with me for once these days, and I cry that it’s both too late and also never been earlier.
It is truly grief that makes me want to honor life. It is truly grief that makes me want to remember everything enough to show everyone it, all at once.
It is truly grief, best expressed through living.