(cw: overdose death)
A kind of process-explaining supplement to the “X annos” piece, plus miscellaneous bits on just a sliver of the memories/thoughts that came up while thinking/writing about grief as it makes its presence known. Some of this is a little raw, so proceed with caution.
I.
For X annos:
I knew that I needed to get some “stuff” out re: the unexpectedly intense grief that welled up as the 10th anniversary of Mike’s death approached, but needed a way to bound it, somehow. To give it shape. Walls to bump up against, in order to make it tangible. Less nebulous and ungraspable. I needed to be able to get my arms around it to feel it and wrestle with it.
I decided to use the rhythm of the walking meditation that I reference in part V here to create a framework for my impressions to take shape. A balance of raw and constrained. I found it to be quite helpful.
II.
I’m okay.
If you take nothing else from this, please know that I am okay. I have been giving myself space to feel through this in recent days rather than bottling it up and letting it drown me.
I’ve been intentional in shifting from an approach of dread (of the day) to a gratefulness for the signpost.
This is a waypoint. A gift. An opportunity for reflection. I welcome it as a guest, knowing it’s not meant to live with me permanently, though we may meet again along the way.
III.
In the months before he died, Mike was in his second semester back to school. Typically, he would stay at his parents’ house during the week (for multiple reasons that aren’t relevant to this part of the story and I’m too tired to enumerate– iykyk). At night, while he was studying, he would listen to music on one of the music channels on his parents’ DirectTV and text me, periodically, to tell me the names of songs he thought I should look up and listen to.
The songs have turned into something of a mental playlist that has stuck with me for the last ten years. This was one of them:
I don’t know that it had ever occurred to me (or to Mike) to look it up at the time, but the other day while I was going down the rabbit hole of finding different versions/remixes of this song, digging into the lyrics, what-have-you, I found the piece that they’d sampled throughout the song.
This is it!
Óró mo churraichín ó
Mike was somewhat fond of Irish folk music, so he likely would have been pleased to have learned of this connection. Probably not of much interest to him now, though. (Though who really knows how all of that works.)
IV.
They couldn’t think of something to say the day you burst
With all their lions and all their might and all their thirst
They crowd your bedroom like some thoughts wearing thin
Against the walls, against your rules, against your skin
My beard grew down to the floor and out through the doors
Of your eyes, begonia skies like a sleepyhead, sleepyhead
– from “Sleepyhead” by Passion Pit
He overdosed at his parents’ house and (based on his temperature at the time the coroner arrived) his body gave out some time around 1 AM on Saturday. His parents didn’t realize he was there. He’d been dropped off by a friend on Friday afternoon while his mom was with his father at dialysis.
When I called his parents on Saturday morning to see if they’d seen him because he wasn’t answering any calls or texts (which wasn’t like him), his mom said, “He’s not here; we thought he was with you. But if it’ll make you feel better, I’ll go check.” She went into his room, with me still on the phone.
“Oh, he’s just asleep. Let me move the cat and wake him… He’s dead!”
“What?”
“He’s dead. Let me let you go. I need to call 911.”
And she hung up.
—
Since his death was “unattended,” they treated it a bit like a crime scene. When I got to his parents’ house (after dropping the kids off with my BIL across the street), I sat with his sister just outside the door to the bedroom he died in, as various people moved in and out of the room collecting things and coming out to ask terse questions before disappearing into the bedroom again. I didn’t dare peek into the room. I just stared at his pile of chemistry books on the table in front of me and tried not to collapse.
His sister insisted that I go into another room when they wheeled his body out, so I didn’t have to see.
—
I didn’t see his body until the day they cremated him and even then it was behind a window. He was in a cardboard box, dressed in the clothes I’d brought for him and covered in make-up to hide the decomposition.
When we’d stared long enough, they put him in the cremation oven like an oversized pizza.
And I laughed.
(And then I finally cried.)
V.
Once upon a time in the relatively recent past, I made a playlist of semi-tolerable holiday songs to listen to with my two youngest while driving around looking at Christmas lights. One year, for some reason, “The Leaving of Liverpool” kept playing in place of one of the songs in the playlist, even though I hadn’t added it (to that playlist or any of my other playlists). And every time “The Leaving of Liverpool” would play, it would show up under the name of an entirely different (Christmas) song.
Anyway, here are The Pogues:
kfw 2021
Undusted Corners 