Conversations with Dead People
It happened last night in the garage. I was listening to some music and trying to wrestle the chaos into some semblance of order when a song started playing that I had never heard before. It was a song in the Bardic tradition about King Arthur’s final moments and of his oldest friend Bevedere who he charges to return Excalibur to the Lady of the Lake. The song tells of Bevedere’s struggle to fulfill his dying friend’s wish and of his sorrow at the loss of his friend and the end of the dream they shared.
You would have liked it all over. The folksy vibe of it, the subject matter — which was both mournful and triumphant all at once. It’s the kind of song that would have woven its way into our identity when we were kids. It would have been burned onto a mix-tape that we played in your car as we cruised around town, or on some back roads sojourn to Woodland Hills Mall.
The clarion call of self-stylized, postmodern knights errant.
Out of nowhere I broke down into sobs right there in my hot mess of a garage. Because this song was one of those discoveries that brought on this bone-deep compulsion I have to share something cool with you. But I can’t share anything with you anymore.
No more books. No more games. No more anything.
And not for the first time since you left, I found myself hating you for what you did.
Conventional wisdom tells us that the final stage of grief is acceptance. But here we are — all these years later — and there’s a piece of me that just...endures it all. Some days the edges are fuzzier…softer…but then I have these moments like in the garage where I hate you more than I’ve hated anything, ever. I hate you for what you’ve done to us. I hate you for being so stupid and short-sighted as to think this is the better timeline.
And I hate myself a little for hating you. Because I know you suffered. I know you were in pain and you just kept trying to medicate it with reinvention and distraction. You couldn’t make sense of the world or your place in it and so you kept trying to find new ways to fit.
But you did fit. You always fit with us, in whatever shape you chose. And I hate myself — just a little — because I never found the words to tell you.
Just thought you should know that. Hope you like the song.
- ← Previous
Grit and Determination - Next →
The Laws of Time Travel