Hold Us All Close

always too late, always still time

Photo by Raechel Anne Jolie, winter 2023.

Last week I finally found the headspace to send him a message. Raechel and I had had a difficult therapy session and we were taking some space. I needed something healthy, meaningful, and calming to do, and he was one of a few friends I needed to reach out to. I’ve been kicking myself for weeks: find the time, write the letter, type up the email, send the audio. Sl was at the top of the list. He had a brain tumor. Glioblastoma.

For those who don’t know what that means, after I had my seizure and the CT and MRI showed a tumor, oligodendroglioma is the kind of cancer the doctors were hoping I had. Glioblastoma is the kind they were hoping I didn’t. Both are considered lethal and incurable, but the life expectancy for people with oligodendroglioma is measured in years: 12 years average from diagnosis for people over 30. With glioblastoma, it’s measured in months: 10-13.

Sl’s partner Mx told me about his diagnosis at the end of this past autumn. Mx was my first true friend in a city where I lived for a number of years. Crazy like me, as solidaristic as the day is long, a wealth of knowledge, and a lifelong anarchist. After I found out, I offered to send Sl some books, which was ignorant of me since glioblastoma usually causes headaches, dizziness, and vision problems. How about audio messages, M pushed back. I thought that was a great idea.

I put it on my to-do list. Time went by.

S was a sweet, kind, knowledgeable guy. We spoke every time our paths crossed, but it always felt like we had some inchoate project waiting for us and we just never found the time to brainstorm, to figure out what it was. It sucks that so soon after the diagnosis he couldn’t read, because he loved reading, he loved books, he loved the ideas that could spread through them.

He also had this ability to appear. I might go a couple years without seeing him, and then suddenly he would just be there in the most natural way. The last time I saw him in person was my little going away shindig two summers ago.

Raechel and I had tried out living together for half a year and decided to go for it. I went back to Catalunya to pack up and say goodbyes, had my seizure, week in the hospital, Raechel came over to meet some of my dearest friends, and then the goodbye party. There were a dozen people there, more than I’ve ever had at a birthday party! (Maybe everyone knows no one throws a party like a guy with a tumor?) No fair-weather friends, just a totally eclectic mix of people so important to me, whom I’d known for years. A banjo came out, an accordion, a guitar, an impromptu concert. Mx sings flamenco and she was happy to oblige. And though I think I hadn’t seen him since before the pandemic, Sl showed up too. That’s where they met, actually – Mx and Sl. Mx might be the least sheepish person I know, but a couple months later I got a message from her that almost sounded sheepish, I could imagine her blushing. Remember that little going away gathering I’d had in Manresa? Well she met a tall, dashing gent there and on the way back to the city they’d started talking…

I come back to the present, the near past. It’s last week. Returning from therapy, I went to the bedroom to breathe for a bit. I decided I had to stop thinking about my own problems and reach out to some friends, send a little love out into the world. In my life, the presence or absence of friends has often made the difference between hardship turning into resilience or even joy… and bottomless sadness. I would read some stories and send Sl the recording.

I decided I’d start with the first few pages of Hermetica and see if he liked it or preferred a different vibe. In that case I had plenty of short stories to choose from, and also books from real authors on my shelf. I got my laptop and a pocket snitch, ready to read from one screen and speak into the other.

I opened the dumb app and clicked on Mx’s profile so I could start with a message of love and support for her, and a heads up that I was sending Sl a story. Then I saw it. A text from that morning. Sl had died a few days earlier. His memorial is on Saturday (now yesterday, as I write these lines). On another continent.

I was too late. Too late to send him some comfort, reading him one of my stupid stories. Too far away to share his death with other people who cared about him, to help them feel a little less lonely on this cruel spinning rock.

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That morning, R and I had walked to our little lake, which is a place of loss for us, but also a place of rebirth. I saw something in the water. It was one of our geese friends, sitting in a shallow patch of mud in the middle of the lake, its graceful neck arced downwards, its head resting underwater. Dead.

We wondered if it was an older one or one of the young fellas I helped babysit a couple times last year. We shared the sadness and the quiet. By a log on the other side, not far from the dead one, another goose held watch, silent. A crow flew straight over the lake, heading south. We took a moment to say goodbye. The silence ended when vigilant goose began a rising crescendo of honks, the typical sound a gaggle of geese use to motivate one another to shake a leg and start flying, with the final notes nearly always emitted airborne, in tempo with their flapping wings. Vigilant goose made no such moves, though. He just made the call to flight, but stayed still, and returned to silence.

And it was in that moment a lone seagull appeared, flying an exact circle over the dead one, and then headed back downstream, back toward the Lake Erie shore… where Canada geese often gather in huge numbers in the middle of a long migration or a difficult winter.

The silence returned.

I don’t know what else to say. Hold each other close. Don’t forget the people who need our love and support. Reach out and say something you’ve needed to say. Even if it’s hard. Especially if it’s hard. There’s no other way to grow. No other way to feel the warmth.

Photo by Raechel Anne Jolie, summer 2024.