Group

When I think about family, I think about a lot of things. Sure, dysfunction and shitty old patterns or habits springs to mind. But so, too, does, love. More so than anything, when I think of family I think of love.

Love that's unconditional and true. And family makes me think of people who know you so, so well. Better than anyone ever could. And even if you don't like each other all the time, invariably, through all your troubling trials, you accept each other. There's nothing else like that in life. There are no other people like that in life. Well, there are very few things – or people - like that in life, I should say.

When I think about my family, in particular, I think it's sad that my father and I don't speak. I think it's sad but, for now, I find it necessary.

When I think about my family, in particular, I think it's amazing that my mother and my stepfather and my brother and his boyfriend came to help me work in my yard and on my house this past Memorial Day weekend. Without even the slightest hesitation. They just showed up. To help me.

This touched me. Deeply.

I remember all the times as a family in New Hampshire – before the majority of us moved to Florida – when we gathered for morning coffee as often as we could. When I lived just twenty minutes away – or even an hour away – we did this pretty often. And we jokingly called it "Group" (as in 'group therapy') and later we called it "As New Hampshire Turns" (because it was funny and because there were some very intriguing tidbits of drama that made it so). We even made a Christmas card with this name as the soap opera title, giving each of us a character in our dysfunctional 'play.'

In all honesty, these coffee mornings, these 'sessions,' if you will, bound our family tighter together, helped us grow, molded us all, each of us, uniquely, during this period of time. And it did so in a way that years past had also done but in an entirely new and different fashion. Some of us were older, yet perhaps not wiser. Some of us were young, but our souls were old and wise. Whatever the case, we learned that we had a new language to speak, one that was full of secrets, yet so full of brave honesty in the same breath, one that cared and dared to speak the truth. We were there for one another. In all the seasons. For every coffee morning that was simply about inspiration to get through the day. Or for every coffee morning that was all about something much deeper. What meant the most, I think, was that we all knew, without question, that we were there for each other.

I'll never forget these times.

My siblings never will either. It was a special time. An era, really. One in which the three of us were single, unencumbered by any sort of relationship and pure of thought; we were blank slates, ready to share and discover. It was an unusual, amazing time. Not that it was perfect or idyllic. Because, certainly, there were fights between us. Mistakes made. And silly disagreements between our parents. And, every once in a while, some needless drama, too.

Our grandmother died one summer when we all happened to be living back at home. While it was only for a few months that we all lived in that house, those months were intense and telling. As divisive as it seemed to be and perhaps felt to each of us at the time, it was, in fact, unifying. I don't think any of my siblings would disagree with that statement. It was terribly sad that our grandmother had died, although it had been within the natural order of things, it was still sad, and yet, it was freeing for our mother as their relationship had been so strained in life. She was finally, finally, able to let it go and find peace. And her pain was our pain. And her peace was our peace, too.

I believe that we all grew and changed and bonded with one another more fully during that time. It allowed us to realize the power and the strength and the unconditional love of our family and to carry on stronger than we had been before.

Today, we still do this. Here in Florida. Me, my parents, my brother Bob. The pets. Whoever wants to be there. But there is someone markedly and hugely absent. Rich.  It's as though we've relocated to a warmer climate but nothing else has really changed. We moved here for our various reasons – jobs, mostly – and other opportunities that have or have not manifested for us as yet. But someone we love is profoundly missing. Has been missing for a long, long time.

We've tried our best to recreate 'Group' or 'As NH Turns' in Maine or even back in NH, but it's been hard. Life and its circumstances get in the way. Work. Children. Families. Daily stressors. So many things can challenge the core of a family.

Rich. You are missing. We miss you. We miss your wisdom. Your wit. Your intelligence. And reason.

You are a father now. A husband. A man with his own thriving business. Whatever you do, you are our hero in so many ways. We are proud of you. We love you. And we miss you.

We miss you. 

From Florida to New Hampshire, at some point this week, or even tomorrow, we'll have coffee together and we'll think of you. As we always do. As we always are.

Me Hawk. You Chipmunk.

I'm in denial.

According to some accredited individuals who've assessed my personality,  temperament and tendencies, apparently I am a commitment phobe who runs from intimacy. Awesome. It hurts just writing that much honesty down. It's not actually true. At all.

Yes, I got married once. Divorced once. And yes, everything was my decision. (I must have some pride here, no, I wasn't 'left' – no, it doesn't matter and no, it would not make any difference if he'd left me). Still, it's like that freshman year mishap – the terrible GPA you get from being a loser that first year that prevents you from ever graduating summa cum laude – where you want to say: I really AM a summa cum laude student. I really, really am. But I made a mistake. Please don't punish me for it. Please.

Too late missy.

I hate that. Because I really tried. I really, really did. And anyone who knew me then…truly, anyone who knows me NOW…knows that I tried. I don't blame him for it.  I don't blame myself for it either. I'm just sad that I couldn't make it work, that I didn't have whatever it would take to make it good.

My mother says, repeatedly, like pressing a pre-recorded button, and I can hear it in my head:

'Jess, you just need to find the guy you want and just GO FOR IT. Just go after him.'

Really?

Go after him?

Really?

I'm not that girl. Everytime I've ever tried to put myself out there it's a big, chubby, awkward and embarrassing fail. In fact, I'm so ill-equipped to do this that I'm like an uninvited guest at the party. Pretty girls in pretty dresses scowl and wonder: where did that…that…awkward…clumsy…dork…come from? And why is she big-eyed and preying on my man?

Truth is, I've been the chipmunk my entire life. The chipmunk is my comfort zone. That's when the steely-eyed hawk spots his prey: me.

He swoops in and picks me up in his expansive wings, holding me captive in his gnarled, sharp claws. And takes me off someplace very unsafe.

I just sit there frantically gnawing on my many nuts, storing the chewed up stuff in my cheek pouches, looking around, but pretty much easy prey. That's it. I just do that and bam! Hawk finds me. It's been this way ever since I was a young, young mickamunk (what my brother Rich called chipmunks before he could speak properly). 

I haven't met someone in a really long time who made me feel freaking giddy. Giddy. Giddy UP. Like a stupid kid on a goddamn pony. 

"Your eyes are open," he said, mid-kiss.

Oh no.

I kiss with my eyes open apparently. I think I must be afraid if I close my eyes that I'll lose my balance and fall over. (Nope, that's not true at all. I just really liked his crazy hot face.)

Yep, damnit, I kissed with my eyes open. And he caught me. OK, so there was a kiss and it was good and it made me dizzy. High school dizzy. (This is a very high bar, I can't recall the last time I had high school dizziness from a kiss with ANYONE).

But I was so uncool.

My friend Will used to tell me: "You are the coolest, hottest freaking girl."

Pause.

"But only when you don't give a shit about the guy."

And I'd be like "And when I like the guy?" (which was rare). He'd roll his eyes and say, "You lose all control. You just show all your cards. You're pathetic."

Yes, it was mean of him to say. But fuck, he was so right. Because it was so annoyingly true.

And here it is, some five years later since Will observed my 'pathetic' hankerings that led to nothing, and I'm still the same. 

My mother is wrong. Just dead wrong on this one.

I give up.  I'm going into infinite hiding.  Those of you who know where I live, feel free to come on by and knock on my door. I'll be home, most likely. Me, my chipmunk self, and the cats. Chilling. Dorking out. Hoping there's a really great amazing hawk out there. A really, really good one this time.

for my old friend

The moment I saw the obituary on his Facebook page, I thought it was a Facebook joke. You know those stupid gimmicky bullshit spam things that people pass around online: 'click here to see how you'll die' and you put in the requisite personal info and then you get this tombstone image with your name ' Here lies Bill Smith 1979-2042 'and some supposedly humorous epitaph: 'Run over by alien crossing ocean while eating squirrel sandwich. ' You get the idea.

That's how the world has become right? One big fat fucking joke I guess. Except this time it wasn't. It wasn't a joke at all.

When it really sank in, though, when I looked at his handsome face and familiar smile beaming off my computer screen, when I read the painfully surrendered words of acceptance that his mother wrote, when I realized it was so fucking true and real and final it made my stomach ache in a way I can't explain. And that's when I just fell into this deep, immediate despair.

And in that despair – in the pacing I suddenly needed to do in my small house, the frantic pacing I did while I processed this end to a life, while I cried those honest, wet tears that hold you captive, his whole life, and mine too, flashed before me - I began to look back, back, back.

It was like some part of me that I'd held onto all these years - some part of me that I could call up and revisit, someone who knew me when I was so young, someone who I also knew when he was so young, before the inescapable damage of the world weighed heavily on our souls with it's burdening angst but also it's overpowering joy, when our lives lay out before us, this big, amazing thing to be lived and we were just beginning it – that part of me, that part of us, was just now gone. And it had been gone for several months. I just didn't know it.

The thing is, it wasn't gone. It was just encapsulated. The way you put something in a newel post for a century. All tucked away like a diary or a scrapbook. The way life happens in your mind. Pockets of the past stored up there like a grandmother's sweater in your brain. All you have to do is go up there and root around in the pockets and you'll find them all. This life, this person, now had a beginning, a middle, and an end. I was just so unprepared for the end.

He was my friend. My lifelong friend. And he was one of the purest friends I've ever had.

When I say pure, I mean we were never lovers. We never even kissed. We were just true friends, first a boy and girl, then a man and woman, friends. It is true we both liked one another in a 'more than friends' way. But it was always at different times. During highschool, I liked him but he liked Annie Leef. (Which made me not like Annie Leef. She seemed fake and you could tell she bleached her upper lip. I couldn't think of anything else bad to say about her. Just: how dare she.) Then he liked me but I was infatuated with Sander Robinson. (Which made him make fun of Sander Robinson for any reason he could find. Usually something like:  what do you see in that kid? Guy is a total 'squid.') Then, a few years later, I liked him but he had a summer love out in California. Then, more years after that, he liked me but I was fully into the idiocy of my twenties by then. We were just never in sync that way. And we weren't meant to be. We were just meant to always be friends. I'm glad that we had that innocence, that we had a pure and true love for one another. That is a pretty rare thing.

We met at Proctor Academy, a small private school in New Hampshire, when I was 13 and he was 15. I can't even recall how we met only that we were always friends. I was a freshman and, as he informed me, therefore a 'boeuf' while sophomores were 'squids' and all I knew was that I just wasn't cool. But he made me his friend. And he never let me down. Sure, he teased me, and made fun of me for being young and unaware, but he also loved to come to my parents' house for weekends and he got me stoned for the first time in the Blacksmith Shop at school. It was underground and dark and interesting and he was always making things down there. Not a lot of students hung out there. So it was kind of our place. He made me an iron key in that shop, too, something I probably still have in the attic of my parent's house in Maine. I remember when he gave it to me. It was a gift. No big deal because that was his way. But his eyes said differently. He was just a giver.

Every May 3^rd, every single May 3^rd since 1987, he got a phone call from me. "Hey Matt, it's the official Coke Holder, Happy Birthday." I was the 'official Coke holder' because one time he asked me to hold his soda for him while he zipped up his parka at the Duke's Den (the snack shack type place where you could get junk food and sodas on campus) and when I went to hand it back he shook his head and smiled that huge smile of his and said, 'Nope, from now on, Jess, you're the 'official Coke holder.' Uh huh, I get it. I'm your little kid-sister type personal slave. Because, I'm sure, at that point, I was the one with the crush. His eyes were that crazy blue that draw you inexplicably in and I'm sure I looked at him like a little whipped sap. I mean, c'mon I was only a kid. And at that point, he knew he had the power. So that was that. Official Coke Holder for life.

When I think back to my years at Proctor, I remember so clearly the hill between the dorms and the dining hall, and when I was walking by myself up and down that hill I would listen to my Walkman. It was a Christmas present from my parents and it was the smallest Walkman they made back then. I was listening to Peter Gabriel repeatedly. All the students at Dartmouth were blaring his new album out of their windows and I remember feeling like one day I'd be one of them. In my mind I was becoming one of them already, practicing to be an adult. That hill would get slippery with ice from so many students going up and down it all day and it was treacherous and windy. I would hold my body tight and prepare to fall each and every time. I never fell but I was always ready to fall. That hill sort of embodied my adolescent self-consciousness. Always ready to fall.

I remember the strange sense of loudness all hidden in the silence at dusk (do you know that sound? Simon and Garfunkel defined it best and it all made sense to me in my adolescent pangs of insecurity.) It seemed to call out from the purple-blue gray skies when we were all returning from a long, satisfying, red-cheeked afternoon of skiing. I remember the sheen and gleam of new fallen snow and only one sound in the near infinite stillness:  the crunch of boots underfoot. Some of the most profound moments that defined my heart to this day, were moments when I was alone, crossing campus at night, seeing warm lights an people moving inside buildings and the glowing moon overhead, and things like simply looking out across at the stunning expanse of fresh snow in all it's glittering mystery. So much gratefulness can exist in these small moments if you let it.  The total awareness of the tenuousness of this life can give you so much during these reflective solitary times.

Orchids have this same sparkling in their white petals. Have you seen this? It is absolute magic. It is a perfect visual language. Snow has this very thing. And snow holds onto it, keeps it, protects it, speaks it, all winter long. All you have to do is watch and listen. And when you live in this climate, when it seeps into your soul, when you live within this precarious dance of death and rebirth, when you witness your own life unfold in periods of deep slumber and vivid consciousness, the intricate details form a world that lives inside you for your whole life.

Every time we had a chance to catch up, usually on the phone, he was recovering from some kind of accident. He was, always it seemed, dancing with the devil, testing life, pushing it, living it in a passionate, full way that most people wouldn't and don't . But it was his way, his journey, his life's blood. It's what he loved. Whether it was racing Ducati's at 125mph or extreme skiing or (in his mother's words) existing with ' that willingness to take a risk, to dare' whatever it was that fueled him at the time, Matt was happy just living life to the fullest in the way he knew how. I know he almost died once before. He was in the hospital with so many broken bones. Motorcycle accident as I recall, although I can't be 100% sure on that. All I know is that it was bad, whatever it was, and it was a close call. We weren't always in constant contact but we were never that far off from the major events of our lives.

When I was at acting school at Emerson College in Boston in 1993, he wrote me a simple postcard. It was no big deal. Just a chatty postcard from a ski trip to Crested Butte, Colorado, from one friend to another. He invited me to come ski with him, even offered to loan me the money to get out there. Then he said in typical humorous Matt style, better yet, get your parents to pay. But I knew he'd fly me out there. He asked me to come be with him so many times over the years. Looking back, I wish I'd taken him up on more of his amazing invitations. I think of the experiences I could have had.

I've kept that little postcard with me all this time. In fact, I've always known exactly where it is wherever I've lived. When I was in New York, it was on my fridge. In Los Angeles, it was tucked into my blue velvet journal. When I lived in Philadelphia, it was in the stereo drawer. Here in Florida, it has been in my office, second drawer down. It's always been with me.

All this time. Matt's familiar handwriting. A postcard to me. A nineteen-cent stamp.

My aunt came to visit this week and she offered to help me organize my house a bit. She's a genius at organization so, of course, I jumped at the chance for her help. So we started going through my books and papers. She suggested I give at least some of my books away but I love my books and just can't get rid of them. So she started stacking them to arrange them better. And, among the stacks, there was this old, hardcover coffee table book, something I hadn't looked at in years and years. It was given to me by my grandparents, when I was far too young to appreciate it.  The book is called 'The Musicians' by Sempe. Sempe, if you're unfamiliar, is the artist/cartoonist whose work appears regularly on the cover of The New Yorker. It is iconic and often comedic.

So I flipped open the very old, very unappreciated book with its torn and curled dustjacket that has been carried from place to place for decades. Immediately inside was a piece of still-fresh-looking academic notebook paper. It was the beginning of a letter. 'Dear Matt' it began. I couldn't believe it.

Just a couple sentences. That was all: 'I had such a great weekend with you. We need to relive the 'Blacksmith Shop days' but I guess we can do that when I come visit you in August…' Here was an unfinished letter that just lay there, frozen in time. Just waiting for me, for this week to open up this old, old book and stumble upon it.

There was no date at the top, nothing but my unmistakable handwriting that was indicative of me at around age 14.  Why was I seeing this? Why now? Why? I can't help but wonder. It's as if he's speaking to me even now. Like God put that old Sempe book there for me to see. Like God said, he's still with you. Matt is right here. He's here right now.

Some people, like postcards we pack up and take with us wherever we go, some people never leave us. Matt will never leave me. Even though he's gone now, even though his life was cut tragically short, he lived his life the way he wanted to, the way he needed to. And even while miles and time separated us, we were never far from each other's thoughts. I carried his memory, his spirit, simply embodied in a paper postcard, from place to place, through the journeys of my life.

As my mom and I both remarked while walking the beach just today, 'He had a look in his eye, didn't he?'

'Yes, he did.'

'What do you think that was?'

"He was so handsome, so wonderful, so right there with you…but…'

'There was a thing apart. Right? There was something about him, a look in his eye, that was…apart somehow.'

'I know. Apart. That's it.'

'Yes. Like he wasn't long for this world and he knew it.'

Like he wasn't long for this world and he knew it.

There are so many more memories of him that I have, the usual stuff I guess, details that aren't all that important. It's who he was, what his soul was about and what he meant to me that I hold dear. His face I can clearly see, his walk I can see, he walked like he was on air, he was somehow just not even tied to the ground. He had this weightlessness, this contagious energy like he was going somewhere. Anyone who knew Matt knows exactly what I'm talking about. He was always moving. Always searching.

When people die young, they are always young.  He'll never be sick or old. He'll always be beautiful and handsome and full of life. And as sad as it is, it's a reminder that your own life can be gone just as suddenly. And it's so important to remember that each day is the only one you have. That's what I will try to remember when I get caught up in some stupid bullshit going on, when I'm short-sighted about a work disappointment or some guy I liked who treated me like dog shit, or being annoyed by someone who takes too long to order their damn latte at Starbucks. It's easy to forget how good you have it when piddly stuff gets in the way. But it's so, so, so important to be grateful. So important to be grateful. Gratefulness affects every part of your life – and makes life better for everyone you ever touch.

And, after all, when I look around, this is all pretty damn good. This life I have is pretty good.

Matt has always been with me. I've tucked him into old books and journals, packed him up and moved from place to place, kept him alive in papers, in letters, in photos. He is one of my soulmates in this life. And he is not just a memory of when we were young and all the things we went through. His life is an entire world inside my heart.