In her brutally honest diary of grief, Companion Through the Darkness, Stephanie Ericsson writes:
What appears to be derangement from observers is only a rearrangement of all parts of our personalities. Still, it seems to be so deeply disturbing to watch. Those who loved us, liked us, respected us, are watching a re-forming of a human being outside of the womb. Since this has always been a private domain, and since we are not concerned with what others think, our friends and loved ones watch in the kind of horror they would have if they saw us defecating in the middle of a boulevard. It is the saving grace of derangement that is has no cognizance or respect for the opinions of others.
For once in my life, I no longer care what other people think.
I feel as if I am finally being broken down, decimated like a condemned edifice; the cracked pillars of what once seemed so important, the crumbling foundations of outdated habits, are collapsing to powder under the wrecking ball of merciless truth. My endlessly sore heart is a yawning hole in the ground, the site of both devastation and potentiality. There are no more obstructions.
Death is the wrecking ball, the merciless truth; when the dust settles, the way is clear.
**
Over the weekend I received this decimating news: my childhood friend Jonathan Goldman had succumbed to non-Hodgkins lymphoma in July. He had been living with the disease for over a decade — unbeknownst to me.
The shock was like a shotgun blast beside my ear, rendering the world oddly silent and still. Jon? We had always managed to reconnect, to pick up where we left off, and I assumed someday we would again. Not that he would be taken away somewhere beyond the reaches of all the wireless networks as well as the International Postal Service. How could this be?
Numbly, I posted the news on my social network. Within an hour there was a response from Adriana, who, along with Jon, was one of my best friends in the fourth grade. The three of us always sat together — we were the top students in class, and the teacher’s rotating pets. “He was the first boy I ever loved, in kindergarten!” she wrote. “I’m so sad! He was smart and funny and I had always hoped you guys would get married!”
Suddenly my shoulders started to shake. Then I was sobbing.
**
Jon and I met in Mrs. Curtis’s first grade class. As I’ve mentioned before, I was infatuated with at least half of the boys in that class, and Jon was in that half. This apple-cheeked Jewish boy with a mild speech impediment was indeed, as Adriana observed, very smart and very funny, not to mention exceedingly tolerant. I cringe to recall my attempts to evangelize him in my six-year-old born-again fervor, but I definitely knew I wanted him in heaven with me. He listened to me patiently, finally trying to explain, “But I’m Jewish. Jews don’t believe in Jesus.” He had to reiterate this point a number of times, unfortunately. I never quite got it.
Another cringe-worthy moment came when a few of my classmates and I were aping some of the schtick we’d seen on reruns of Hogan’s Heroes. Holding our palms up high, we were running around exclaiming “Heil Hitler!” to our endless amusement. Jon was not so amused. Yet he calmly explained to me, again, why this was not cool.
Adriana remembers feeling like a bit of a third wheel with me and Jon in the fourth grade — “He was so in love with you back then,” she says. I remember being pretty enamored of him myself, but Adriana and I seemed to be forever competing for his attentions. Maybe that was a misperception. (I’m beginning to think my entire youth was a misperception.) Either way, he kept us in stitches, and kept us on our toes. The three of us were always competing for the perfect grade.
But it wasn’t until junior high that things reached a critical point. At the end of a chorus trip to New York, on a charter bus driving through the night, we sat together on plush reclinable seats and fell deep into conversation while our classmates slept. It was like an eighth-grade version of Before Sunrise. We talked about our childhoods and our families and our worries and our hopes and our dreams. I’d never experienced that level of intimacy with someone of the opposite sex before. But Jon wasn’t your average boy. Far from it. (In my little social-network obituary, I called him one of the finest men I’d ever known, and I wasn’t exaggerating.) Unfortunately, I started to notice that we were being noticed by other kids on the bus, and this bothered me.
Back at school Monday, I was teased about Jon. My response and solution was to put as much distance between us as possible (to poor Jon’s bafflement and hurt). He wasn’t one of the cool kids, after all; he was a “brain,” and a nerd, and I had other crushes, notably on a very cute Christian boy who looked like Luke Skywalker.
To remember this now, under these circumstances, fills me with the deepest shame and guilt for my ignoble, ignorant, cruel behavior toward the one person who least deserved it. I’ve misrepresented myself to you, my readers, through selective memory; it’s not true that no boy I ever loved growing up loved me back. Jon loved me all along. It was I who refused to be open to loving him, and all because of my foolish vanity and fear of what other people might think.
He even forgave me for my stupid, snobbish, misguided middle-school shunning. We were back to critiquing each other’s short stories the following year, and by senior year of high school he was one of my two best friends again. We would drive to the local arthouse cinema in his tiny, ripped-to-shit orange crate of a car, or take long walks through our suburban neighborhoods, talking for hours about everything under the sun. There always seemed to be some unaddressed sexual tension hanging in the air between us, but I steadfastly insisted on treating him like a brother. He went to work for the Appalachian Mountain Club for the summer, having become an enthusiastic outdoorsman and mountain climber, and sent me numerous postcards and humorous dispatches and, at one point, even a huge, shelf-like tree fungus.
When we went off to college, he continued to write wonderful letters, at one point sending me a long missive on one continuous sheet of paper, a la Jack Kerouac. His writing style was rather Kerouackian — blunt and vivid — and I think he’d tell you that On the Road shaped his adolescent self as much as it shaped mine.
We stayed in touch when I moved out West, at least for several years. But as he worked his way through MIT, and met the woman he would eventually marry, the letters dwindled. I had been thinking a lot about him last fall, and found his self-titled company through the miracle of Google, but the email I sent to the general email address (there was no direct email for Jon) went unanswered. Oh well, I thought, maybe he’ll show up on Facebook one of these days.
**
“It is only with the heart that one can see rightly,” Antoine de Saint-Exupery famously wrote. “What is essential is invisible to the eye.”
As I rather shamefacedly admitted in a previous comment thread, I have rarely looked at things with the so-called eyes of my heart. I have gotten distracted by shiny wrapping paper and bells and whistles and what James Baldwin called the “cacophany of quotations” that we internalize from outside sources. I have been led astray time and time again by a noddle full of misgivings, or else by some glittering mirage off in the impossible distance. You weren’t exactly what I had in mind, Jon, and the other kids are gossiping, and I think I see something I like better, just over that hill.
Never mind that men like Jonathan are worth their weight in gold. Gold-men.
But it takes open eyes and an open heart to see that.
**
Last week, I tentatively suggested to Sam that we go out for a drink. He was all for it. Later that same day, he handed me a little card from the art museum that said “happy” in 1950s-retro lettering on one side, and on the other had a quote.
The quote was a particularly gleeful one from On the Road by Jack Kerouac.
Blissfully ignorant of what had happened to Jonathan, I thought of him momentarily, of our rowdy senior English class, and of how much Jack sparked our fertile, youthful imaginations. I thought about the ways in which Sam is like Jon: reliable, steady, precociously smart yet humble, unassuming, approachable, caring. Jon somehow knew, whether by nature or nurture, that being a man didn’t mean aggression or domination; he exuded quiet strength. So does Sam. Jon was a no-frills, no-bullshit kind of guy. So is Sam.
Jon would have liked Sam.
now the eyes of my eyes are open, wrote e.e. cummings, a favorite poet of one of our favorite English teachers. I would add: amid the rubble of my useless vanity and my ceaseless fretting about irrelevant judges, the eyes of my heart are open.
**
Today as I stood shakily with tears in my eyes for my lost beloved, Sam looked at me with an expression of the utmost concern and kindness in his serious dark eyes. And he was utterly, unutterably beautiful to my heart.
Shall I listen to the voices that scream he’s too young? Shall I listen to the shrill cawing of the gossips who are savoring the latest scandal and who repeat the old saw Don’t shit where you eat? Shall I date Drew instead, who is inarguably pretty and a sharp dresser and age-appropriate?
In the rare cases (and Sam is nothing if not rare), age is only a number. And while I adore the people at my job, I know it’s not where I’m meant to stay forever. It’s certainly far too small a pond for the likes of Sam. And I genuinely like Drew, but I’m not off-the-rails smitten with him because of who he is.
By now, and thanks to Jon, I know what matters.
And it isn’t what people think.
**
**
The above is what I read to Sam last night when he came over to check on me.
He stayed — for a long, nearly sleepless night of talking and lovemaking and copious amounts of laughter, at times simultaneous.
What else should I tell you, dear readers? He was delicious (I can still taste his sweet, sweet mouth), romantic, and infinitely tender. If I gave more details (which I am not about to), I would be the envy of my female readers (if they indeed exist). I made him unforgivably late for work, but he was loath to leave me. And those are words I doubt I have ever uttered about anyone.
**
In the early dawn, as Sam dozed with his arms and legs wrapped around me, I fancied I saw Jon sitting on the edge of the bed, dropping by for an impromptu visit like the late Nathaniel Fisher.
“Nice going,” he said.
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