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June 10, 2006

rips valerie

[...] Been too preoccupied to post the last few week or so, mostly because I've been thinking about a friend who passed recently. No great revelations or observations in my head, just the usual questions and sadness.

[...] It's funny how you can be preoccupied by "thinking about something" and yet have a head full of holes and ellipses and unfinished sentences. Some things are get thought but remain unspoken, some are unspeakable, some you recognize as being pointless as utterance in that there is no real audience for them except (of course) for the missing one, who, as far as you can tell, can't get the message. (Can you?) So you sit and keep thinking, and if you are particularly attuned to your own rhythms and pitfalls you find something to do with your hands. Blogging was obviously not one of those things. Instead I've been running my mouth to folks on the phone, I've been playing videogames and going to the gym - completely mundane and banal. I think crazy things on the elliptical trainer, like how getting hit by a train is such and awful, gruesome way to die. I stare out the gym window at the LA skyline and shake my head, think what kind of crazy guts it takes to kill yourself that way. I listen to music and the words make all kinds of unexpected sense to me. I stop in the middle of a set, rewind for a second listen. I am desperately grateful for every chance to pay attention, connect.

[...] Everyone is avoiding the word "suicide" except when they are using it privately. But we don't know what happened, do we? When there is so much ambiguity about an event choosing one possibility over another says more about the chooser than the event we are purportedly trying to understand. So what is it about me that makes me keep turning to one point of view, one interpretation? What do I get out of it?

[...] I don't think I've ever fully gotten over the death of someone I have known in any kind of intimate, liminal way, but that's no unique pain; it's likely the same for everyone. The literal and figurative arms that have held you can be those of a lover or parent or child, or maybe just those of a favored dance partner or fondly remembered teacher or trusted co-worker, but no matter the connection these are people that for the rest of your life you could put a blindfold on and still ID - from their smell, from the characteristic hang of a hand around your neck, from the particular, tell-tale route their mind likes to take from point A to B . Their loss is a tragedy in-and-of-itself and then on top of everything it goes and cuts you off irrevocably from the parts of yourself that were forged in partnership with the lost/gone person. These parts of you - memories, places, songs, offices, apartments, streets, friends in common, whole years and biographical chapters - go not so much gone themselves but become hazy and unstable. How can they ever be trusted again, all these people, places and things whose were either made or verified in common?

[...] You lose someone you have known particularly and you rediscover the hard way that your brain is a social organ, that X% of its circuitry, maybe more, was wired collaboratively. Even if those circuits have been sitting dormant for decades there is a sense in which they are at peace with their quiescence as long as the other coder (partner in code?) is still there in the world, doing their thing. And then they're not in the world and besides the sadness and anger and guilt there is all this feedback, a buzzing in your ears that indicates a node in the network is missing.

[...] You lose someone you once knew particularly well (but not so well lately) and you sit around wishing everything was different. That you had been there more, that you had reached out or checked in more effectively. And then you're dumbstruck - yes, of course. Everything already is different, has been for years. You should have grieved a little the morning you woke up and it occurred to you that you had not spoken to them in months and months and months. You should have

[...] I want to write "rest in peace, Valerie" but I can't. The words feel a formal affectation concerned more with the problem of ending this post than with anything to do with my grief or her life. I guess I want out of this post in a way that actually means something, but that's a taller order than I feel up to now. So how about I just stop?

[...] But rest in peace, Valerie. I miss you. You really did have a great, gigantic laugh. It burst out of you and made everything it attended yours.

Posted by ebogjonson in brain maintenance, memory, on June 10, 2006 11:40 AM