In Which Four Years

NOTE: Please excuse the exceptionally rambling nature of this post. I don't have it in me to do any kind of editing at the moment. I hope you'll read it in the open-hearted spirit in which I publish it.

Four years ago yesterday, January 25 2007, my friend Alex died at the age of twenty-three years, fourteen days.  He had been fighting Ewing's sarcoma for two years, and most recently been battling the graft-versus-host disease that had been plaguing him ever since his bone marrow transplant.  I saw him for a kind of birthday party, but the following two weeks were mostly just for him and family, and I was informed of his passing over the phone. 

His birthday party was not the most fun party I've ever been to.  He could hardly speak, but had refused much of the methadone he was being given as a pain killer so that he could be at least partly lucid for the party.  Most of the party consisted of him being approached by one or more people, croaking out something in a voice like sandpaper and then, miraculously, managing to muster a smile.  Or something that looked like a smile—that was able to communicate, "smile." 

The novel Catch-22 by Joseph Heller is incredibly important to the development of my appreciation of literature, humor, life, and death, and when Alex first told me that he had Ewing's sarcoma, I immediately thought of it.  Not because of what Catch-22 has to say about laughter in the face of death, or what it means to seek sanity in an insane, unpredictable world, but simply because it appears in the novel (the emphasis in bold is mine):

"'I worry about airplane crashes also,' Yossarian told him. 'You're not the only one.'

"'Yeah, but I'm also pretty worried about Ewing's tumor,' Doc Daneeka boasted. 'Do you think that's why my nose is stuffed all the time and why I always feel so chilly? Take my pulse.'

"Yossarian also worried about Ewing's tumor and melanoma. Catastrophes were lurking everywhere, too numerous to count. When he contemplated the many diseases and potential accidents threatening him, he was positively astounded that he had managed to survive in good health for as long as he had. It was miraculous. Each day he faced was another dangerous mission against mortality. And he had been surviving them for twenty-eight years."

The way in which Doc Daneeka views his anxieties as a competition, boasting about his Ewing's tumor worry, and the way in which Yossarian views his daily survival as a kind of inexplicable accident—I have always strongly related to those sentiments. Alex was actually brought face-to-face with Ewing's sarcoma (known as Ewing's tumor when Catch-22 was published). This completely obscure disease that Yossarian and Doc Daneeka obsess over, particularly because of its obscurity, found my friend, and he didn't make it to the twenty-eight years that Yossarian finds miraculous. He was laid low after just twenty three.

I, however, am turning twenty eight in a month and a half. I turned twenty four just a month and a half after Alex died, almost exactly two months after he turned twenty three. In that time between Alex's death and my twenty-fourth birthday, I went on the first date with a girl who would end up becoming my first real relationship—something I never thought myself capable or deserving of.  She and I broke up, got back together, broke up again. I found Rosie, adopted her—a dream come true, thought I couldn't take care of her, overcame my anxieties, thought I'd lost her, and then grabbed her back into my arms. My mother was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, had surgery, recurred, had a second surgery, more chemo. I got a job, got a new job, got paid to write something for the first time in my life. I met  Michelle, got a new dog with her—little Maddy, moved in with her, and last month I asked her to marry me and she said, "yes!"

So much has changed, turned over, changed again.  Last night, Michelle and I went to dinner with my family at my parents' apartment.  As we were sitting around after dinner, Hazel brought in the newspaper for me to see, showing me that Alex's family had bought a notice for him in the obituaries, as they have every year on this date since he died.  I had forgotten.  Forgotten that it was that day.  Four years ago.  So much has changed, and four years doesn't seem like much time, but looking at his picture in that paper, it seemed like forever.  It couldn't possibly have been four years, could it? 

Over four years since I visited him at Sloan Kettering on the children's ward, trying to play Candyland, talking about how he was going to get flying lessons once he got out of the hospital, feeling his mother suddenly burst into tears and grab hold of me, weeping, shaking, pouring some small measure of her grief into me to take outside.  I can remember sneaking out of the hospital, feeling the pack of cigarettes in the inside pocket of my jacket.  Other people, even doctors, were standing right outside the door smoking—oncologists smoking outside a cancer hospital, right next to the sign that said it was a no smoking zone—but I didn't feel like I could take one out just yet.  I walked down York, hand shaking, looking over my shoulder, turning to the East River, waiting until I felt completely certain that no one who had seen me leave the hospital was around me now, and I pulled the cigarette and lighter out, sparked, inhaled deeply, sweetly. 

Feeling the smoke twist through my lungs, my sinuses, wishing that it was me lying in that bed.  My mother weeping, clawing at my friends for some support.  I was trying to fill the hole inside of me with death and disease.  I thought about my mother, just a twenty-five minute walk in the other direction.  I could go to her, cry, hug her, pass onto her what Alex's mother had passed on to me.  But my clothes will smell like smoke, I told myself, and I can't let her know I'm smoking.  The real reason, of course, was that I didn't want to give up what Alex's mother had given me.  It was my burden now to carry.  My very real sense, for the first time, that my friend was dying… and I wasn't. 

Last night, the thought that kept running through my head was, "how could I forget?" January 25th, January 25th, January 25th… I'd looked at the date when I first woke up.  How could I have not thought to myself: "Alex.  Alex died today."  I texted my friends, wanting to feel close to the people I'd shared in his death and our grief with.  To remember that we're still here.  "Can't believe it's been that long," one said.  "Never forgotten, always an inspiration," said another."  One didn't reply at all. 

Four years is at once a long time and no time at all, just as Alex's twenty-three years are at once magically everything and tragically nothing.  One extra year wouldn't have made his death more coherent to me.  Not even ten extra years.  And each month that has passed since he died hasn't been of much significance.  But together, those forty-eight months constitute a chasm of time and distance, reflection and change.

I miss you, Alex.  Your life and death have shaped me in ways I cannot hope to fully understand, but am always grateful for.  It has always been my great honor to have known you, to still know you.  You remain like a distant star that has long since gone out, but your light still travels to me, and will forever.