Mourning deferred

Echoes of Covid and connection in the digital age

I texted my friend Brian a few weeks ago. It had been a while, and I thought he might be a good person to check in with about the creativity course I’m working on. Either way, it would be fun to catch up.

A few weeks went by, which was long enough that I thought it was worth wondering if he was okay.

Reader… he was not.

I’m not sure what made me decide not to bother texting again and instead to go look him up on Facebook, but that’s what I did. His last public post was from October 27, 2021, and said that he had been moved to the ICU and would “be unavailable for a while.” He added, “Life is beautiful and life is short. I love you all and ask that you pray for me during this time.”

Only three days before, he’d posted that he had just been told he had Covid pneumonia that was worsening, and that they were about to start treating it “aggressively.”

There were no further updates or comments from him. No sign that he saw the 200 replies from so many friends offering their prayers and good wishes.

Eventually—and by then, unsurprisingly—I found the comments saying that Brian died a few weeks later—just shy of his 57th birthday.

Photo by Heike Trautmann on Unsplash

Our last conversation was about a month before he went to the ICU. I sent greetings at Thanksgiving and New Year’s, which obviously went unanswered, but didn’t think too much about it. In retrospect, I should have. While our communication was sporadic, it was not like him not to have replied.

When the pandemic started, my mom mentioned to me that during the 1918 Spanish Flu epidemic, not everyone knew someone who died, but everyone knew of someone who had. For four years I have counted myself very lucky to have been spared the loss of anyone to Covid. I didn’t know for the last two and a half that I was wrong.

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It’s a very strange thing to discover the loss of someone so long after the fact. I’ve been wrestling with it over the last few days. Just what does one do with such belated, terrible news?

I suddenly want to talk to him so desperately. While we weren’t super close, there’s still a hole where he fit into my life.

I am not even sure at this point exactly how I first met Brian, though I’m sure it was musical. I am reasonably certain that it was after a concert given by one of the chamber choirs he was in. That may have been after we overlapped in the local symphony chorus back in my hometown, because I don’t remember associating him with those rehearsals. He had a lovely voice and made good use of it, though. We kept in touch, if sporadically, when I left the area.

Photo by David Beale on Unsplash

Before then, though, he was a dear friend and confidant who helped me navigate some of the most difficult moments of my (then) young life. To call him a “sensitive soul” would be a gross understatement. Brian was the most gentle, kind, compassionate, and thoughtful person I have ever known, always doing his best to listen and allow other people to be exactly who they were, where they were, as they were. He never judged. He never criticized.

I’m not sure how to quantify the way he held my hand in those moments except to say that I realize now that I’ve never experienced anything else like it in my life, and I suspect most of us have only rarely come into contact with anyone like him. It was a sense of… what’s the right word? Maybe just a sense of true companionship? Of being seen and accepted despite my flaws (including my own judgments and criticisms of myself, which were never judged or criticized, either—just heard).

It may be the closest thing to truly unconditional love I’ve ever experienced from another human being. (Maybe that’s why it’s so hard to give it a name.)

It’s so strange to write about this now. It feels so long ago. I haven’t thought about those particular moments in probably 25 years, and I don’t think I appreciated them sufficiently at the time for the truly amazing thing they were. I don’t remember him really offering advice or input—though he must have, to some extent—so much as existing as this incredibly calm, safe presence.

I don’t mean to make it sound like he was some kind of saint. He wasn’t; he could get angry and upset just like the rest of us. But in those moments, he was closer to that saintly ideal than most of us ever experience from someone else, much less achieve ourselves.

I last saw Brian almost six years ago, when I went back to my hometown to visit for the first time in two or three years. We met for dinner and then went to see Black Panther. I had no way of knowing I’d never see him again. Would I have done something differently if I had?

What do you do when someone you cared about has died and you didn’t know for so long?

I have spent the last few days trying to tell myself it wasn’t my fault that I didn’t know—and that is true. We had no friends in common. I didn’t know his family. I deactivated my Facebook account in 2017, so there was no chance I was going to see his posts unless I deliberately went looking for them.

But shouldn’t I have noticed that more than two years had gone by without a peep? (Shouldn’t… shouldn’t… shouldn’t…?) Shouldn’t I have kept in touch better than I did?

That road definitely worked in both directions, though, so even if I should have, he should have, too. And I’m not sure it’s fair to imply that he was neglectful, which means it’s probably not fair to say it about myself, either.

Still.

It never even occurred to me until a friend pointed it out that, because Brian spent his working life in the produce department of a grocery store—where he eventually became an assistant manager (maybe more; no way to find out now)—he would have been considered an essential worker when Covid hit. It’s remarkable, then, that he wasn’t struck down sooner. But why did it never even cross my mind that he was in such danger?

I find myself thinking about relationships in our digital era, and how they are both easier and harder to maintain than ever before. I often “joke” that my friends all live in my phone, because most of our conversations happen over text. The digital social life has both its upsides and its downsides, of course. Proximity is not necessary—but what happens when proximity doesn’t happen at all? Are our screen-based relationships really as real if we never see each other?

Photo by Adem AY on Unsplash

I can look back at my text (and, at one point, email) conversations with Brian and feel the connection that was there, but there’s no denying it is not the same. Those conversations now feel frozen in amber, scraps of time never to breathe in real time again—historical documents rather than a conversation that lived over the years. They smell musty somehow, even just as words on a screen.

How well do we tell people what they mean to us when it’s so easy to send a simple text that approximates a connection with another human being we don’t realize we might be taking for granted?

Our relationships make us human. Are they really the same when they’re words on a screen?

I don’t know.

I suspect not.

But without them, we’d have lost touch much longer ago.

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I really only know two things:

1. I’ve been trying to figure out what to do with this strange energy of deferred loss since it hit me Wednesday night. The only thing it seemed I really could do was write about it, so here I am, two nights later, trying to figure it out in words, or at least do justice in acknowledging what’s beyond figuring out. Writing this is the closest I’ve come to crying, which I probably should let myself do, but somehow also feels out of place, like the moment passed—and I missed it. (I know that makes no sense, but that’s how it feels.)

2. If Brian were here, despite all my misgivings and regrets over these last two days, he would not judge me. He would not criticize me.
   
   He would sit here and listen and hold my hand and tell me everything was okay.

   
   He would not only forgive me, he would probably also ask me exactly what I thought I needed to be forgiven for, because he would see and accept my ordinary humanity and imperfection for what it is, and would not have taken it personally in the first place.

   

   Photo by Christopher Beloch on Unsplash

If I could spend the rest of my days on this planet being to my friends—and to anyone else I meet, because that was just his way—even half the friend Brian was to me, I would consider it an awe-inspiring success. And possibly the best tribute I could ever pay to his memory.

I’m not sure I have that level of Zen mastery in me, but I can at least try.

“Now cracks a noble heart. Good-night, sweet prince;
And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.”

― William Shakespeare, Hamlet