Drawing Practice
RIP T.
My friend T. passed away in the summer of 2019. I think about her often. She was a wonderful conversationalist, a truly weird human who was distinctive in all her reincarnations on earth. Oftentimes the memories we keep of each other keep us stuck in a boxes we’ve made to contain a person’s personality, and in her later years, T. was particularly open to greeting new versions of people. Perhaps that because she herself underwent many transformations. All of them seemed connected, but she was no averse to casting off aspects of herself that no longer made sense.
I had a harder time with that. I’d get myself stuck in versions of myself that were dictated by other people’s expectations of who I was supposed to be. Now that I have reached 51, an age she never got to see, I feel at home with casting off old versions of myself, which paradoxically makes it easier for me to deal with people who seem intent on forcing me into old versions of myself that I no longer feel attached to.
One of the heartbreaking things about grief is feeling yourself get farther and farther from the person you once were when the person you care for stays static, but that’s all conjecture. None of us know shit about the afterlife, and I like to think that T. is death is probably similar to T. in life, which is to say, I like to imagine that she is open to shedding older versions of herself even in death.
When she first died, I hated saying those words. I avoided saying them because it felt like I was imposing a truth on her no one, including her, wanted. One of the last things she said to me was “it’s not fair.” And it’s not. It’s not fair that she doesn’t get to grow old, that she doesn’t get more time with her family and her boyfriend and her job at the US Copyright Office, which she had worked so hard to get and which she loved so much.
It’s not fair, and for a long while, I felt like the way to deal with that was to just think of her as still alive. This was possible because we lived in different states and wouldn’t talk for months, but by not thinking about her in death, I did not think about her life, and I hated that. I hate that for me and I hate that for her.
