SEPTEMBER 4, 2014:
EULOGY is an essay about my best friend, who I admire, and who I always expected to write about, but not like this. I first wrote this essay in 2010, and I have revisited it dozens of times since, always in an effort to shorten it into something more palatable. My attempts have been in vain… each time I hack it apart, I find that what I want to say is: MORE. The mangy version that I'm offering up now, has mutated to
7,200 inelegant words, which is apparently the absolute LEAST amount of words that I can say at this time.
I apologize.
If you decide to read it, it will take you approximately 45 minutes.
I know that less is more, and I hope that one day I will get it right, but when it comes to writing about someone I cherish deeply, I run long. If you do read this, you may think, as I have, "A WHOLE LOT of this isn't about Jason at all." You are right. If this were an essay "about" Jason, that would be a lot of fun! That would be story after story of hilarity. But this essay is about what Jason has given to me, and the million beautiful ways that he's impacted my life. To that end, this essay is also about shame, for when I was given the opportunity to express my love, I went about it badly, I hid, and surely there is nothing a human being regrets more than letting love go unsaid.
Today is your 40th birthday, Jason. I love you, dearest friend. Everything I know today, you instinctively knew as a kid. Everything I am today, you taught me when we were so much younger. I wish I had listened, but I wasn't ready. It took me some time, but I'm ready now. I can still hear you.
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M
y family moved to a suburb of Chicago the summer before I started 5th grade. On my first day at St. Raphael’s Catholic Grade School in Naperville, I met the three other new students in Sr. Helen’s class. Jason and Kelly were both from New York, with accents that made them sound to me like movie characters. Mandy had a pleasanter, sweeter accent. She was from a place where they have crawdads and mee-maws. My family had moved from Minneapolis, where we’d lived for one year. Five states ago and 10 years before, I was born in Pittsburgh. I had never lived anywhere long enough to pick up an accent. I sounded like a dialect merger.
My family was transient. My father commuted for work and come home only on weekends. He was always going to the airport, so I thought he worked there. We moved so many times before I turned 10, I don’t know what to say when people ask me where I am “from.” I am from a Mayflower moving van.
My mother stayed at home. She held it all together while my father was away, but she wasn’t like the other mothers, and I knew we weren’t like the regular families. While our instability loomed, the other mothers were redecorating the dining rooms. My mother was ever-unpacking, reorganizing, creating a home on the fly. We moved in, set up shop, we joined, we played, made friends, and settled in, but all was temporary. Our bubble floated into a new town where we wafted for a while. But at any moment, we could pop. Life would be packed up, loaded, driven, unloaded, unpacked, and rearranged, and we would make ourselves anew in a city I’d never heard of before.
This felt normal to me, and I liked it. I made new friends wherever we went, but the perpetual impermanence made me move, talk, and think at frenetic speed. I knew how to come and go, but I had never learned to “stay.”
I didn’t know it then, but we were not on the run anymore. My parents decided that Naperville was the last stop. My brother and I were older and they wanted to give us some stability. My father would now do all the traveling, while my mom made us part of the community.
Because we were the new girls, Kelly, Mandy, and I immediately magnetized to one another. We were different from the other girls in our class. We were accustomed to dislocation, and maybe because of that we projected (or feigned) a fearless intensity. Our mothers hawked over us, but when we could dodge their line of sight, we behaved as if we were feral: We stayed up all night at the slumber parties, got sent into the hallway for talking too much in class, went to parks late at night to meet the boys, though we had no idea what to do when we got there and usually just giggled and ran away. We slept at each other’s houses almost every weekend. We navigated the stage between childhood and adolescence, alternately playing with Barbies, roller skating, watching MTV, and making up dance routines. We called the party line, the homework assistance line, the pregnancy help line, and the suicide hotline (using the telephone was such a big deal in the 80s). Kelly was trendy and liked to start fads. Mandy was a Girl Scout and had the best imagination. I was the tall girl, the fastest runner, goofy, but fanatical about my grades.
I had a complicated relationship with my mother, who was protective of me, and didn’t let me do things that (I thought) everyone else was allowed to do. I bucked against her and broke her rules to fit in. When I wasn’t with friends, I felt unhinged. I wanted my mother to understand me. I wanted my dad to come home.
I got into my head that Kelly, Mandy, and I all were in Naperville to stay, that we were safe with each other. We became our own family. We made a funny-looking trio, because Mandy and Kelly were normal-sized, pre-teen girls, whereas I was a foot taller than both of them, and by 6th grade, had grown to my full adult height and width.
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| Julie, Kelly, and Mandy (1986) |
As if things weren’t bad enough for me with my boobs and hips, I didn’t have Guess jeans or Jams or an Izod polo shirt like the rest of the girls. My clothes came from Venture. To put this in perspective, Venture is to K-Mart as K-Mart is to Versace. But even though I had my body and clothes and mother problems, I had my friends, and I was happy.
Then within a month of each other, both Kelly and Mandy moved in the middle of 6th grade, Kelly to New Jersey, and Mandy to Georgia. This was the first time I wasn’t the one doing the moving, and I learned for the first time that it is considerably harder to be the one left behind, than the one moving on.
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Most of our class at the going away party for Mandy
Jason is on the far left... holding a bible (1986) |
After Kelly and Mandy left, I performed melodramatic rituals of grief for months. I sat in my room after school, sobbing, writing letters, hopefully going out to the mailbox every day. For hours on end, I listened to “True Colors” by Cyndi Lauper, and “All Cried Out” by Lisa Lisa and the Cult Jam, songs I’d acquired by putting a tape recorder up to my clock radio. Making long-distance calls was a luxury, and I could only talk to Kelly and Mandy on special days. I was 12 and I felt lost. Jason and I had been friends from the start too, but during my time of mourning, we became closer. It began because Kelly’s family had moved in such a hurry that they hadn’t sold their house. For the rest of the school year and over the summer, and for a small wage, Jason and I mowed the lawn at Kelly’s old house. Kelly’s father gave us boxes, and we packed up Kelly’s room and the basement.
When we started 7th grade, Jason and I were inseparable. Also, I think, just really very loud. We disrupted everything with our shenanigans. We were never allowed to sit next to each other in class. Our poor teachers had to change our assigned seats regularly to try to make it so that we couldn’t see each other because we fancied ourselves some kind of comedy act. No matter what they did, we kept it up, and we got away with it because teachers don’t lay on the discipline with students who participate in class and get good grades. We both genuinely loved school.
Kids like that can be obnoxious, so I don’t claim that we were universally adored. Those middle school years can be brutal, but having each other made it easier. I don’t know what our peers thought of us, but I do know that no one from our school thought of one of us without the other.
But there was something else, something they didn’t know… what kept us together, talking for hours on the phone every night, were the sad secrets we had in common. Now, mind you, we were 12, 13, 14. We were upper middle class. We had privileges that we took for granted, so I’m not about to compare our woes with those of the Lost Boys of the Sudan. But everybody’s got their something, and we had ours: We didn’t get along with our mothers. Our fathers missed important things and we had to pretend not to be hurt. Jason had a cat called Peaches, and I had a cat called Casper, and families who have cats are kind of weird just to begin with. Families who have cats instead of dogs are saying to the world, “I will love and care for something that will never love me back, and I’m OK with that.”
Our fathers were like cats, sort of vaguely present. This turned our mothers into hound dogs, and we felt suffocated by their paranoia. I couldn’t stand to be in my house, and Jason couldn’t stand to be at his, so we spent a lot of time at parks or standing around in the street.
I was too tall. I wore glasses. I didn’t have the right clothes. Jason was the first boy who made me feel special. When we were 12 years old, we had our first kiss behind the air conditioning unit on the side of his house. He was my first boyfriend. I couldn’t imagine that we would not always be together.
I needed someone to love me. My mother loved me, but she didn’t know what to do with me. Our fighting exhausted and confused me. I imagine it was hard on her too, but I was a kid and thought only of myself. When I needed to escape, I would sit with Jason’s mother, Charlene, who was a comforting, compassionate presence in those years. “Chuck,” as Jason called her, had three sons, Jason in the middle. They put her through the ringer, and her husband was gone sometimes for over a MONTH, usually overseas, not just during the week like my dad. Charlene didn’t treat me like someone else’s daughter, or even like a kid. She talked to me like a sentient adult, like a friend. She and Jason were often at odds, and sometimes, I think, she needed to talk, or maybe it’s the case that I wasn’t the only one with troubles. When I came over to talk, I felt like she took me seriously. She’d give me a glass of juice and we’d chatter away. There was plenty of crying too, sometimes both of us.
My presence at Jason’s house, and his presence at mine, could, by itself, frequently defuse a potential bomb. When Jason yelled and screamed at Charlene, I’d take Charlene’s side, and tell him he was being an ass. When Jason came into my house, all tension melted away. There was a lot of tension, and if I wasn’t there, food in particular was an acceptable target. To wit:
MOM: [yelling at the oven] “What’s wrong with this god damn meatloaf?!”
MOM: [having just dropped a pie]: “FUCKing meringue!”
MOM: [aggressively slamming a head of lettuce into the kitchen counter] “LETTUCE SHOULD COME IN A CAN!”
My mother wasn’t SERIOUS. These are actually examples of her fantastic sense of humor, but some people would be taken aback to walk in on a woman in the midst of cussing out a meatloaf. Not Jason. He knew how to tease my mother in just the right way to light her up laughing. She couldn’t be angry when he was around. Without asking permission, he called her by her first name, which was unheard of at our age. One day he walked into my house while Mom was cooking dinner. To the tune of an R.E.M. song that was in continuous rotation on the radio, he sang out, “Shiny happy Paula holding ham.”
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| Jason holding a ham sandwich (1992) |
Living in my house was one thing, but living in my body was harder. Misgauging my height as a weight problem, my mother (at my request) took me to Jenny Craig when I was 13. The clinician told me that at 5’7”, I should weigh 110 pounds. She said, “You have such nice cheek bones. When you lose weight, you’ll be very pretty.” I hated my body, but Chuck would force-feed me, telling me I was beautiful. Every time Jason had a pool party, I’d get SO close to just jumping in, but would always detour into the house and lock myself in his parent’s bathroom, too ashamed to show myself in a bathing suit. Charlene sat outside the door and patiently talked me out. I’d reluctantly slink into the backyard hoping to go unnoticed and dive into the pool, only to surprise myself by having a great time... until the next pool party, when we’d run the whole play again. When Jason and I were 14, about to graduate from 8th grade and go to different high schools, he wrote in my yearbook, “Don’t fall away. I won’t let you.” He gave me a ring made from a green paper clip, and we said that we would get married when we got older. Our romance was over by summer’s end, but our friendship was unique, unchallenged.
When we were 18, I moved to Iowa City to get a degree in English, and Jason moved to New York City to get a degree in theater. About nine minutes after he walked into Tisch, he came out of the closet. This put a rumple in our marriage plans, so we hatched a back-up scheme to mutually achieve our respective goals. He wanted to be famous. I wanted to be a writer, but that was too impractical, so I went to law school in Nashville, and Jason moved to L.A. He would rocket to fame (as an actor or a model, or by having sex with someone famous – really anything to speed things up), and I would write the tell-all biography that exploited him.
This was a completely serious plan. We talked about it, plotted it, and waited for things to kick off. He ran around trying to get acting work... or sleep with celebrities who were supposedly straight, and I wrote the first chapters of his biography. These exist on a 3x5 floppy disk readable only by an obsolete word processing program, so my opus can never be retrieved.
The biography would have been balanced. I respected Jason, but I knew him well, and I had some opinions regarding his “flaws,” most of which, at this point in my life, are squarely the OPPOSITE of flaws, but these are they: He didn’t care what anyone thought, so he did whatever he wanted to do. If, by some strange circumstance, he wasn’t the center of attention, he made himself the center of attention (e.g.: starting to dance in the middle of a shopping mall; talking much too loud in a restaurant about things that one typically keeps down to a whisper). He provoked people (e.g.; while doing the aforementioned solo dancing in the mall, yelling, “What’re you looking at?!” when people stared).
He wasted his parent’s money (so freely given, when my parents were so frugal) on frivolous things. He was mean to his mother. (Well, so was I.) The most egregious offense came in 8th grade, when Jason and I were up for the highly-coveted Blanchette award along with our classmates, Jenny and Kim. Every time we lined up in the hall for school mass, we passed the Blanchette plaque with the engraved names of the winners who had graduated before us. I dreamed of my name being etched on that plaque for all time. I don’t know what the award was for – it was probably supposed to be given to the student who was as much like Jesus as an 8th grade kid can be; but really, it was the last major popularity contest before exiting grade school, because it was awarded by the vote of our classmates. NEEDING my name on that plaque as much as I did, I really WANTED to vote for myself, but that seemed objectively un-Jesus-like, so I voted for Jason. I don’t remember who Kim or Jenny voted for, but like me, they didn’t vote for themselves. Unlike us, Jason did vote for himself, and he made no bones about it. I lost by one vote. Jason got the award. This gross injustice burned me for YEARS.
He laughed it off. He would not change for me or anyone. His confidence had no bounds. Before my eyes, he transformed from an awkward 10-year-old into one of the most uniquely beautiful men I have ever seen. He had sway and self-assurance to spare. I wanted to be like him, see myself the way he saw me, but I was so turned inside-out, I didn’t know how. Liking myself didn’t come naturally the way it did for him.
When I looked in a mirror, I saw something plain and ugly and afraid. When he looked at me, I felt different, like a worthwhile person who at least ONE person loved, but I thought that only he could see me, like I was one of those pixelated images that you have to squint at to see the hidden, interesting something. As I got older, I started to be able to see myself almost the way he saw me, but I couldn’t see it consistently. I lost focus and needed reminders. Jason gave me his love in a way that I could receive. I had no guilt or shame or fear of it because I hid nothing from him, and he never made me feel like I had to.
I could accept Jason’s love because he knew me better than anyone, and he knew me from a very young age, before my brain was fully formed, when I had braces and an unfortunate perm, when no matter how hard I tried to dress myself, I looked absurd. Jason read my diaries.
He wrote in my diaries. In times when I despised myself to the pore, he loved me even more fiercely, relentlessly. Jason could be kooky, but his love was unfailing. I cannot recall a time when I went to him in tears without walking away feeling light and reassured. Jason sat with me the night before prom, after I’d eaten only carrots for two weeks to lose weight. I was so sick, my skin and my tears were orange. He held me on his bed and said, “Carrots, you weren’t fat to begin with. Now you’re just skinny AND orange.” From that day on, he could snap me out of a state into laugh-tears with that word: Carrots.
He knew the most horrible things about me, and he loved me still. People like that only exist in romantic comedies. In real life, the only person who loves you like that is your mother, but the whole POINT of life is to love someone who loves you as much as your mother does. If you can swing that, you win!
No one except Jason will ever, ever know who I really was when I was 10, or 16, or 24, or when I was sitting in his bedroom at his Casio keyboard writing songs while wearing a pink leotard and his prom king crown. He took his lumps in high school for being effeminate and eccentric, but he was popular and artsy. I could be outgoing, but only when I wasn’t isolating myself as punishment for all of my perceived imperfections.
We smoked and wrote faux-serious poetry on napkins while drinking coffee at Baker’s Square. We listened to the most obscure bands we could find and went dancing at Medusa’s. He came to my college graduation. I went to Montreal with his parents to see him sing and dance in “A Chorus Line.” He was superb and happy and I was jealous. I admit it. I wanted to be artsy too.
Instead, I was toiling away at law school, towards a career I had no desire to pursue. I envied Jason’s innate sense that he was ENTITLED to happiness. I didn’t know how he went through life allowing the world to fall to its knees, showering him with easy love, never making apologies for himself, doing whatever he pleased. I had dreams, but no idea how to get close to them. I was practical. I put happiness off till I got my work done.
He kept telling me to quit law school and be a writer, but what in the hell did that MEAN? “HOW?,” I would ask. “I can’t just ‘go be a writer.’ Who DOES that?” I didn’t have the guts, and I thought HE should be more practical. I kept telling him to act more, party less, get his head shots, pursue something real, but he went about having fun. No matter where I was, I could make myself miserable. Wherever he was, he materialized joy.
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| I get my wisdom teeth taken out before starting college |
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| Jason came over every day |
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| and made it fun :) |
I was spiraling into depression in law school. I wanted to cry myself to sleep, but I called Jason, knowing that ANYTHING he said would “fix” me. He was stuck at LaGuardia in a snowstorm overnight, and was dancing in the ladies room to stay awake. I was annoyed, but only because I didn’t get it. “Why would you start dancing in an airport? Why are you in the ladies room?”
He told me he’d seen two maintenance women with a radio on their cleaning cart, and he followed them into the bathroom. I heard him say something in Spanish (he collected languages, and he spoke them with cool confidence), then, in the background, I heard the women laughing, the kind of laughter that made it clear that THIS was the brightest thing that had happened to them all day. I could picture him putting on a show, no self-conscious reservation, all energy and delight. Life. I wasn’t stuck in an airport. I was stuck in my head. I didn’t cry. I didn’t feel sorry for myself. If I couldn’t be that fearless, at least he could, and I laughed and laughed, long after I hung up the phone.
When we were 26, Jason moved to Tokyo with his boyfriend. I don’t know why. I’m sure I asked. I’m also sure his answer made no sense to me. I was too achievement-driven to get that sometimes you just feel like moving to Japan. During the time he was away, we didn’t talk much. I would be at work, and up would pop an email with no message, just a series of pictures of him and Winston striking increasingly ridiculous poses with a crew of Japanese punks. The “Subject” lines of his emails alone were so ludicrous, they were side-splitting: “I hate the Japanese!!” and “We’re like the friends in Beaches, but you have to be the one who dies at the end.”
I fully expected that he would be Bette Midler and I would be the homely, untalented one who got cancer. I imagined myself sitting under a blanket at a beach house, and Jason coming to comfort me and be a parent figure for my bastard son. I fully expected to have a bastard son. I fully expected to die in a warm blanket with Jason holding my hand and stroking my bald head. And Sigur Ros would be playing. And I would die laughing at something funny Jason said.
*** *** ***
August 28, 2002. My boyfriend, Sean, pointed to a picture of Jason in my condo, and asked me who he was. Sean and I had been dating for a few months, and I couldn’t believe that I hadn’t mentioned Jason. As Sean drove me to work, I prattled on and on, excitedly telling him stories about Jason. When we got to my office, I was in the middle of a story. I was on a roll, and I didn’t want to stop. I told Sean he was in for it, that he’d opened the door, and now that I’d started, I was going to keep going for DAYS.
I was a third-year associate at a firm where I worked in estate litigation. I was sitting in my office on the 58th floor, staring out the window at a plane flying by the Sears Tower. The events of 9/11 were still pretty fresh. I was suspicious of the plane. My phone rang.
My mother said, “Are you sitting down?”
“I’m a lawyer, so, yes.”
“Oh, Jules. Jason is dead.”
I’m not going to go into how I reacted, but there was a lot of snot. The partner whose office was next to mine came in and asked me if I was all right. “No, I’m not,” I said. “My best friend died.” The partner expressed his condolences and shut my door. I laid down on the floor. It wasn’t possible. I hadn’t seen Jason in nearly two years. Where did this happen? HOW? And then there was a sickness as my body went numb and sunk into the floor: The only person on the planet who really knew me was gone, and with that realization, I felt an entire section of my soul (maybe the best part) lift right out of me and drift away. My past was erased. And also my future, that happiness I’d been putting off for later: I was supposed to ride Jason’s coat-tails to fame; when he died, along with him died the best shot I had at getting published.
I don’t know much about how Jason died. He had just moved to Brooklyn from Tokyo. Charlene told me that he had had a massive heart attack. He’d been on blood pressure medication for years, but when his prescription ran out in Tokyo, he stopped taking it. She described getting the call in the middle of the night, flying to New York. She said that they wouldn’t let her hold his body in the basement of the hospital where he was pronounced dead on arrival.
There was going to be a memorial service in Brooklyn and another one in Naperville, but she didn’t know exactly when. Sean and I had a flight to Mexico in two days. I called Sean and said, “You know my friend Jason, the one you asked me about this morning? He’s dead.” It seemed like it should be very dramatic, but the words sounded preposterous as they came out. I was paralyzed, not with grief, but just in general. What do you do? Someone said the words and the words went into my ears. I couldn’t unhear them, and that made Jason go away forever. He’d been gone for a long time, but dead is different. Dead is never coming back. When are you supposed to do?
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Homecoming (1988) |
I asked Sean to leave work, pick me up, and take me somewhere, anywhere. We ate lunch in Greektown, at a restaurant near Greek Isles, where Jason took me before the Homecoming dance when we were 15. His father had driven us downtown and he sat in the car and waited as we ate our meal. Then he drove us back to Naperville and dropped us off at the dance.I wanted Sean to tell me what to do. I wanted him to tell me that we should cancel our trip, and I’m sure that he did. I am also sure that I then convinced him that I didn’t want to sit around waiting to find out when or where the funeral would be, that I needed to do something fun, that we should just get on the plane. Sean didn’t know how dumb I was being, or maybe he did think it was dumb, but I was very convincing. I still can’t believe it, but we went.
Halfway through the next week, Jason’s mother called me at the resort in Mexico. She said, “The funeral in Naperville is on Saturday.” In my glorious egocentrism, I thought/feared that she was going to ask me to say something at the service, and I was terrified. I don’t know what she wanted to say or what she would have said because I didn’t give her the opportunity. I quickly said, “Charlene, I’m in Mexico.” I didn’t tell her that I wouldn’t come to the funeral, but I didn’t tell her that I would.
How arrogant I was. Jason had hundreds of friends. HUNDREDS. I wasn’t his best friend. I may have been his oldest friend, but I was only ONE of so many.
I knew I should go home. I knew I shouldn’t have left the country in the first place. I wanted to want to go home. I wanted to be better, at least for Charlene, but I wasn’t.
Some of my friends went to Jason’s funeral at St. Raphael’s, where we’d met in 1984. I must have asked them about it, but I don’t remember what they said. I didn’t even write about it in my diary. I didn’t think about it this way at the time, but I was acting with full mens rea, I knew it, and I sure as hell didn’t want THAT memorialized on paper. I didn’t want to feel the discomfort of analyzing why I was acting like this, how disrespectful and insensitive I was being to his family, what a gross violation of friendship I was committing. So I flaked on my best friend’s funeral, and I told myself I didn’t care. I went even further to protect myself. I TOLD people, “I’m a terrible person. I know that, but I don’t care.”
I made up a story that I told myself to relieve the guilt I claimed not to be feeling: Jason would have understood. Jason is the only person who would have understood how I could do what I did, even if I didn’t understand it myself.
I was 28. For the first time since I was 10, he wasn’t there to make me laugh and comfort me when I was all mixed up.
Jason knew that I cried and didn’t cry at all the wrong times: weddings and funerals = no tears; seeing a man eating alone at Wendy’s, especially if elderly or wearing a cardigan = hysterical sobbing. He thought it was funny that there was no rhyme or reason to my emotional reactions. He knew I couldn’t regulate my feelings, and he didn’t judge me when my behavior was nonsensical or when my thoughts didn’t correlate with reality. He just laughed and loved me anyway.
Every night after he died, Jason visited me in a dream, and what’s more, I woke up every morning and I remembered it in colorful detail. In each dream, it was nighttime, and I was alone, and then he appeared out of nowhere, took me by the hand and led me somewhere beautiful – the bow of a boat, a gazebo in a park surrounded by trees lit up in white lights. Then we danced.
He never spoke. In months of dreams, he never uttered a word. Every night, he took me to some perfectly perfect place where we were completely alone, he held me, and we danced. The Jason who came in my dreams had a different demeanor than the Jason I knew in life. The Jason in my dreams didn’t talk, but his eyes were soft and sincere. Love. This was always somewhere under the surface, but it was covered by layers of wit, sarcasm, some flamboyant display. In my dreams, all of that was stripped away. No jokes. No mischievous glint. His eyes were pure love. When I first started having the dreams, I woke up wondering why he never said anything. As the weeks and months went on, I started talking to him in the dream, asking him how he could be gone when I could still feel him. His eyes comforted me. He didn’t say it, but I could hear his voice through his sparkling eyes. His eyes said, “I’m right here. I’ll never leave you.” I would beg him to speak to me, but he would just smile and hold me and dance, sometimes fast, sometimes slow. Unlike in real life, he wasn’t putting on a show. It wasn’t a laugh-fest. In my dreams, he was calm and steady. He wasn’t there to impart wisdom. He simply stayed with me. He was gone, but he wasn’t. He stayed with me through the loneliness I felt at the loss of him and the part of myself that went with him, the grief that I wasn’t allowing myself to feel, the guilt that I was glibly claiming not to hold onto as proof of my worthlessness. After a very long time, more than a year, I stopped trying to talk to him. I quieted down. The dream came every single night. Every single night, we danced.
One morning I woke up and realized that I hadn’t had the dream. I had been too stubborn and our time had been too short for him to finish the task on earth, but hundreds of dreams after he died, I finally learned the thing he’d known all along. I am lovely, and I am loved. All around me, all the time, there is love. I’m not alone. I will never be alone. Life is love. That’s all. Give it. Receive it. But love it. Love all of it. Dance!
I wanted him to know that I understood, and also that I loved him. I wondered if I’d ever been clear enough about that. It weighed on me for a while. Years actually. Though I never attributed it to Jason’s death, and certainly many other factors weighed in, my depression became so severe, I’d had to ask my boss to let me work from home. Then one night, Jason came one last time in a dream. This time it was snowing. We danced in the snow. In the dream, I said, “You DO know! Thank you for telling me!” His eyes closed, then opened, and they smiled, “Yes.” I woke up and I remembered. Say what you will about death and dreams and hokey-pokey. I was taking all kind of medication at that time. Where the dreams came from, I don’t care. I know that he knows how much I loved him, because he reminded me that I DID say it, and I said it at the top of my lungs.
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I don't understand what I'm wearing here, but
Jason bought me the hat (New Year's Eve 1992) |
December 1992. We were freshmen in college and we were home for winter break. We’d just had dinner with his family at Mama Celeste’s. We were sitting in his dad’s company car parked in his driveway. He handed me a letter and said, “I gave this to Mom and Dad last night. Will you read it?” In the letter, Jason told his parents that he was gay. As I read the letter, I was waiting for the punchline. There wasn’t one. In my heart of hearts, I didn’t believe it, couldn’t fathom it, and it honestly did NOT register to me that he was serious. I had known Jason to do things just to get a rise, so I thought there was something more coming. I laughed. “Are you trying to kill them!?”
When I asked the question, I fully expected him to laugh. I was so naïve, I thought it was all a joke. But when I looked at him, he wasn’t laughing. His eyes were disappointed, and he seemed a little scared. I had never seen him this way. He looked at me like he was searching for something he didn’t expect to find, and quietly said, “I’m gay.”
“But...”
He said it again. Louder. More firm. “I’m gay.”
“But...” I went into hysterics. He may as well have been wearing a cardigan.
Definitive now. No bullshit. “I’m gay.”
“How long have you known?”
“Carrots,” he laughed at my stupid question, but he wasn’t flip. He knew I didn’t understand. “I’ve always known.”
I started screaming at him, just SCREAMING a litany of crazy. I don’t even know what horrible things I said, or why. It’s hard to believe now that I was THAT shocked, that I was having THAT insane of a reaction; but I WAS shocked, and it DID seem insane.
The next part is very clear. I concluded my hysteric rant with, “WHAT THE FUCK!? WHY DIDN’T YOU TELL ME?!”
“I was afraid to lose your love.”
I was stunned, stunned out of my SKIN.
My
heart
broke
into
pieces
and
fell
onto
the
dirty
floormat.
The words I said next are burned so deep in my brain, to this day, I can feel them coming out of my face. Except, I didn’t say them. I SCREAMED them: “I could NEVER not love you! DO YOU HEAR ME?!
I
could
NEVER
NOT
love you!”
Admittedly, shrieking at him was a poor way to demonstrate my support, but I was DEVASTATED, crestfallen, not because he was gay, but because he’d kept it from me. He hadn’t entrusted me with his soul the way I had delivered mine up to him. I hadn’t been a good enough friend. I was ashamed. But he changed me in an INSTANT. Everything I thought I knew was gone. Something new stepped in to replace it.
Jason took me home. There was like, a thousand feet of snow. His dad’s Taurus was sliding all over the road. Ice was pouring out of the sky. I walked into the house and my mother was standing in the kitchen. My face was swollen from crying. My palms were bruised purple from banging on the dashboard. I’d gone totally apeshit in the car.
My mother looked concerned. “What’s the matter?”
“Jason is gay.”
She gave a quick, happy little laugh.
This was a totally unacceptable response. I got angry, and snapped, “Why are you laughing?”
“Oh, honey, it’s just... well, that’s not much of a surprise, is it?”
“Well, it’s a surprise to ME!”
I was pissed at my mom for somehow clairvoyantly knowing that Jason was gay but never bothering to mention it to me. I went upstairs. I picked up my cat and brought him into my room. I tried to hold him with me under the covers while I cried, but he clawed at my face and ran away. Cats are so fucking stupid. Why can’t they just love you?
I was mad at myself, thinking why Jason waited so long to tell me. I was, in fact, the LAST person he told. He’d been out at NYU for months. My mind raced through our lives and I scoured my memories for each offense. I’d gone to visit him halfway through our first semester, and he kept introducing me to his friends, announcing some as gay. I was uncomfortable, partly because of that, but mostly because I was self-conscious. I wasn’t dressed right for Manhatten. I lived in Iowa, where we were doing the whole Pearl Jam/lumberjack thing. His friends were thrifting and hip. I felt like he was showing off, that his world was more important and trendy than mine. I didn’t need him to rub it in my face. I already knew it, and instead of enjoying the opportunity to be a country mouse in the big city, I asserted my ignorance with venom. I actually said these words in an elevator: “Why are you hanging out with these people, and why do you keep making ME hang out with them? Aren’t you worried that you’ll catch it?” I was openly homophobic, which may have given him pause. How many times had I said something obtuse, hurt him without knowing it? We were young. I was dumb. I didn’t know what I was talking about because I didn’t know that I knew anyone who was gay. It never crossed my mind. I knew I could never understand how it felt for him to tell me, never know the pain he had lived, but it was unfathomable to me that he had somehow lived it with joy.
There was far more to Jason than his being gay, but HIS being gay changed MY life. I had no choice but to open up and accept something I didn’t understand. All of a sudden, it wasn’t something “out there,” removed. There was nothing to understand. This was Jason. I loved him. That was it.
 |
| Winter Break (December 1992) |
The next morning, I was ACTIVATED. I was not only OK with it, but I saw it as my charge to be his outspoken CHAMPION. I was prepared to join P-FLAG and march in Pride parades and put a rainbow sticker on my forehead.
This was during a time when it was not really OK to be out. This was during a time when, if you even knew someone who was gay, you were on the margins. Jason had redefined me. I had to become progressive. I had to question things about being Catholic. I had to talk about it all the time. I stuffed it down people’s throats, made them eat it, and I did it as if to challenge them to say there was something wrong with being gay, just so I could tell them there wasn’t.
 |
| Summer before Sophomore year of college (1993) |
Over the next 10 years, I introduced ALL of my friends and boyfriends to Jason so that they too would be transformed. And they were. Every last one. Of course, I had an unfair advantage. “Here is the most wonderful person you will ever meet. He is gay. BAM! POW! Now you like a gay person.” Whatever they thought before, they didn’t have a fighting chance of clinging to it now.That was 1993. Things have changed. It has been my experience that when I meet someone who is gay, it comes up naturally and right at the start. There is no big announcement, no dramatic reveal, just being who you are, which is the way it should be for everyone.
I was angry that for 18 years of his life, my hero had to hide a part of himself, even from me, his best friend, who happily would have died before him (as long as it was at a beach house and the blanket was really warm). And then, after he died, I was angry that he only got to live 10 truly authentic years. But Jason never said anything about that. I never once heard him lament it the way I would have. He wasn’t programmed like that.
Maybe I didn’t go to Jason’s funeral because I didn’t trust that the image of his coffin wouldn’t subsume my memories.
He belonged on a dance floor at the Limelight, wearing shiny black lamé hot pants, with a whistle around his neck, whooping it up to “Vogue,” which he could do perfectly, start to finish. I would stand shyly by, in the silly outfit he made me wear, slightly embarrassed, but mostly proud to have him as my friend. I was in awe that anyone could just LIVE like that, without being afraid, without caring what anyone thought, without taking the safe way all the time. *** *** ***
 |
The night before I went to Iowa and
Jason went to NYU (August 1992) |
The night before we left for college, we went to each other’s houses to help each other pack. He was leaving my place, going out to his car. I was starting to panic. I was moving the next day, and it would be the first time in eight years that we wouldn’t live one mile apart. I didn’t want him to go. I was stalling. I yelled from my front porch, “Wait! What if there’s a piano?! Should I bring sheet music?” He yelled back, “Nah. When you get there, just write your own.”
It is considerably harder to be the one left behind, than the one moving on, but I’ve learned to live life, Jason, and even to love and be loved. You wouldn’t BELIEVE the things I’ve done!
Thank you. 
