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~ Obsession ~ "I think you might be obsessed," a friend said to me the other day. He was worried, he said, because I'd said some things recently about my boyfriend, also a longtime friend of his, that he'd found disturbing. I wasn't taken totally off-guard. I understand that there are people who don't know what to think. Frankly it's troubling to some that I talk about him or our relationship at all. Another good friend who also has a long (predominantly but not completely unpleasant) history with my love hadn't been so gentle; "Jeez!" she burst out a few days ago, after my taste in men and therefore he, came up in conversation. She actually pulled at her hair: "Jeff, Jeff, Jeff! God, you're… you're trippin' on Jeff!" She's my beautiful buddy and I love her even more than ginger ale or napoleons, and I think I did a pretty good job of tempering my tongue despite the jet of wounded anger that flared up out of the always-molten place under my ribcage, searing my throat. Huh, I gritted. Was I 'trippin''? Was I obsessed? I guessed, after hearing about this twice in the same week from loved ones whose opinions I valued, that I probably ought to get under the hood and give it a gander. I started with the basics. First I stopped by urbandictionary.com: 1. trippin When someone is overreacting or getting all bent out of shape over something small. 2. Trippin 1. To be concerned or worried about something/someone when you act like you're not. (Especially when a guy is "sweatin" a girl and vice versa) 2. To make a big deal/get upset over nothing. 3. To be under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs. I'm pretty sure suicide isn't 'something small', much less 'nothing', so that must not be what she meant. Maybe I just got some bad LSD (don't take the brown acid), and the last two years, seven months and twenty-two days never happened! Gosh, what a relief! After that I went by TheFreeDictionary.com: ob·sess v. ob·sessed, ob·sess·ing, ob·sess·es Mental-health professionals generally classify suicide grief as 'catastrophic'. Not everyone understands what that means; even in the pitch-black, howling deep of it I could barely comprehend it myself. People who haven't gone through it with anyone close to them often characterize suicide as cowardly or cruel (…and will often SAY that right to you, as if it might actually be the source of comfort) and tell themselves that they'd just get angry and move on - much like a woman who has never been raped often thinks she'd fight harder, that she wouldn't 'let' that happen to her. Death by suicide is not a gentle deathbed gathering; it rips apart lives and beliefs, and it sets its survivors on a prolonged and devastating journey. Suicide isn't like saying goodbye to dear old Dad after a long, full life. It's like being yanked out of your bed in the middle of the night (through the wall, face-first) and dropped into the middle of an endless minefield strewn with broken glass and body parts. You don't get to put it away and move on, like neatly closing Granny's hope chest: for years afterward it leaps out from behind trashcans, out of alleyways and bathroom stalls every so often and batters you until your eyes can't open and your piss comes out the color of the bottom layer of a Tequila Sunrise for a week. It's bloody, slow-torture booby traps all over an empty house so far from the road that no one will hear you screaming. THE SUICIDE: (Cheerily transparent.) It's me again! How are you? Did you get my note? Getting over blaming yourself and looking for me in crowds? Think you might be able, sometime, to be happy again, babe? THE BEREAVED: Well, it's been hard … I miss you so much, but every day I'm getting stro- THE SUICIDE: -Oops, forgot - I don't give a shit! (Poof. Canned laughter.) Move on? Hey, I'm working on it, but it's a full-time job: I haven't even gotten all the way through. I make jokes, I admit it, and some of them are brutal. So has it ever been, so shall it ever be. Even right afterward, when staying alive myself and not plunging headlong after him into the darkness was like holding my bare hand on a live burner as it began to glow, I joked. "Hang in there," someone would say in gentle earnest; "…In there?" I'd inquire in return, directing my hollow, shadowed gaze in ominous wryness toward the back bedroom, where the closet was. It upset some people, but others told me later that hearing me say things like that was how they knew I was still myself, and that I would eventually be okay. They were right; I am okay… and there's a NO VACANCY sign on my sweetie's urn: so? It's funny, and one of the things we shared, to our great, cackling mutual enjoyment, was a profoundly macabre sense of humor. He was a dark, dark man, even on his sunny days: I think it would make him laugh, too. Recently another longtime friend of ours, one of the two, actually, that came to tell me that Jeff had died, joked that if his new business goes under he's going to go out in his back yard and open his belly in a… well, splashy act of seppuku; his wife, always game, has promised to be his second and decapitate him if it gets ugly. "Well," I sniffed, "I do hope if you make an event of it you'll remember me. If you'll recall I was rrrawther pointedly snubbed at the last such to-do." And you know, I'm certainly not the only girl who brags about her man being well-hung. Seven or eight years after my uncle died, my aunt went on a cruise; at the end a couple with whom she had made friends asked her to keep in touch, saying that they'd like her to visit sometime. They'd love to meet her husband - he sounded like a lot of fun. They were shocked when she told them that he had been gone for so long; he seemed so relevant, they said, so much a part of her. From the immediate, fond, comfortable way she spoke of him he sounded very much alive. That's the way Jeff is for me, though we had much less time together than my aunt and uncle did. He's never absent from my thoughts: my experience with him and the void he left behind continually feed and shape my creativity, my emotional life, my soul; my life will forever be divided by our joining and his death like a mountain split in half by an earthquake. Every single aspect of my consciousness, from whether or not I think there's an afterlife to what I want to do for a living to how I handle stress to the color of my hair has passed through the hole he tore through the world on his way out and come out the other side - sometimes altered so drastically that it's hard to tell what it was before. Do you think that in a few short years you would stop yearning every moment for the face of your beloved, for the smell of their skin, the sound of their voice soft against your ear? If you do, then you've never been in love. He's been gone nearly three years now: some people take much longer just to get over their divorce. Me, I'd give my right arm (I think somehow that I can imagine how the pain of a phantom limb might feel) to know he were alive somewhere, banging someone half his age and chain-smoking while he talks shit about me. I'd give pretty much anything I have to buy him another chance, even if the bastard used it to do that. And he might. Does that mean that thoughts of him and his death preoccupy me excessively? I don't know; how often does September 11th come up these days? I think and talk about plenty of other things, and to me wondering why he still comes up in my conversation seems similar to asking a Vietnam vet circa 1975 why they can't just move on and get over that whole war thing, or wondering why we haven't just put something else up on the Trade Center site by now and gotten on with business as usual. It's not just the bad stuff, either. I speak of him out of love, because he deserves to be cherished and brought to mind just like anyone else who's gone away. I tell our stories because they're mine. Some (too few, by my reckoning) are love stories, many are black comedies, a couple are tragedies and one or two are horror, as mercilessly ghastly as any I've ever read. I've never been one to shy away from vivid descriptions or jarring material, and I'm not about to start now. Yep: a lot of really horrible shit happened to Jeff's poor lovely body at the end of his life; each of those unthinkable assaults on my senses is part of the topography of my psyche now and (among many other experiences) will forever inform who I continue to become. Some of it's damn funny, too, when you look at it right… or wrong, maybe. When other horrific stuff comes up it's natural to want my baby to take his place among the great ones; he was a hell of a showman, kind of the P.T. Barnum of Oh My F*cking God. What's done, as the Scottish Queen laments, cannot be undone. He's gone, and what he didn't take with him is mine, including the jokes - which are few and far between, occasional puddles of muddy water in a vast, blowing desert. I think I've more than earned it. Interestingly, the same dear friend who expressed his concern about my obsession, in his desire to make a more profound connection with his just- deceased father some years ago, actually consumed some of his ashes as a ritual of sorts while in a kind of spiritual and emotional altered state. That vision, while easily as disturbing in my estimation as anything I've ever described, is an important piece of information about my friend and the effect that experience had on him; that's what makes it so incredibly moving. Without it there's no point in telling the story, and not telling that story occasionally would be a damn shame; I'm better for having heard it. Jeff left a good part of his prodigious, fractious legacy with me in the short time we had together, and a comparable part of mine is over there somewhere with him now; the gift I can give the man who was my worst enemy and then my deepest love (…and then maybe my worst enemy again) is to take good care of what he left behind. It's a little Rose Tattoo, I know, but I don't mind, because it's a little Brian's Song, too. He was vibrant and convoluted and there was infinitely more to him than the litany of his offenses or the immense, crushing practical-jokey ugliness of his death - which, if I may say so, wasn't really that long ago. It's on my mind a lot, sure; I haven't seen a lot of spinal-cord patients running marathons their first few years out, either. If they can make a few jokes during their long, long (loooong) recovery I think I'd consider that a good sign. - Beth, July 2007 __________________________________________
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