In four years, you can complete a college degree.
It is enough time to partner up, procreate, and maybe even train that new little person to use a toilet.
Four years can see the beginning and end of a presidential term.
It can be the home to a great number of make-ups and break-ups.
Your hair can grow two feet in length.
It is the life span of a very hearty mouse.
In four years, a lot can happen. In the span of four years, I lived on three continents. I went to law school. Graduated from law school. Took the bar exam. Passed the bar exam. Had my heart broken. Broke someone’s heart. Made friends and found communities I can’t imagine I once never knew. Traveled. Called at least four cities “home.” Stood in weddings. Held hands through divorces. Cradled new babies.
I did a lot in four years.
And yet today, it all feels very brief. Like no time at all has passed, really. On Sunday, it will be four years since my dad died. The third anniversary of Jared’s death falls just three weeks later. Their deaths are, in somewhat inexplicable ways, tied together for me. Perhaps it is the simple chronology – that Jared died just weeks after the first anniversary of my father’s death. Perhaps it is that they shared profound similarities. Or maybe it is that Jared was the person who knew – just knew – and with whom I trusted my secrets, my hopes, and my grief. Losing him – the only person I could imagine processing such a loss with – was like losing a piece of myself and sad beyond measure. But it was also like losing this connection – one of the last people who held this shared piece of history, who had met my father, who had been there with me when things were good, and then when they were bad, and who had watched all of this unfold. But, regardless of why, I often feel the weight of their absence together, this compound loss of friend and father.
After so much time and so many things, it seems like I should not be so sad, not anymore. It has been long enough that it feels like these days- the anniversarys and birthdays – should pass quietly, noted surely, but without the rawness or pain. That is how it is most of the time, after all. As days and years passed, I stopped missing them in the visceral way I did in the first few months. They stopped invading my dreams only for me to be yanked back into consciousness with the physically jarring realization that they were gone. But today it all feels fresh, fresher than it should.
But I felt their absence from the world today. And it was sad. It is sad. I am sad.
It makes me feel lonely.
Which is hard to describe emotion, really. It is a type of lonely in and of itself. The loneliness of one’s own experience with the emotion, I suppose. Because it is really such a terribly personal thing, this emotion with one name that takes on so many meanings it can almost feel like an empty word. There is the lonely of being physically alone. There is the lonely of not having someone – not being loved in a substantial way by other people. There is the lonely of not being alone at all but feeling somehow outside – being unknown in a crowd, having a secret, or simply not quite fitting in. There are simply so many different types of lonely it can be overwhelming.
The lonely I am experiencing is all of those things and none of those things, somehow all at once. It is the loneliness of absence. The loneliness of missing the people who knew you best and loved you. The loneliness of that experiencing something that cannot quite or perfectly be understood, even by those who want to. The loneliness of the world continuing to move when you just can’t. It is the loneliness of loss, I suppose.
In these times, I often wonder about the cure, whether there is one and whether it should be sought. Because, while I am desperately sad, I also cancelled plans to see people I adore. People who I know would make me laugh, listen if I wanted to talk, or simply hang out. It was, in some sense, the active rejection of comfort. And I can’t quite explain it or say why, other than that it feels right. It feels lonely, but right and safe in some sense. Which is perhaps the explanation that in some moments we recognize such a deep need for safety that we know we can only find it in our own company. We know, on some profound level, that no one can fill the void we currently feel and that we simply must, at least for a little while, feel it.
So I am feeling the void. I am feeling the void of my father. I am feeling my regret and guilt. My deep-seated tension of somehow both wanting and fearing being just like him. I am feeling the uncertainty of the world without him in it. And I am feeling the void of Jared. The absence of my friend and kindred spirit, the one person who would be safest to be near when I am in this place. I am aching for his comfort and wisdom, his voice, and his existence. I am missing – so deeply and painfully missing – knowing he is simply there, always. They were these terribly similar men who played such meaningful – and sometimes painful - roles in my life. The each, in their own way, helped form me in ways that cannot be easily explained.
I suspect I will always miss them. Every day will not be like today. Most days will be quieter, the calm acceptance of their very gone-ness. But when someone changes you, you cannot help but carry a piece of that person with you, always.
I miss them today. But I am so glad to carry the bits and pieces of them that I do. Having known them makes me want to embody fully the very best parts of each of them. But that doesn’t make it any less lonely without them.
