Wind, waves & grief
Today is the 20th anniversary of Shortstack’s death. It’s weird to have a 20th anniversary for someone who only lived to 16. I don’t feel old enough to have a 20th anniversary of anything. And yet, here we are.
I walked down to the river and sat on a rocky outpost, watching the waves. Under a cloudy sky, I sat with my grief and watched the waves hurl themselves against the rocks and disappear into the bay, one after the next.
I thought about a recent hike I had gone on with a friend. During our trek, we came across several downed trees teeming with life. Lichen, moss, mushrooms, insects, animals, all building lives on and in these fallen trees. We talked that day about how trees never really die as they never stop being sites of life. From the moment that a pinecone opens, life is always in flow, although the state and shape may change.
As I sat on the rocks, I thought with envy about how easy it can be to trace how life carries on after a tree falls. But when a person is gone, where does their energy go when it returns to the atmosphere? I asked out loud, “are you still here?” and a wave smashed against the rock, kissing my cheek with its splash.
I like to imagine my friend as belonging to the wind now. When the trees dance around me, with their leaves shimmering between gray and green. When the wind blows into my palm and intertwines with my fingers as if we are holding hands again. When I walk fully wrapped in an air so lively that it threatens to lift me off the ground.
It’s been 20 years and I still don’t fully understand how we got here. How so much time has passed. How so much time could pass without him.
Today was particularly jagged because of the events leading up to it. I spent yesterday tabling at a Pride event in Ottawa. During setup, a handful of people began to congregate across the street from us. They had lawn chairs, body cameras, and placards that they coyly kept hidden. They waited for hours for a drag show to start at which point the placards came out, and several protestors attempted to enter the event space to interrupt the performance.
One of the protestors, who I spent an hour (the length of the performance) physically blocking from entering the space, carried a bible with him. When we were standing chest to chest, he would open the bible to one of his bookmarked passages and read to me. Later in the day, another member of his church arrived, waving a bible and yelling at us to repent for our sins.
My friend was a devout Christian, raised in a Baptist church. He was also rebellious when it came to his approach to religion. We often talked about what an anarchist’s approach to religion and spirituality would look like. His love of god was interwoven with his love of nature and people. He never proselytized, preached, or condemned. He protected, supported, and loved.
He was the most caring person I knew, our biggest conflict being his commitment to stealing my sweaters.
I don’t know what we would look like today.
The world somehow feels more upsidedown now, which is a big statement considering that we met at an anti-war protest in the lead up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq. And it’s hard to know if he would have stayed rebellious and loving or if that love would have become off-limits for heathens like me. It’s hard to know if we would still know and love each other or if we would have ended up divided as so many friends and families have found themselves divided during the past few years. It’s entirely possible that our friendship was the rebellious phase of his life and he would have outgrown me.
But it’s the fact that we never got to find out. Everyone should have the right to the banality of life. To grow apart. To disappoint each other. To make plans and cancel. To be reduced to Instagram friends that DM once in a blue moon.
I grieve because I lost someone who made me feel safe in a chaotic world and who made me feel loved. And I grieve because there is so much more that he should have had the opportunity to do. My friend is the wind. My friend is the waves. He is everywhere. And he deserved to have a somewhere and a sometime all his own.