TeamJed

Sometimes the best eulogy is to remember the truth.

There’s a poem or saying somewhere about the dash. The one between birth and death, and it’s there where we exist.

It’s a great idea. A motivator to recognize we all have an expiration date, and the drive to matter or to leave a legacy can be all-consuming.

The dash is for the one who lives. But the space after the expiration date is where it intersects with the dash I’m living and the space left by the one who died.

Sometimes you can prepare for the space. You have years, days, and moments that create space and soften the loss. Sometimes it is sudden. The walls caving in with a phone call or a face at the door. Sometimes it’s a breathtaking series of days that turn into weeks that should have been months, and then you’re standing beside a bed with no words left for the face you love. No pushback from cold hands.

It’s the god awful stillness. The silence that hits where you weren’t expecting it to hit. Those moments are when the punch of loss hits hard.

But, somehow, you remember to breathe and you do the things, make the calls, say the words. You comfort others because they grieve out loud, and you don’t. You step up and carry a burden they won’t because they don’t know or don’t care what it costs you to carry it for them.

So, you wait. You wait for the words you want to say. You wait for the memories that glow around the edges and not just the sharp, spinning sucker punches at random 2 pm moments when a song plays on the radio. That one in German that has nothing to do with anything important but the sound of language, the guttural r’s, reminds you of that time you laughed over your inability to say bread just right…

It’s tempting to forget the times we weren’t our best and gloss over the frustrations or the irritations that built up and faded. But that was the real part. The garbled text messages were part of the gift. The frantic grasping for connection when voices failed and the world didn’t feel right. That was just as real as the quiet voice from the corner, who reminded me I was loved when the farmhouse didn’t feel safe.

Because that is who Joel was to me. He loved me. Not a generic “loving person”, he was specific. There were people he loved and people he tolerated. Oh, and he was good at making people feel like he liked them. Even when he didn’t. It was a survival skill he honed. A way to be safe.

But he loved me and thought I was amazing. His eyes lit up when he saw me, his shoulders relaxed when I said I’d help. His laugh about the snarky things that we dared to say out loud to each other, feeling a little naughty, would still trickle through.

It’s not fair that his last months were spent without much of a voice and failing eyesight. He was trapped in the one place he’d run from for decades.

His mind.

He lost the capacity to form sentences, cohesive thoughts. He was riddled with fear about the future and easily angered by how vulnerable he was.

Middle of the night text messages, mid-afternoon requests, Uber Eats orders, and more Gatorade than seemed possible for one person to consume.

I had my own family and my world for most of my life. He was so much older than I, and his world reshaped itself right about the time I discovered that a world outside of family existed. He bounced in and out of the house as I grew into young adulthood, and then we sort of revolved around each other as much as his wife would let us.

But when she was gone and it was just us again? He settled again in my heart. I couldn’t do much for him at the time; others were louder, others inserted themselves. Everyone knew better what he needed, even though they rarely asked him what he wanted.

But there he would be every time. Birthday cards and Christmas cards. Every holiday. Every phone call. Every minute he treasured with my sons and settled into his chair, happy to engage my husband, I knew.

He loved me.

He loved me better than the pastor and the pastor’s wife. He loved me better than the do-gooder and the churchgoer. He loved me better than the poet and the parents. Because he just did. Without pretense. Without falsity. Without a transaction.

He just loved me. He was chaos and paranoia, and mayhem. And safe.

The temptation to remember someone differently in death, rather than the reality of who they were while alive, is a powerful one. We glamorize pain and push the ugliness to the back. Unfortunately, if that temptation is fed too much, we forget the person entirely and live with a fabrication, a fantasy, bred of our insecurity and grasping for meaning and legacy. We write eulogies that make ourselves look good, and we forget the shape of their faces.

Joel didn’t leave behind a wife and children, grandchildren, and real estate. He left me with stories and memories. Of inside jokes and the unrelenting awareness of the need for those who can to advocate for those who can’t.

Years ago, during a rather bad mix of mismanaged medication and untreated psychosis, Joel disappeared into Spokane, Washington. His baggy clothes, shaggy beard, and twitchy behavior put him in a category of a dangerous man. In this state, Joel wandered into a McDonald’s for a cup of coffee and made the mistake of smiling at a child. The mother gasped in horror, and authorities were called because he became a perceived threat. They didn’t know him. They couldn’t see the brother, the son, the man. Only the illness. Only the neglect.

Joel was never violent unless terrified. And once terrified? He remembered that fear and wore it like armor. But he loved children and was a pacifist in nearly every way he could be. He felt weak and paranoid; schizophrenia relentlessly informed his reality into a place of constant hyper-vigilance. You never know when someone will steal your phone or listen to your calls on the bus, he’d say.

I loved Joel. He was precious to me. I want to remember him as he was, for real. So I don’t lose sight of all he taught me.

June 13th was his birthday. His second one lived beyond this plane. I miss him. He was consistent and, more than anything, I remember that he loved me without expectations or stipulations.

Which, frankly, is a better epitaph than most people get.