The second I opened the invite, I knew I had to find this picture. It was June of 1983: Bruce was working for Norden Systems, and I think at the time he was just beginning to date my aunt Mary Ann. I was a huge fan of Star Wars, and they had a life-size homemade TIE fighter, or at least the biggest damn TIE fighter I had ever seen. I wanted to go inside of it so badly, but it was on this trailer. Everything was analog and working its way to a digital age. Oh, and there was a greasers contest for the kids for some reason. Not sure why there was said competition, but David, Jason, and I had to get dressed up—or rather, were dressed up—like 50’s greasers. Don’t recall much beyond that outside of Norden’s feeling much more like a campus of nerds, more akin to the Google’s and Facebook’s of today. Perhaps it was a sign of the times. Oh, and Jason won the greasers competition. David may have as well, don’t recall.
So that is what I thought about when I opened the invite from Becca about my aunt’s 60th birthday party, which would be in 50’s theme. A quick run to Walmart for some fresh crew-neck shirts, and I was ready to go with a winning outfit. The jean tuxedo, some white all-stars, and a pair of jeans. Easy enough. No grease needed since I had long since lost my hair.
I had a pleasant enough morning the day of the party. Went to see my godson play some ball—they easily dominated the team they were playing against. We went back to Jason’s to get the kids ready for the party and to help set up.
When we arrived at the venue, everybody looked the part. Poodle skirts and all the fixins. Becca had made quite an array of props using old records and 45’s and neat applications to display cupcakes. Was really rather impressive that we turned an Italian restaurant into a 50’s era soda shop.
I was exhausted, for reasons I really can’t explain, and grabbed a couple zzz’s on the couch upstairs in the other room that apparently I only know about. When I woke up about 20 minutes later, people were arriving. So I shrugged off the sleepy and was walking downstairs to go be a part of the festivities.
Somewhere between my first beer and more guests arriving, it hit me: A wave of loss hit me like a brick wall. I looked around and saw families I had grown up with, with their families and their kids’ kids. Tables filling up with familiar faces, and all of a sudden, it was if it was just me in the room. Alone. No wrong word. Alone doesn’t come close to summing up what I was feeling. I felt like a refugee with no country to claim me. Alone-ly… maybe something like that. I was sitting in a room of total strangers whom I had known my whole life with a day-to-day that resembles nothing like the life I live.
I had an immediate flee reaction: I could feel the tears welling up inside like a little kid who has lost his mother in the mall and whose only instructions are “don’t talk to strangers.” I was in a room of strangers, and I needed to get out of this place and get some air. It wasn’t anxiety; it was reality. It was realization of how very little it matters when we are gone and how life goes on. There are casualties, and there are survivors. And at this moment, the survivor was the casualty. I beelined for the door.
Air is what I needed, some cold crisp air to gather my thoughts and get my head right. I was in a room with mostly family, and yet I have rarely ever felt so alone. I breathed in the crisp autumn air, and immediately goosebumps ran down the entirety of my body. I was shivering and cold now. In need of a piss. I ran to the edge of the parking lot and relieved myself. I mention this specific detail because, in the end, we are animals, and when our bodies go into protect/defend mode, it’s just funny how quickly you become aware of your animal instincts. I walked back to the car and turned the engine on to get some heat going, to warm back up, to collect my thoughts. I lit a cigarette, and as soon as I exhaled the first drag, I broke into an uncontrollable sob.
My body was racked with the feeling of loss that I could not stop the flow of emotion running through me. I tried to stop, but the harder I tried, the more the tears flowed. I was at the point of hyperventilating like a little kid does when he overdoes it. I no longer had control of the emotion, and it just overflowed all the edges of the dam that I have so carefully monitored while I deal with my emotions.
As with all things, the crying passed. In some ways, it felt good; in others, it sucked. It’s the feeling you have after you puke: that relief of expelling whatever it was that was upsetting your stomach, but the bile flavor is still in your mouth and nose, your eyes are bloodshot from the involuntary force of your muscular system spasming beyond your control. That good but bad feeling. I felt good for having cried but felt like shit because no matter what I told myself about going back in, there wasn’t an ounce of energy left in me to do so.
I found myself talking to myself. “Get ahold of yourself… suck it up… get back in there put on that smile, and eventually you will forget about how you are feeling.” But that was part of it: I couldn’t fake what just had happened. There was no swallowing this down and dealing with it later. The feeling I felt in that room is real. It’s the loss, the hole we live with for the rest of our lives when you see something you know, by right, you should have and should be experiencing, but don’t and can’t get back. It’s forever removed from the chapters of your life. I could not bring myself to pretend that I was okay with it, and I sure as shit wasn’t going to focus the attention on me when so many had come to celebrate my aunt’s amazing accomplishments, trials, and tribulations.
In the end, I sat in that car for another hour and decided it was best to leave. It wasn’t where I was meant to be, and I needed a minute to reflect on how powerful loss can be several years later. I don’t feel bad for it. It’s how I felt. It’s how I feel sometimes cheated, jealous. Perhaps a couple slices of animosity and resentment. There is also unfathomable love at the same time because when you see it, you recognize it—you see the life you might have lived, you are aware of what it might just be at some point. It gives you the same hope in equal amounts to the despair, and it’s how we go on choosing to pick which side of the fence we live on and how we choose to leverage our feelings to out betterment or our detriment. The feelings were real, and not going back in that night was the right choice. It was the right choice for me. I am not ready yet to be so exposed to such a large floodgate of “what it could have been, what it can be.” I’m still dealing with what it is that I actually lost. Most days, you get through it and don’t think about the bigger things that matter. Some days, you get punched in the face through the looking glass of other people’s lives.
Sometimes, I guess you got to take your lumps, and for the most part, they will be when you least expect them. It’s what you do with your lumps after, I guess, that matters.
For right now, I am putting some ice on them and appreciating the fact of how much I have lost. I mean, there has to be some silver lining to having lost something so important that two years later, you are still thinking about it. It’s when I pulled out the pictures above and look at my aunt in the background of the picture on the left (I had to crop it to make it fit), but there was the lady we were celebrating that evening fixing Jason’s hair, and somehow it makes more sense to me.
The little hints in our past that help us get through the future.
