An Invitation

One of my great worries is that I'll forget what it was like to be around Joey. For a few days after his death, as I sleep-walked my way through the endless procession of visitors and condolences and funeral arrangements, my brain, blurred with shock and sleeplessness, kept grasping at a few persistent thoughts: there was my wedding, forthcoming in two months, at which he was to be the best man; there was the mystery of the circumstances of his death, something that still troubles me; there was the wellbeing of his loved ones, my parents and Tina especially; and there was the concern that, over time, he would inevitably be reduced in my memory to a handful of images and gestures, recalled fitfully and in fragments. This anxiety - not that we'll forget the dead, but that, as the years pass, they will become two-dimensional caricatures of their real selves - is a central part of any grief, and I suspect that it gets worse the closer you are to the deceased. C.S. Lewis wrote about it movingly, with respect to his wife, in A Grief Observed (which I'm now reading), and Francisco Goldman has discussed it in interviews about his new book, Say Her Name, which he wrote after the sudden death of his young wife. Goldman (whom I heard recently on the NY Times Book Review podcast) says that he wrote the book, a sort of memoir-novel hybrid about his wife and their relationship, pretty soon after her death, while living in a borrowed apartment in Berlin, precisely because he was worried that he would forget her. He saw the book as a gift to his future self: as he grows older and his memory fades, he'll always be able to return to the book and revive her.

I've been noticing that my own writing recently has been more about myself and my mourning than it has been about Joey. This is fine - I need to tell the story of my own grief if I'm ever going to learn to live with it (I almost said "work my way through it") - but I'd like to work a little harder to recall Joey's life, if only so that I (we) can have some old stories for future reference.

This is actually more difficult for me than you might think. For all of our closeness, Joey and I actually didn't spend much time together as adults. I would have said that we saw each other pretty frequently - more frequently, indeed, than we saw our parents - but we lived in different parts of the country, so "frequently" here means something like four or five times a year, for a few days at a time. I imagine it added up to no more than a few weeks a year, which is a lot less time that I spend with our cats, say, or with my students, even if the quality of our interactions was rather higher than in either of those examples.

Some of my strongest memories are of the moments when we first met in whatever city or airport we happened to be meeting in. I have a vivid memory of standing in the Nashville airport waiting for him to deplane, looking over the heads of the approaching streams of people for a tall guy who looked a bit like me but always turned out to be much blonder than I remembered. I recall dragging my suitcase through an airport in Berlin doing the same thing, only this time I was the one who was arriving and he was the one who was meeting me. Often - as, I believe, on this occasion - he would be wearing a t-shirt that I had given him (in recent years I had taken to giving him witty t-shirts, and he always made a point of wearing them when we were together, although neither of us ever mentioned that that's what he was doing), but sometimes he would be coming from work and it would take me a moment to recognize the tall, smartly-dressed man heading toward me in loafers and a suit jacket as my brother (this happened when I met him at a train station outside Philadelphia before our cousin's wedding, a moment which, thankfully, I captured with a photo). Sometimes these meetings would be unnecessarily drawn out, either because he couldn't find me (as when he drove up to Boston from Virginia and struggled to follow my directions to my new Somerville apartment) or because I couldn't find him (as in Asheville, the last place we saw each other, when Kate and I wandered around for a good long while in that not-so-big city, and I became increasingly annoyed with his laconic, rather unhelpful [and constantly shifting] descriptions of just where in the hell he and Tina were shopping).

We never worked out any solid protocol for greeting one another: we didn't hug, and we didn't shake hands. This was mildly embarrassing for both of us, especially when we had girlfriends whom the other would hug (thus highlighting the lack of contact between the two brothers), and I think it stemmed from an earlier time in our relationship when we didn't always get along and avoided any open signs of affection. It was something that one of us was one day going to have to address, probably by wrapping the other in an unexpected hug, but neither of us ever made that leap.

Departures I remember less well, though I do remember them. Frequently it would be one of us dropping the other at the airport, usually the Oklahoma City airport, again without a handshake or a hug, but often with an admonition to "call your mother" to let her know we got home safely. I may also have encouraged him, once or twice, not to "take any shit" from the people in the airport or on the plane, but he probably knew to do this already. Our last departure was not at an airport but on the rainy streets of Asheville, as he climbed into his CRV and I stooped into Kate's Saturn. I don't remember what we said to each other, but it's likely that we talked about when next we'd meet (in Nashville, in July) and warned each other to be careful on the road.

This is the part where I come to the point of today's post:

I'm going to work on pinning down other memories, but over the next few months I'll be traveling and might not get a chance to write many of them on this blog, so I'd like to invite guest contributors to take over the blog for a few months. I can give you permission to post on the blog if you send me your email address (a facebook message would be the best way to do that), which will allow me to send you an email that ought to give you posting access. I'd like to limit it to people close to Joey who might have a story or two that they feel like telling. You don't need to talk about your own grief or anything like that (unless you want to), and it doesn't have to be too fancy - mostly I'm hoping to compile a sort of database of Joey stories that we can all return to from time to time as a way to fend off the inevitable erosion of memory. Feel free to write on any topic, although you should know that my grandmother does occasionally read this stuff, and I'll post each new entry to facebook so that my own friends and family will know there's something new to read. I may sneak in a post or two of my own along the way.

This can start as soon as you'd like it to: I'm leaving for the UK on May 8 and will be traveling more or less continuously (UK, Ireland, Brazil) until early July, so there's plenty of time to join in if you don't feel up to it right now. Anna has already agreed to take a crack at this, and I really hope several others will feel similarly inclined. I learn a lot from listening to stories from people who knew him in a different way than I did - Joey, more than most people, very carefully regulated who got to see his different sides - and I think that the more of him we can evoke, the better we can resist our own failing memories.