not a eulogy, but sort of a eulogy.

(this was written on the train on July 26, 2011, just two days before Meghan LaRocca passed away.)



There are always certain pieces of mortality that you encounter and experience even though they don't belong to you. I don't mean grief, I mean tangible moments of profound clarity regarding the blind injustice and revolting fragility of life itself, moments that seize you and take you by surprise, and you are emotionally pushed to the wall. You give in, maybe for a minute, maybe an hour, a day, a week. Time is nothing. Pain is everything. Then it passes ad you wonder what it must be like for the person actually living the problem. You remind yourself that you are a bystander, close to the crash site but still in one piece.

I wonder in these moments what it will be like to attend everyone's funeral. If death is inevitable, it follows that at some point in my life I will be attending a funeral, and more likely than not it will be a wonderful person's funeral. It will belong to someone beloved and irreplaceable and beautiful, and I will cry an obscene amount of tears, and wonder how I'll ever recover.

This, I suspect, will happen many times in my life, for many loved ones, and it will be exactly the same and absolutely different each time.

I suspect this is how it will be, and I know my suspicion will do nothing for me in preparing me for those moments.

What would the last two years be like if I had cancer instead of her? Or if it weren't either of us, but someone else? A stranger?

I think about everything which makes up a person. All of the time, experience, education; all of the soul and emotion; all of the senses and quirks. I think about her, specifically. All that she was when I first met her, our freshman year of college. All that she is at this moment.

I don't want to write a eulogy. She isn't dead.

I am not writing a eulogy.

I wish I could look through the archives of our souls. I want to read every text we ever sent, look at every moment, the inception of each inside joke, each first experience we achieved while in each other's company or close vicinity.

We take so much for granted because it drives us mad to consider time as irreplaceable. It is foolish to think that because a person is young they have "all the time in the world." What is time? How could anyone possibly have all of it, let alone any of it?

Let alone her?

First of all, it isn't fair to have an incurable disease. That's death cheating the shit out of us, and we're already weak, brief underdogs.

But to have an incurable disease and no biological defenses at all?

There isn't a word for that kind of cheating.

Would it be worse if we lived hundreds of years ago and I had no way of knowing how she was except by carrier pigeon?

Would it be better, not being able to text her and wait for days on end to hear one word of reply?

I wish there was anything at all I could do to make it better, even a tiny bit.

I hope and pray and tell her I love her. That's all I can do. Love is all you can give, first and last and unending.

RIP Heath Ledger (1979-2008)

When I was told around 3:45 (central time) today that Heath Ledger was dead, I didn't believe it. On inspecting the internet promptly thereafter, I found affirmations that it was true, but no details. In the last several hours more details have been released. The words 'drug overdose', 'sleeping pills', and 'possible suicide' are being tossed from headline to headline like tennis balls. It's taken a while to sink in. It still really hasn't, I guess. But I'm moreover just sort of stunned. It's shocking, yeah, it's... confusing... it's really strange. It feels like a hoax. It feels like a big joke. Publicity for "The Dark Knight" maybe. I don't know. I feel very weird about all this.

But I think, regardless, that it's extremely sad. Something was wrong with him, with his life, at this point in time, and no one knew enough about it to help. If it was an accidental overdose or a suicide, it doesn't matter. Everyone is shocked. Everyone is going, "What happened? We had no idea!" Which means something was not right and he either hid it from everyone or no one is admitting to knowing about the problem, whatever it was.

I guess I'm just very surprised. He was not one of the people in Hollywood I expected to drop off the map, especially now, especially with everything that's up in that neck of the woods right now. I'm very very surprised, and very very sad. I mean... what did he do this morning? Get up, maybe shower, maybe have a meal? Did he go for a walk? Did he run errands? Did he sit around his apartment? Did he sleep in late? Was he busy? Was he relaxing? What did he watch on TV? What did you do today, Heath, before you died this afternoon?

I really loved his work. All of it. I think he was a brilliant young actor, with so much goddamn potential to break more records and destroy more expectations as his career went on. I was positive he'd be one of those actors we look back on, my generation, when we're older, and go "OH, wasn't he great when he was younger! Oh, he's doing something new? How fantastic, let's go see it!" Now what will we say?

Some great people have died in the last few months. Michael Kidd. Jack Trahey. Robert Goulet. Luciano Pavarotti. Among others. Granted, great people die all the time. Normal people die all the time. Young people, old people, naturally, unnaturally. It's part of us. Obviously. I'm not disputing that. But it's surprising how sometimes they... well... surprise you with it. And it's sad how... well... sad it is.

I do miss you, Heath. We never met. Maybe we were never going to. But I was in a movie with you. And I loved your work. I'm surprised. And sad. And I hope whatever your problem was is fixed now.