The Unfinished Book

Grief and I are old acquaintances. I can’t say “old friends” because I hate the heartless bastard, but we’re at least on speaking terms. And I’ve learned a thing or two about grief in the two years since I lost my son. Yesterday, I learned my friend of 20 years passed away from a brain tumor and, as such, my old acquaintance grief came sauntering back in and sidled up to the bar like he owned the goddamned place. I hate that guy.

First thing to know is that grief is a physical thing. It sits heavy on your chest, squeezing the breath out of your lungs just enough that you can't think straight. It lulls you into thinking it's turned its gaze from you but the moment you let your guard down, it strikes, sinking its fangs into your chest yet again. It pricks and wounds and often feels like it is playing with its prey. Grief robs you of your ability to think properly, behave normally, eat healthily, and grief absolutely loves to feed on sleep, feasting on restful nights and leaving you with scraps come the morning light, groggy and disgusted at what just passed for slumber. Grief is a thief that nicks your sense of self, steals your capacity for basic human interaction, pilfers your working memory, and absconds with the energy you need to function. Grief is an asshole and once in your life, it never fully leaves. 

My friend John was an amazing artist. When speaking to his wife today, I decided the best way to describe his presence was "mirth." He found humor in everything, including his brain tumor which he named Jerry. His comic strip was a joyful cartoon about mutant freak children finding joy in their differences and peculiarities. We used to get together annually to drink bourbon and force ourselves to watch the worst possible movies would could find, and he was the master of finding bad movies. And his life was cut short by a cancerous tumor shaped like the Shazam logo, which I'm sure he found endlessly amusing. And, of course, nothing is truly endless, is it?

John's story was one of amusement in the dark places of life and joy in the chaos. He was an inspiration to me. I don't mean this in a trite epilogue way. He encouraged and inspired me to take up cartooning and illustration again a decade after I abandoned my dreams of publishing a comic strip. Years later, when I got a request to create a series of eight children's graphic novels, I couldn't imagine anyone else to team up with. I envy the ease and looseness he brought to the page, his characters brimming with life and emotion with merely the swoop of a marker. I looked up to him as an artist and I hope I let him know that often enough while he was alive. 

See, when a life is cut short, their story doesn't end in the way that we want stories to end. We're conditioned by millennia of narrative storytelling that we have different acts that rise and fall and rise again, culminating in a mountain peak of tension, and then our hero descends the other side to return home a changed person, or more tragically, doesn't return home having offered their life to save that which they love. But real life doesn't give two shits about proper story structure and grief doesn't give a rat's ass about your need for closure after a fulfilling finale. Sometimes, the story just stops. Cut to black. Roll credits. No final act. And that fucking hurts. 

In my own experience, grief is about our person's life that was lost, the life we lived together until then, and the life we could have (should have) lived together if not for that fateful day. Call it a multiverse of grieving if you're more comic-book-inclined (like John was). You miss the person now. You long for the days you had. And you mourn the years you don't have moving forward. And in each universe of grief, there it is, striking out at you whenever you feel you have a handle on it. Grief is a coiled viper with boundless patience. It never, ever sleeps. 

But with all these anthropomorphic metaphors aside, grief does diminish over time. You will never be free of it, but it shrinks in relation to the rest of your life. It stays the same size and your heart grows around it. It only shrinks in relation to your recovery. Grief still rattles around in there, but the sharp edges that so wounded you in the first few years have pricked and prodded so violently that they have worn down to nubs. Or perhaps your heart is stronger and more resilient. I don’t know. It's not a perfect metaphor because I, myself, am still dealing with grief and the first thing it sapped from me is literary flourish. 

I won't launch into trite platitudes about savoring the life you have or telling your loved ones now how you feel instead of saving it all for an obituary. I won't lecture you about writing a will or buying life insurance or getting regular cancer screenings. I'm not your guide to better living through preparation. But I can tell you that there will come a day when you can laugh again. There will be times you will feel content, even if for a moment. There will be days when you don't feel like your heart was ripped in two and the other half lost along the way. Grief is an asshole, but grief gets weary over time and pulls its punches year after year until it's simply running through the motions, but by then you know all its attacks. The sting of a story unfinished never goes away, but you do eventually realize that you're the end of that story. Your life after theirs ends is their final act. Your memories, you cherishing your time together, your telling of their tales, your lifting up their memory, that is a final act in and of itself. It's not ideal. It wouldn't pass a screenwriting seminar or a creative writing class, but who cares. An unfinished book cut short by the death of a loved one still has plenty of pages left for you to write your own ending. 

Or, if you're John, fill them with lighthearted cartoons about lasting friendship and limitless mirth.

My friend, rest in peace knowing you brought joy to so many with little more than a marker set and a pad of paper. It’s up to us to fill in the rest of your book.