Nobody Ever Talks About Anything But the End

by Liz Levine

  And so we start with her apartment. Or it seems like we might, except… As Mom starts talking and pointing and suggesting what might move I follow her lead, but every time I touch something Mom tells me to put it down or says, “That can wait.” It’s clear I can’t do anything, so I sit down on Tamara’s couch and just watch and listen to her.

  When we find Tamara’s camera, I instantly know that it’s the only thing of hers I want to keep. I don’t understand yet how holding it in my hands and feeling the click of the shutter will prove meditative and soothing for me. I don’t know yet that Tamara foresaw this and left me a letter in the bottom of the case. I don’t know that the letter acknowledges that she bought this camera because I wanted the same model. I don’t know anything but my instinct in this moment—that this is supposed to come home with me.

  Now Mom is into the tech equipment, and she is starting to find a place for me to support her. “What’s this?” she asks repeatedly as she pulls cables and Kobos and iPods and Blackberrys from Tamara’s office space.

  And I see the space in which I can help. “Let me take all this, Mom,” I say. She hesitates, but I already know what she wants. “I’ll take every photo and every piece of writing and everything you could want from all these devices and put it on a hard drive and have it for you by Christmas. Then you’ll have everything in one place and you can just plug it into your computer whenever you want to.”

  It seems easy enough. I am relatively tech savvy, and Tamara left us passwords for everything along with her suicide note, and I figure I’ll just compile all the files and do a drag and drop and that will be that.

  Once I get home to Vancouver, I start with her Blackberry. It’s the usual jumble of text messages and emails and random photos. Only two things stand out here: The first is a text to Scott Willis that says only T-minus 48 hrs that she sent exactly 48 hours before her death. The second is that she has kept screenshots of the last few times I called her… like she wanted a record of the fact that I had tried, that I liked her, that she mattered to me somehow.

  I am shaken, but it isn’t that bad really. It’s almost done. And finally, on Christmas Eve, I figure I’ll tackle her computer so Mom has the drive in her hand as promised. The first thing I find on Tamara’s computer breaks my heart. It’s just a Word document, but… it’s all her heart, all her pain, and all her crazy.

  It reads like this:

  I stood in the hot tub for 15 minutes trying to remember when I last felt happy or free…

  I tried as hard as I could to remember a moment when I was happy to see someone…

  When a conversation or action did not feel pre-scripted, probing, a blatant violation of privacy and lacking all authenticity.

  I tried to remember when last someone picked up the phone to call me or even sent me an email without a pre-scripted message with intentional typos or coincidental names of some variety.

  I tried to remember what it was like to swim or work out without cameras watching or people watching from above in purple or testing in some way.

  I tried to remember what it was like to run into a friend without them running away in fear of being investigated, coerced or mowed down by the US, 5i, Russian, Iranian, Israeli mafia or some other variety of illusionary shark.

  I tried to remember what it was like to be trusted and to trust in return.

  I consider whether it’s OK for Mom to read this. And I realize that it’s not my call to make. It may be painful and revealing, and part of me wants to protect Tamara, but there is nothing nefarious here—and I can’t keep this from my mother.

  I keep trudging through—academic papers, bits of research, some creative musings, and then photos. They are tough to look at, but most of them are good, and I know Mom will want to keep these. I delete a couple that are inappropriate or private, but I have no guilt about these removals—I’m protecting Tamara’s privacy, after all.

  Her drive is almost empty now, save for a file with videos. A bunch of the videos are academic content from research presentations or proposals. I find a couple of really sweet videos of her laughing on the living room floor with my little brother, Joshy. The videos make me smile a little bit, and they make me cry. And then there is one video left, and I am so close to being through this painfully intimate place, and I’m relieved. Then I see the date—the video was taken on the day she died, just over a month ago, and it is ten seconds long…

  I watch it. Twice. And remove it.

  I am the only one who has ever seen it.

  And the only one who ever will.

  HELP

  There isn’t any. No one is going to make this better. Nothing is going to make this better.

  HELPFUL

  The first night of shiva for Judson is madness. By the time we get to the house from the cemetery, there is already a crowd gathering. Coats litter the front hallway area, and Josh and I are hurled into function mode. Neither of us complains. This is what we want to be doing. We are happy to organize. Refill ice. Pour drinks. Replace plates of canapés. We do not want to have awkward conversations with the adults; we do not want to talk about Judson, or our feelings. We certainly don’t want to hear any more about anyone else’s feelings.

  Our friends look uncomfortable already, and we’ve only been here half an hour. They don’t know the house well enough to make themselves busy, to escape the endless conversations, or to not notice the cloth draped over all the mirrors, the hushed sobs from the corners of the room, or the pain in Kathy’s eyes. Judson’s friend Tyler and I connect across the room. He wants the young people to get out of here, to go to his house, to celebrate a life instead of to mourn it. And then Kathy needs me. Or at least she needs someone, and I need to function. We’re the perfect match.

  The extra drinks are downstairs in the fridge next to Judson’s bedroom. I haven’t been downstairs yet, since he died. I stand at the freezer door staring aimlessly at the myriad beverages, and I see someone slip into his room.

  His room! As if his privacy no longer mattered, as if it was not his anymore.

  No one should go in there. That is his space, our space. I don’t even know the person who just slipped in, then out, and shut the door behind him. I go find Josh. Tug on his arm and point towards Judson’s room to say, I’m going there. I go, close the door behind me, and wait for Josh to follow.

  I am frozen in his space. Bed still creased from his last sleep at home, magazines left open and desk piled high with cards and sunglasses and scraps of paper—like he’ll be back any minute now. I am paralyzed. Stuck in a time warp, waiting to hear his voice, for his door to open, for this moment to end in any way except the inevitable. I lie on his bed, just breathing him in. Have I been here for seconds, minutes, more—waffling between the fictional hope and the reality of the despair?

  And then Josh is there. Function mode.

  We open drawers and cupboards and rummage through them. In the bedside table: condoms, cock rings, porn magazines, lube, it all gets thrown into my knapsack. In the bottom bedside table drawer, two jars, still half-full that read SLEEP ME and FEED ME. And beside them, another ziplock bag packed with marijuana.

  Josh works on Judson’s desk, and from there we get a journal, some pills that look like ecstasy, a container of GHB, and cocaine: small bags of cocaine and a small glass cocaine dispenser that’s almost full. Josh looks to the sky. “This is the last time we’re bailing you out, buddy,” he says. We lock the door, and Josh taps out a small line for each of us on the desk. Lines done, Josh slips back to check on his mum, leaving me with instructions to finish by going through the closet.

  On the floor of the closet is a shoebox. I don’t even realize what it is until I am halfway through the first piece of paper. Then it dawns on me. He kept my letters, all of them. Most still had the original envelopes. I watch the blue ink of his address bleed into the paper, and I wipe away the tears smudging the page. The letters go into the knapsack. They are mine, after all.

  And then I feel si
ck. I don’t know if it is the drugs or just being in his space, but I have to get out of here. I rummage through the box and find a few more baggies with powder at the bottom. They go into my knapsack with everything else, and I am out the door to the shiva before I can look at his space again. I leave before I can curl up on the creases that he left on his bed and never get up again.

  Keep moving. Stay helpful. I learned this young. It means that I don’t have to feel.

  Josh and I finally leave and go to Tyler’s. It is quiet when we get there, but there is a pile of shoes in the front hall that suggests a serious party.

  Upstairs, everyone is sitting silent, sipping beer, crying, hugging, not “celebrating” his life at all. I wander through the living room into the middle of the crowd.

  “Judson couldn’t make it tonight, but he sent you this.”

  And with that, I slide my knapsack off my shoulders and empty the entire contents onto the coffee table.

  I get a few laughs.

  Emboldened, someone across the room grabs a baggie and puts a line of cocaine on the mantelpiece. An honourary line, for Judson. Someone else prints out his picture and tapes it up.

  Soon a joint and a glass of champagne have been set up beneath the picture, too.

  It turns into a party.

  We get high, we laugh, and we cry. We play our music too loud. People come and go, but the three of us, Tyler, Josh, and I, are constants. We don’t sleep for five days.

  I walk home with my headphones playing in my ears and a baggie of blow in my pocket. It is a long walk, but I barely notice a single step. I do a couple of keys when I feel tired or sad, and I turn my music up. By the time I get to my street, streaks of light are bleeding into the night sky, my nose is bleeding into a worn Kleenex, and my head is pounding.

  Sleep.

  I wake up the day after our five-day shiva ends; it might be two days after. I stand under the hot shower for what seems like forever. The house is empty. My mother left me a note on the front hall table—hoping I was feeling “better.”

  Fuck. I am not feeling “better.” I am feeling worse. We have prayed and sung and buried and ritualized and drunk and laughed and cried, and then it ended. And I woke up this morning and everything is still so fucking wrong.

  The end is devastating. The end makes me understand. Commitment to not feeling this is a lifetime promise.

  HIGH SCHOOL

  I really miss him. Often, and still, a dozen years later.

  I don’t really miss her.

  She has not been a part of my daily life for decades. While I note her absence at family affairs, it is more with a sigh of relief than a twinge of loss—because these moments are easier without her.

  I have some semblance of control over my emotions. I always have. And while I grieve Tamara at moments, I have not yet been really sideswiped by this loss. I held my own at the funeral, the gathering, out in public, and then even back at home. I now cry when I need to, and beyond that, my life without her is not so much different from my life with her—in either case, she isn’t a part of it.

  So I’m more shocked than anyone when grief takes me out at the knees.

  I’m back in Toronto for some meetings and some work. I don’t notice her absence here anymore. She hadn’t lived at home for years, so Mom’s place is becoming a newfound sanctuary of sorts, and I don’t venture upstairs to her childhood bedroom often, if ever.

  While I’m in the city this week, my high school is giving out Distinguished Old Girl Awards. My friend Larysa is a recipient this year, so five of us are going to go, all together. We’ve known one another for decades. Each one of them was present with me when Judson died and again the week of Tamara’s funeral. Within minutes of my arrival at the school, my friends show up, and it’s laughs and hugs and VIP receptions and familiar and familial. Now I’m certain this is going to be easy. I’ve known some of these women for over thirty years. I am safe here.

  As we wander down the hall to the reunion dinner, I can hear my friends’ voices behind me and in front of me, and I’m not engaged in any conversation, but in the normalcy of it all: how they speak, the sound of their laughter. I love these people. These people, I miss.

  The dinner is in the gymnasium. A place familiar to me but different tonight, filled with tables and chairs and a stage. We raise a glass to Larysa—she makes a lovely speech. And we mill about for a bit drinking wine. There are a few tables off to our left that are celebrating their twenty-year reunion. It takes me a moment to realize that it’s Tamara’s grad class. There are so many of them. They all seem to want to talk to me, I can feel it. But none of them do.

  As the dinner ends, we decide to walk through the school with the last of our wine and go back to the chapel, where we had assembly every morning. It seems simple enough. But as we meander down the long corridor to the old section of the building, I can feel my discomfort growing. When my friends stop to hover in front of grad photos posted on the wall, I push to move on. I can feel Tamara staring out at me.

  At the end of the hall is the small math classroom where the folk group used to rehearse at lunch hours. A room where I spent hundreds of hours and a room where, once I graduated, Tamara, in her compulsive need to copy me, did the same.

  And for the first time in a year and a half, out of nowhere, I feel her. I see her here, in her school uniform, tie askew, knapsack too big for her and sliding off one shoulder. I hear her voice and her laugh. There’s a sudden, overwhelming awareness of the size of the hole she has left, and I could fit this entire school into it.

  I didn’t stop to consider that I haven’t been back to the school since. That it was the only space I shared with her. That this might be hard.

  None of it.

  There are tears in my eyes, rolling down my cheeks, and I can’t breathe. Only my oldest friend, Robin, notices, so we hang back from the group to let the moment pass.

  I wipe my eyes and giggle. It’s something I do to ease the pressure. Apparently, I do it on film sets, too. Robin looks worried, but I shrug it off and we continue down the hall to the chapel. I can make the tears stop for a minute, but that’s just long enough to free Robin from this burden. I can’t pull myself together, maybe for the first time ever, so I just sit there in the dark and cry and listen to the sounds of my friends’ laughter like they are on the other side of the ocean, and I hope their voices are enough to carry me through this and across to the other side.

  I don’t know how long I’m here. Robin is now reenacting her role as the angel Gabriel in the Christmas nativity to shrieks of giggles. As I sit and watch, I remember the night we performed the nativity, the night that Natalie’s Mom died. Natalie had to go the hospital and Robin went with her, leaving instructions for us to meet them there. She was dressed in her Angel Gabriel costume, and she walked Natalie down the corridor with the stern headmistress, who said to them, “It’s not often that you have an actual angel with you in moments like this.”

  Robin is an angel. And something I’ve noticed about loss is its direct correlation to gratitude. I wipe my tears, and give thanks for my friends. They are angels. And I’m going to be OK.

  I

  INTERVAL

  I’ve had a good run. No one has died in the last few years.

  IMAGINED

  I used to imagine what those last three months were like for Judson. I would lie awake and wonder about his fear, about the things he missed, about the details he kept in his head or those that only Josh heard through Judson’s drugged and fevered bouts of chemo.

  Later, I wondered if I’d still like Judson today. I wondered if we would have grown in the same direction and stayed as close as we were or if it’s possible that we might have grown apart. That I wouldn’t like him now.

  But always and most often, I wondered if he was afraid. Afraid of fighting, of losing, of dying, of death, of pain.

  I wondered my way through the details. Did he think about his new mortgage, law school applications, the new boy
was flirting with? We never really talked about those things after his diagnosis.

  Was he annoyed when he first got sick or was he worried? Was he frustrated with how long he had to wait in the emergency room? Did he care that he had plans: Christmas with me, Jewbouree, a trip to the cabin up north? Was he restless, or had he somehow already let life go?

  I wonder how he felt when they told him he had cancer. What was it like to hear the C word? Did it flatten him, or was his instantaneous response the same one he had for us days later: that he was way too young and too beautiful to die? Did fear feel contagious when he had to tell people about it, to say the details out loud, the scary names and the big words? I wonder how it felt to hear all of us hear his news.

  I spent hours in my head trying to understand what it was like for an athlete like him to lose his body: to constantly be sick to his stomach, to need help going to the bathroom, to have people poke and prod and talk about him? I wonder what it was like to lose his muscle, his physical power, his privacy, his dignity, his independence.

  I wonder if he ever gave up and how he struggled with that. Did it ever feel like there were two of him: one that knew he was dying and one that refused to believe it? I wonder if dying feels easier in those moments. Like giving in.

  I can’t know the answers to any of these questions. And the only answer I didn’t want to know I got: that as they wheeled him to the ICU with Josh holding his hand, his last words were, “I’m so scared.”

  Thankfully, Josh lied to him. The way we all would. He told him it would be OK.

  INTERVENTION

  Christmas holidays of 2012: I put in my final and biggest fight for Tamara. I force a family intervention, replete with competent shrink at a professional office and Mom and Dad and all of us in the same room for the first time in years. That night, a lot of people spoke, but I mostly stayed quiet. I had only one thing to say: “I think you’re very sick. And I want you to get better.”