What Will Your Verse Be?

“…Poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.”

– Robin Williams, Dead Poets Society

Love, Hailey once told me, while in an especially cerebral mood, is all the little memories you share with someone that no one else has. Love doesn’t always have to be romantic, she said, or with just one person, or even a person in general, and by her standards, love was around everywhere. Some of my favorite memories of her was when she was in these moods, when she was feeling talkative about abstract ideas and beliefs, being spiritual.

I suggested that maybe love was exclusive to only good memories, to which she asked who in my life that I loved did I only have good memories with? No one. Bad times add depth and give context to love, she explained, in many more words than that. When folks get to the age where Alzheimer’s or other forms of dementia set in, she said, they forget who they love, because they lose their memories with that person.

I had long suspected in my own mind and my beliefs that this was the very meaning of life, all the weddings and funerals and art and math and science and religion and music, it was all part of the human experience, interactions between humans and other living things. We all have different views on why we’re here, but my presumption is that it’s to feel every range of emotion contained within the unexplainable complexity that is the evolved human brain. That’s another topic altogether, but essentially what I called God, she called love.

It was one of the more profound things she ever told me, that memories and love are one and the same, and a mentality I ended up adopting. She was right, after all. There are other factors at play of course, what I like to think of as memories you’ve had because of someone maybe rather than with; remembering the way it made you feel when they did something in particular, or memories of phone or text conversations you had while not technically together. Essentially though, I realized that everything I loved in my life; her, my dog, my parents, my sisters, my friends, every living thing that I had love for, I indeed loved because of my memories with them.

There was an article I read recently, about the science behind memories, and the tangible items that inevitably sometimes become attached to them. Some objects around us are ordinary and insignificant. Bag of dog food, bar of soap, those things are replaceable. There’s another scope of items all together though that are absolutely unique in their own right, and these are the ones that have the ability to take you to a very particular plot on the plane of time and space, the ability to reproduce a memory unlike anything else can. Just like a memory is a special place in space and time that can’t be replicated, so too are these objects.

I’ve got them everywhere. She had a habit of leaving pieces of her behind everywhere she went, which I wouldn’t have had any other way. Pictures she hung up, trinkets she left behind, things she wrote me, her plants that she loved, all things I could never get rid of. These things hold her essence like nothing else can, and I can feel them the moment I open my door, her inviting me back in with love, in the form of memories, in the very way she explained. We’ve all got them, our Hailey keepsakes. Memory retrieval tools, if you will. Vehicles to relish in our memories, should we choose to, and still feel her love. Those things are still around not to dwell on the past, but to instill hope for the future, to remind us how beautiful life can be, especially when in love.

I will admit that it is hard sometimes, not to harp on the past. It’s human nature I think, in any case of loss, to go back and assess what exactly happened and how it could have been prevented. Whether sports, or business, or love, and especially life, it’s ingrained in us to backtrack and pinpoint where it all went wrong. I do so much less now, although I’ve been lost in memories all week. The difficulty and demons for me, always lied in the parallel universe, the alternate series of events that would have transpired had just this or that one thing happened differently. “Why me?” is a question for the self-pitied, and I got over that one quickly. “What if?” though, was the maddening one. There are millions of them, junctures that could have altered fate, and I am not sure how anyone ever silences them for good. Muffled now, surely, but never completely silenced. I think sometimes maybe I’m just an unforgiving person at heart, and that reaches into the realm of self forgiveness as well.

I grieved publicly, more than many would have liked. Hailey and I were going through things at the time where we were largely taking care of each other, and when she left I felt like I had failed, and my sense of purpose inevitably shifted to becoming a memorial of life for her. Maybe if I’m known for nothing else, it will be for my ability to pick one thing and stick with it.

I made affirmations that I would be strong, that everything was going to be fine soon. I could not have been more wrong. Grief entangled me, swallowed me whole, suffocated me. I survived, yes, but I got my ass kicked. To say I took it hard would be an understatement. I don’t care what cliche encouraging words anyone may have about strength, I walked away from that fight feeling I had lost it pretty emphatically. I wrestled with massive, colossal, extreme internal conflicts, and was left feeling very shaken up from the whole thing.

Life, to me is a perceived series of events, and the way you perceive and interpret it depends entirely on who you are. It’s impossible really, for me not to juxtapose between August 30th and August 31st. It was the axis on which my reality spun, and not the first time that Hailey had spun it, just never so furiously. You would have been hard pressed to find a single event that could have possibly changed my life more. It transformed me instantly, so much so that it’s difficult to not feel like that was was a past life. Not just immediate change, but also a slow, piece by piece unraveling. I felt as though chapters of my life were getting slammed shut in my face one by one. I watched helplessly as everything that defined me most was ever fleeting, leaving me wondering if it was all circumstantial, or a function of my own destruction? My romantic life, my career, personal relationships, my health, day to day activities, nothing was left untouched.

In my mind, that really was a past life, and I wasn’t left just grieving the loss of Hailey, but also of my former self. Anyone who tells you the old Josh is back would be lying, and I myself would be lying if I told you I saw him ever coming back as he was before. The old Josh belonged to Hailey, and that’s largely the way I’d always felt since I met her. I assure you, there is nothing more strange and confusing in this world than being in love with someone who is deceased. It’s not an exaggeration when I say these memories sometimes feel as if they’re a lifetime away, and it’s easier for me to think about my life now as a second one, to just acknowledge that the other was lost on I-75 with her. Restart rather than rebuild, it fits better in my mind that way.

Metaphors for new life and rebirths aside, death and loss and mortality are very heavy and present themes in this chapter of my life, and they seep their way into everything. Maybe that’s what defines me right now, maybe it will define me forever. Maybe one day I’ll return to form, and have my journals and stories and tattoos as scars to remind me of when I walked through the fire, of when I felt so strongly about such things. Every word that I write now, every punch or kick I throw, every note I play or sing, it’s all in efforts to come to terms with who I am, and try to shape the person I will be in the future. The new me is certainly not any less ambitious, and at no shortage of grandiose plans.

At the end of the day, we are vessels, I think, for whatever emotions it is we’re carrying. Hailey, at her best, was a vessel for pure bliss, the definition of an infectious smile, one that would make you want to go conquer the whole world. At Hailey’s funeral I tried my best to elaborate on that, on her being the source of inspiration for much of my teenage and adult life. It still rings true, so much so that anything significant I do, any mark I make here in the world, whether locally or nationally or globally, will inevitably have her hand behind it, and it takes an extremely powerful person to be able to do that after they’re gone.

To finish with the Robin Williams quote with which I began:

“…That the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be?”

If you were to die today, whose life would you have impacted? What seeds did you plant?

What will you be a vessel for?

What will your verse be?