There are losses in life that are so hard to comprehend. They creep up on us in slow motion, from a great distance, like a stupid cold you think you could avoid if you just ignore it for a while or bills that keep piling up on your desk that you don’t pay for months, knowing it will just get worse. We lost someone this weekend. And this is a sentence. And this is a period. All of these words are only starting to actually mean something.
I am not someone who could say they knew Eric Miranda well.
What I know is that I first met him at the front door of his house, back when he lived near Ocean Beach, and it was my first visit in San Francisco. He had a spare room and I needed a place to stay. I had no idea back then that five years later, the man who had connected me with Eric would become my husband, and Eric would be one of the few people present on our wedding day, and that I would return to the west coast three more times in the following years. Back then, none of this had happened yet.
What I know is that I have a distinct memory of Eric walking down the street in front of me, his canine brother Floyd by his side. I remember how we arrived at the supermarket and after a brief nod and a subtle gesture from Eric, Floyd would just stay put in front of the sliding doors, no collar, no leash. A slightly scruffy, large-ish black dog, standing patiently in a half-empty parking lot at dusk, looking, waiting. Like an outpost of his friend’s personality.
For some reason this picture overshadows the memories of drunkenly playing and recording “War Strategies” on an acoustic guitar while sitting between Eric’s synthesizers that same night, or drunkenly filming a scene for a sci-fi movie in the basement that same week, or the memories of drinks after the wedding last autumn, or the memories of spending one new year’s at the light house with family and Eric and Pauline, looking for migrating whales in the distance, sitting around the dinner table, walking down to the Pacific at night in a landscape lit only by the stars and a slowly rotating golden beam of light.
Eric’s death reminds me of another death, and I was wondering the other day if this is what adulthood is now. Deaths and deaths reminding us of other deaths and other people that left their marks because they were warm, and brilliant, and complicated, and talented, and their disappearance makes no sense. So we sit here, seeing this loss creep up on us from a distance. Across a continent, across an ocean, across another continent, until we wake up one night and feel it all crashing down on us again because another friend has joined the strange club of brilliant people who will never age, who will always stay thirty-eight, forever.
His voice remains, eternally tied to this music and the videos of him performing it. Isn’t it redundant to say that he will be missed, when it is so obvious that he will? Isn’t it bizarre to even say these words, because there must be a combination of keys on this keyboard to undo all of this? command-z. command-z. nothing works.
I like to imagine that wherever he is now, Floyd was waiting there for him for the past few years. Patiently, like he waited for him in that half-empty parking lot that night in the spring of 2010.
Farewell, Eric.
