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[itsmohitbansalchd-blog]

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[wilsenki]

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[hsiachunyuilu]

Rains today, bandage, fertilized. #liveharder #jennyhsiasdoodles #fiftythreepaper #madewithpaper

[flynfish777crew]

Gettin Ya Pumped Up For The Weekend w/ N8 @n8dawgg & Scott @sieser_8 #trainhard #liveharder #keepthememoriesalive #flynfish777crew2 #flynfish777crew (at 9Round Orlando)

[jansen1107]

Live Harder

Back in 2000, I landed a freelance proofreading gig with a financial company in Boston. (If you rearrange the letters in Pier One, you’ll know which one I’m talking about.) Six weeks of proofreading online fact sheets turned full-time when a guy on staff, Chris, was promoted to project manager. My title became Editorial Assistant, but I was responsible for filing the company’s marketing material for legal review with three big wirehouses. Boring stuff... and I was not very good at it.

Chris was of Irish and Scottish descent and lived in South Boston. For those who don’t know, being even part-Irish and having been born in Boston automatically makes you blue-collar royalty. Chris played his heritage to the hilt.

As far as looks go, hot he was not, but he was several towns over from hideous, too. He was about six-foot (give or take), big but not muscly, had medium-brown hair almost styled in a bowl cut, and big blue eyes behind Coke-bottle glasses that made him look like a turtle when he blinked. He made me think of an overgrown Ralphie from A Christmas Story. He also had a nice smile with perfect teeth that you rarely ever saw because Chris rarely ever smiled.

Chris was in charge of training me, naturally, and it did not go well. For one thing, I was a proofreader being pushed into an administrative job that required me to file rainforests’ worth of paperwork. Everything had to be meticulously stowed away in binders because we were constantly under threat of being audited by financial watchdogs. When Chris was at the helm, the audits went extremely well; a fact he reminded me of several times. He ran a tight ship, so to have this loosey-goosey ingenue try to step into his shoes just made him bristle at every turn. I was not up to snuff, and although I could sense it about myself, he was certain of it.

More than once, during my training period, I’d present him with a stack of forms that I had filled out only to have him come over and chew me out for filling out a code number that was one digit off. Yes, I needed to be corrected in order to do the job well, but Chris would then launch into what I called “The Special.”

The Special began with Chris letting out a deep sigh, rolling his eyes, and starting with, “Dude....” Then he’d lay into me for five minutes or so, sometimes in front of coworkers who always seemed to be a little sympathetic toward me but who would turn and quietly walk away while I got hosed down with Chris’s Boston Irish brogue.

It’s amazing I lasted with the company for five years. Someone must have liked me, because I’d go on to get chewed out regularly by executives from other departments because I often didn’t file the necessary material with the wirehouses. (Ironically, these same executives could never seem to give me a definitive answer on what I was supposed to file.) I was always getting screamed at in opera voices by red-faced executives. Maybe my title should have been changed to Whipping Boy. Incidentally, when we finally did get audited, the auditors told my superiors that my binders were excellent; well-maintained, easy-to-read, and up-to-date. So, I must have been doing something right. And, yes, I have Chris to thank for his training skills.

Over time, Chris warmed up to me about as much as a Catholic school nun. He didn’t exactly hate me, but I certainly wasn’t a member of his inner posse by any stretch. When a guy in IT once asked him, “So how do you like working with Jansen?” His response was, “It’s tolerable.”

On the morning of 911, I was nearly a half an hour late for work. There was a cluster of people standing in the building lobby looking up at a monitor set to CNN. I heard one woman say as I walked by, “If she can get into it, surely, she can get out of it.” I had no idea what was going on. Oblivious was my name.

When I got to my floor and arrived at my cube, next to Chris’s, I said good morning and asked, “Are we having our ten o’clock meeting?” Chris looked at me with eyes wide and mouth open. “No! Of course not. Do you know what’s going on? A plane crashed into the World Trade Center.”

I could see a news site on his monitor. Really? In my mind, all I could think was a drunk billionaire and his mistress were out joyriding in a propeller plane, because, really, who crashes an airliner into a building? Before that point in time, the world really had no frame of reference.

My relationship with Chris became a sysiphean effort of trying to prove myself to him. I’d spend so much of my goddamn time pushing my boulder up to the point where I felt like I received his approval only to be knocked back to the bottom by some gaff. (This has been a recurring theme at various jobs.) I always felt like the little brother who just couldn’t toe the line no matter what I did. And because I’m not inclined to join them if I can’t beat them, I just kind of disengaged from Chris and went about my life. (I go where the love is, not where the love isn’t.)

As time went by, I think I managed to win a modicum of his respect, if only grudgingly. The proof in the pudding came when I was sometimes invited out to lunch and after-work drinks with Chris and Tara (pronounced: TAH-ruh) the girl in charge of the company’s PR. Tara was pretty, funny, and a total Carrie Bradshaw wannabe. I adored her. Chris would take us out to Boston’s notorious Irish pubs (of course!) and I never got so drunk with coworkers as when I went out with those two. A night involving grape crush shots still stands out in my mind.

The real proof of Chris’s affection for me came the night I was invited to Dorchester (DOT) with the two of them so Chris could take us to a hole-in-the-wall Chinese place for dumplings. I had always heard about Chris taking coworkers there, and there were nights when I was unceremoniously bid adieu while everyone else headed to DOT for the mythical dumplings. On the night I was invited, I knew I was in like Flynn, but I played it with a poker face. It would be the first and only time I would ever enjoy dumplings with my coworkers.

Then Chris was out of work for a week. I heard that he had to have an operation to remove melanoma from his leg. When he returned, he was on crutches for several weeks and hobbled around the halls without the slightest bit of self-pity. At this time, we had both been given offices of our own and felt like big shots. I started noticing that when I passed his office, he was eating a lot healthier. Bananas and oranges frequently popped up on his desk. Clearly, he was going the health-conscious route.

Around this time, he also seemed to soften toward me a bit. He was always the stoic, but there was a warmer timbre to his voice. He seemed to be more receptive to joking with me. Even his e-mails had a friendlier, less business-like tone to them.

During the summer of 2004, Chris changed his schedule so that he was only coming in on Wednesday afternoons. I had no idea what it was about. There was a vague notion that he was doing rehabilitation after the melanoma on his leg. Our weekly team meetings revealed nothing in his absence. The most we knew was that he was cutting back his hours. There was no further discussion, and, weirdly, no one seemed to inquire why.

One Wednesday afternoon, I stopped by Chris’s cube. We had both been booted from our offices in a floor reorganization and were now back in lowly cubes. (How the mighty had fallen!) He was wearing a red T-shirt and blue denim shorts.

“Hey, Chris, how’s it going?” I asked.

“Good,” he said. “How are you?”

“Good. When are you coming back?”

Chris just looked at me with those big, blue turtle eyes and said, as though I were a five-year-old, “I won’t be back for a long time.”

He didn’t elaborate, and I didn’t ask. That would be the last time I would see him alive.

A couple weeks later, I flew out to California with some friends of mine from DracTour 2003 to attend Burning Man, the notorious annual festival in the desert of Black Rock City, Nevada. I danced my ass off at Depeche Mode Camp, got covered in dust during the frequent windstorms, felt like I was on the planet of Tatooine in Star Wars, wore a red prom dress and a tiara with blue Converse sneakers, fished Tofurky slices out of a dirty-water-filled cooler, got bathed in the nude like Aphrodite by a group of women, and served free alcohol-laced Kool-Aid to passersby as part of our camp: Camp Jonestown.

I was 30, single, childless, had great friends, was healthy, and now found myself having the experience of being among 35,000 like-minded individuals who could have casual gay sex at Camp Jiffy Lube, drink red wine at Spike’s Vampire Bar, write in journals available at Camp Dear Diary, walk through mammoth art instillations styled like Japanese pagodas, and just basically be free in an experimental world on the wide-open desert for a week. It was said that anything you wanted could be had at Burning Man. In a week, there was no way in hell you could get to it all. You just had to pick and choose what you wanted to do. It was a 10-mile circle of debauchery, and you could be as good or bad as you wanted to be. All of the naked and beautiful Burners accepted you as you were. It was your experience. Enjoy it!  

Of course, all that debauchery caught up to me when I returned to Boston the following Tuesday. I decided to take a sick day on Wednesday and dream about Camp Absinthe where my friend Mary and I sat in a gauzy tent on pillows, middle eastern-style, and I sipped absinthe for the first time. That Wednesday would be the last day Chris reported to work.

When I returned on Thursday, I would find an email from Chris. It was pleasant and simply asked if I could locate the paperwork for a filing. No problem. I fished out what he wanted, made copies, and left them in the mailbox outside his cube.

Several weeks went by, and Chris was MIA. I still didn’t have a clue what was going on with him. No one seemed to be talking. It was eery. But what’s worse is that in my naivety, I had absolutely no idea of how bad things were.

Finally, some news leaked out that Chris was in the hospital. Why, I had no idea. I also knew that he stopped seeing visitors fairly quickly, so none of us in the department were able to see him. My boss Kris did manage a visit prior to the banning. There was a get-well card that circulated around the department.

On the morning of Monday, October 25, 2004, Tara called me at my desk and asked if I could come into her office. The company had a pattern of doing layoffs every year, and I had somehow managed to survive them all. (I would go on to survive the rest during my tenure.) Did Tara know something?

When I got to Tara’s office, she quietly motioned me in and shut the door. I was amazed at how dark it was.

“I just thought you should know that Chris was admitted to hospice care over the weekend,” she said.

It turned out he had cancer and that it had metasticized to his brain.

I went back to my desk, sat in my chair, stared at my monitor, made sure my back was to the opening of my cube, and I just cried silently. The tears rolled down my face and dripped onto my business shirt.

Two days later, on the morning of Wednesday, October 27, 2004, Chris died.

He was 33.

That evening, the Red Sox won the World Series. It would be their first World Series win in 75 years. The curse had been reversed. Of course, Chris had been a lifelong Red Sox fan.

(Tragically, the Wednesday before this happened, Chris’s father died of a heart attack. I don’t know if Chris ever knew or not.)

Chris’s wake was held on October 31. Halloween is my all-time favorite holiday, but I just couldn’t get into the mood that day. Wakes and funerals don’t celebrate the macabre but, rather, allow us the letting go of someone we loved. It was, by far, my worst Halloween.

Chris’s wake was also the first and only wake that I’ve ever attended. I met his mother in the family’s receiving line. Her hands felt cool and soft. As I tried to tell her how sorry I was for her loss and that Chris had been like a big brother to me, she seemed to be trying to comfort me, to my amazement. I noticed that Chris had inherited his big, blue eyes from her.

Finally, I got up the nerve to walk to the casket. Chris looked like an old man lying there serenely with his eyes closed and his big hands folded over his chest. I think there must have been a Hail Mary attempt at chemotherapy because Chris’s once-full head of hair was now bald with wisps dotting his scalp. Red Sox caps and flags were draped around his body in the casket. His stillness unsettled me.

I stared down at him feeling numb. I know that I said something to him in farewell, but time has erased my memory of it.  

Several weeks went by, and Chris was never very far from my thoughts. I had just turned 31. I hadn’t been able to cry the morning my boss called me into her office and tearfully told me, along with two project managers, that Chris was gone. I hadn’t been able to cry at Chris’s wake. I was completely numb. The reality of it just didn’t hit me.

But I was hurting.

I promised myself that because Chris had died so young, I was going to live harder. From that moment on, I was going to pay attention to the way sunlight felt on my skin. To the way tiredness felt. To the way food really tasted. And I promised myself that every day I was going to suck in a lungfull of air and feel grateful for being alive. I was going to cherish living because I didn’t know if there was an afterlife or reincarnation and this was all I was going to get. I was also going to live harder so that Chris could feel it on the other side.

I’m now 41 years old and Chris has been gone for 11 years this October. I sometimes go for months without remembering to suck in a lungfull of air. I forget to be thankful when my knees ache from walking around all day. Sometimes I just forget to pay attention to living and the promise I had made to Chris and to myself.

But the story doesn’t end here.

I felt really bad about taking that Wednesday off after Burning Man; the one that would be Chris’s last day. And I felt bad that I had been oblivious to what he was suffering through all that time. But I also knew that Chris wanted the secrecy. It wasn’t like him to let on and then have people rush in and feel sorry for him. He wanted his dignity. It was so like him.

It came out that Chris had been involved with a charity during his last year of life to get tent shelters put on school playgrounds so that kids could stay out of the sun, and thus, minimize the threat of skin cancer. Again, it was so like him.

What gnawed on me through the whole ordeal was that I never felt like I had any closure with him. When my grandfather died, I wanted his red Mr. Rogers button-up sweater because it symbolized him to me. I saved a couple sheets of notebook paper from work that had Chris’s handwriting on them. It was my way of holding onto a little bit of him. 

One morning in December, after Chris had died, I had a dream. In the dream, Chris appeared to me wearing Grampa’s red sweater. He looked like he always did with his full head of hair and his Coke-bottle glasses. A bright light was shining behind him, and he stood there looking at me.

“Goodbye, Jansen,” he said.

He opened his arms and I hugged him. I felt my chin on his strong right shoulder, my ear against his. His arms were strong, and they held me tight.

Then that was it. It was over.

I woke up crying and feeling both sad and happy. I finally had the closure I needed. Maybe it was my brain creating a scenario to help me let go. Maybe it wasn't.  

Today, I don’t feel Chris’s presence. They say you can feel departed loved ones with you, and I certainly feel that is true of my grandparents and even the mother of one of my good friends who was very fond of me in life. But I can no longer feel Chris. Maybe he’s back on the planet in a new incarnation. Maybe he’s gone on to a higher plane. Someday, these mysteries might be revealed to me. To all of us.

I feel deeply satisfied that I had my closure with him. I also know in my heart that the crusty exterior he showed the world was not who he really was. And I know that his view of me was a bit better than I had always believed.

In conclusion, pay attention to all the little mundane things in life. Pay attention to the feel of sunlight on your skin. (Use sunscreen.) Really inhale the scent of fresh flowers on a spring day. Revel in the good times and quietly laugh and shake your head when things are bad---because they won't be forever. Go big in life as much as you can and really savor the joy of living. Live for those who have passed.

Live harder.

[damnitsangie]

😋🙌😆 #rock #partyrock #quotes #quotestagram #liveharder