I have been turtling so hard. SO HARD, y’all. I am tired. My body is tired and doing some new shit that I don’t quite know how to deal with; my work is in a very difficult period; I had a July that I don’t quite know how to process, still, but there is no time to sit and think about it and sort it out because life still goes on and there is my body and my work and they don’t wait for me to get my soul quiet. So I have been wallowing - in my children, in my partner, in my bed, in my own whirring head. These are places I can go when I need to heal, or where I can be quiet and wait when I can’t yet heal. They are my places for comfort when life is difficult. And it has been very difficult this summer - this year, really.
(The one-year anniversary of the beginning of my long hospital drama is on Tuesday, and I have felt it coming for me. That experience was just one more long punctuating period of drama in a life-long disease management process, but it changed me, and I haven’t yet figured out exactly how. That’s part of all that up scenery up there.)
I only heard this morning that Lex had died. And here is the thing: we were not close. We had never met, and we had only talked a few times over email, on the phone, in silly asks back and forth. Maybe... 10 sets of individual exchanges? 20? Not a lot, really. But enough.
There are these people that you meet sometimes; people who you don’t really know, but you sort of feel like you do, if that makes sense? I don’t even really know how to articulate it, except to say that sometimes you encounter people who feel like they’re sharing your vibe, people with whom you can be vulnerable and honest and instantly bullshit-free because yeah, you DON’T know them, but you feel like you could, like you probably should, if only you had the time and the energy to invest. They’re people who you know instinctively are your people, who make it easy to be who you are.
I always thought Lex was one of those people. He was someone I looked forward to meeting, someday, when I was in the area and dontbefanci and I bullied him out to have lunch with us. We talked about it, Fanci and I, idly planned how to make it happen sometime. When I read posts about him today, though, it seems much more likely that, no, it wasn’t that I had found one of these people - it seems much more likely that he was just... very kind, so gentle, and very very easy to trust and care for. It’s not that he belonged to me and my tribe; it’s that he was just a very good person, with a soul and a heart blown wide open.
Ultimately it really doesn’t matter, at least in my life, whether I got that wrong or not. Because he’s gone now, and whatever sorrow I feel is just background noise for so many others who are mourning a connection much deeper and much more personal. But I feel his loss in my own quiet, unsettled way, and I can’t even mourn that I didn’t have any more energy to pour toward discovering more of him while he was still here because I just... we are all just living, every day, as best we can, until we aren’t anymore, and that is all we can ask of ourselves.
I am an atheist; I am, at heart, a difficult scientist who doesn’t have a soft, gentle, slightly woo-woo way to wish him well as he goes. Instead I want to believe that the lives he touched will be changed by him. I want to believe that I, personally, will learn something - will be inspired to turn outward more, to make better connections with people while they are here, to not be left mourning a deeper friendship that maybe could have been.
Maybe I will. I don’t know; I’m still very tired and so guarded right now. But he makes me want to. Maybe that’s enough.
Thank you, Lex - for everything. Thanks for your kindness, your humor, your gentleness. I am so sorry I didn’t know you better; that is the shape of my loss.
snowghoul
titsay
baratheonpilled
dailybridgerton
gummygunk
yousharknotpass
prguitarman
