Dear Sam

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My dear brother, Sam,

It’s your 35^th birthday tomorrow. I turned 35 six years ago in Los Angeles, hair newly buzzed, eyes smarting and blurred from the laser surgery I’d gotten the previous month to correct their focus. How they stung in that brightness if I forgot sunglasses. Back then you were just short of 29, father to an infant whose brilliance was still emerging. Even without knowing who he’d be, I loved that he’d come, because it felt like he connected you to me again, to the family, in a kind of irrevocable way. The first time I met him we walked at dusk with Naomi in a Salt Lake City park full of memorials. I still see that first glimpse of his blue eyes.

For a few months before you died, and despite the crisis you were in, there’d been silence between us. It came without assertion; there was no rift or bad feeling. But in the way that people sometimes do, whether or not those people are closely related, we’d found ourselves over the years frequently outmatched by the effort of talking. Adlai was a useful diversion, in that sense, because he liked nothing more—by the time he was three, he could supply the whole conversation (and would prefer to). You and I still made periodic efforts, as if going outside to check whether the clouds have cleared when it’s obvious the day will be stormy. I don’t want to seem fatalistic about that, or absolve myself of whatever older-brother duty I had to kindle something brighter between us; rather, I’m grateful that both of us kept trying. We’re both serious meditators, you long before I, and it felt a little like the return from distraction to presence—a never-ending task, the futility of it the reason.

One thing that struck me after we lost you last month was the absence of what I called a container for what had happened—a mental or experiential frame to hold the enormity of feelings, even the words to convey them. Everyone experiences grief, because we don’t get to hold on to what we love. So we have phrases, and glances, and styles of hugs, that are born of loss and try to acknowledge it. They can’t say the first thing about it, though, not really, because they’re still constituted in being. What’s lost is unattached from that. Loss is painful because it didn’t include us, or anything we still have the ability to know.

Emotions aren’t words, even or especially the words we use to describe them. My friend and teacher Marina once prompted a group of us on a yoga retreat to make a point of experiencing the feelings in our body without putting words to them, and since then I’ve tried to emphasize this distinction in myself: not rushing into articulacy, meaning also not hiding in it. All the talking I’ve been doing lately, and listening, and writing, and reading—all the stories—all the therapy—these are exercises in proximity to the event of concern that can’t touch it, from which it is in some sense protected. At best the words might stir additional sensations, part of an ecology of such things that seasons itself through us, winter and summer for an unknown number of years.

You know that I’m training for an epic triathlon next month. Four hours of running is not a big enough container, either. But it does gesture at the scale. When I ran for four hours last weekend in central Oregon, some old volcano whiting the horizon like a dental veneer, I swung out into strangeness and re-approached the familiar only when my vitality was gone, each step now an awkward scrawl of motor geometry and fuel burn. In such a state, three Bruckner symphonies in and a fourth playing at maximum volume, I could look back on the path I’d set down and recognize the impossibility of retracing it even as it rang fresh in my body. A one-shot deal, a skinny graph across the clover-leaf and zig-zag bike trails of Sunriver, wending along the edges of its two private and two public golf courses. You can’t paint your house just any color in Sunriver. It has to disappear.

The time you visited me in New York, you suggested a thought experiment while we were waiting at a restaurant for the check. Imagine, you said, that this moment goes on forever—not this exact frame, paused like a movie, but the ambient scene. The waiting, the bustle, the background conversation, the readiness to move on. I still try this now and then, and find the exercise oddly settling. (I’ve often shared it with others, and realize now that all of a sudden it’s part of your legend.) Giving up the possibility that anything else might happen also eases the burden of wanting it, or fearing it. Maybe that’s the container for all this—that little moment, in minor motion, stretching on forever. It’s a limited space, busy and modest, and there’s no hurry to leave. You couldn’t if you tried.

One of the littler liberations of the ex-Mormon is an absence of regiment around prayer. You can pray to whom you’d like, and whenever. I guess a person could even receive prayers, embody them, grant them. There’s a quote attributed to the medieval German mystic Meister Eckhart: “If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is thank you, it will be enough.” In the silence that often prevailed between us and is now permanent, a prayer seems like a thing that is powerful enough to make a difference. So here is mine to you, Sam, and it applies to every day in this life that you could sustain yourself: Thank you.

Love,

Michael

P.S. I wrote you a song. The piano called to me today before I could even sit down to write. Here you go.

Kindly send me your thoughts, questions, and provocations: dmichaelowen@gmail.com. And say hi on Instagram, or let’s Peloton together: @leggy_blond.