Ryan
This is Western Coffee—notes on building the creative body. Last time: Loss. The whole series is here. Please share this email; you can sign up free below.
On May 1, I posted a quote on Instagram from Joan Didion’s memoir of the death of her daughter, “Blue Nights”:
During the blue nights you think the end of day will never come. As the blue nights draw to a close (and they will, and they do) you experience an actual chill, an apprehension of illness, at the moment you first notice: the blue light is going, the days are already shortening, the summer is gone.
The photo I posted was of a blue night—the pre-summer sky charged long after sunset. In the moment I sensed but ignored a dissonance in using that specific Didion excerpt—its emphasis on the departure of the blue nights rather than their arrival. It was dissonant because on May 1, more than the sky was brightening. My broken wrist, calamity enough for one year, was getting better. Even in the worst aftermath of my bike crash, I’d given James a Weber grill for his birthday, and a telescope, which made his yard in the Hudson Valley a playland. Over the sense of emergency and rupture that had pervaded April was settling a return of wonder. I was starting to make plans for a marriage proposal. Time with family and friends lay just ahead. The summer looked to be kind.
We still had 17 days left to feel that way, and part of a night.
And then everything else happened. Which now must include that last week, my friend Ryan died in a car crash in San Diego. His loss is immediate and physical and crushing for his husband and son, and incomprehensible for so many others—he was loved across the land. My debt to him in my own formation is not exceptional, it’s the kind of effect he had. But one thing I know for sure about grief is that it’s individual. All I can write about here is my own.
I first knew Ryan because he was my first lover, when I was a college freshman still trying to defeat my sexual identity. He embodied—then, and as often as I saw him afterward—a perennial and defiant freedom, as if remembered and retained, at some cost, from long before this particular incarnation. His joy and mirth gave evidence of that interior state; and it played out in other ways, a tangle of fury and mischief and glee and incredulity building under the atom-thin membrane of his face until, always, it broke—the ire and the laughter and the pranking all at once, all as one. I couldn’t begin back then to match his liberation, still anchored as I was deep inside the Mormon matrix, but the idea of it fixed itself to my sky like the star of the morning.
The friendship we left college with came under the usual fading of time and distance. And then three summers ago we found ourselves, suddenly as this sentence, with two other friends he’d shared with me back at the beginning, Liz and Whitney, for a three-day mind-meld in Joshua Tree. That trip became a template, a temple, for those 18- and 19-year-old brightnesses we’d encountered in one another long ago to kindle again, and we repeated it four times. We would bathe in the same precision of thought and language and warmth of heart that had always been there, seasoned by what felt like (and ought to be) the stories of a long middle chunk of our lives. Not the latter half of anyone’s.
From the more essential of the Didion death memoirs, “The Year of Magical Thinking,” I take away the sense that for her the death of her husband was the advent of death, that it had always been a force rumored but unverified. Now I know that it’s the prerogative of the grieving to act this way because—for reasons biological and cognitive and ritual—it’s true. Death isn’t real until it’s beside us.
The blue nights are a poor metaphor for her purposes, though, much as I’ll always be drawn to the image—because the blue nights come back. That’s why the impish spirit who haunted me out of the closet in college could return 20 years later for a celebration of how rich and full and bright our lives had become. And yes, we nurture one another on those trips—I say nurture in the present tense, because I’m certain that part of Ryan’s legacy to us will be that they continue—so that we can face up to what parts of us aren’t yet free, or what from outside binds us. But deep inside their animating energy is an ecstasy that we made it this far with our hearts intact, with our best witnesses back to see it.
I remember clearly: The me who met Ryan pictured a future in which safety would come not from freedom but from armor. The armor of acquired privilege, the armor of prestige, probably the armor of the church. That me did not picture a future of taking just too many mushrooms at a birthday party upstate one Sunday night and texting Whitney the next morning to say, Forget my doubts about this, we have to make that random desert trip happen. In two weeks. How much that Michael would have missed if he was right about the armor. How much Michael without Ryan would have missed.
Kindly send me your thoughts, questions, and provocations: dmichaelowen@gmail.com. And say hi on Instagram.