In Lost Memory

One of my great fears in beginning this Buggy Face project was that it would devolve into an online dairy, a place for my daily grievances to find some air, thus boring readers and myself and keep me from doing the real, meditative work that building budding essays requires (whatever the hell that means). But you see, my life keeps happening daily and there are unplanned events I must think about, write about, try to figure out. This feels the logical place to do it. I've abandoned my yellow legal pad of blog idea notes for the knotted thoughts. They need a form.

Yesterday a friend died. To say the word friend seems so wrong and inaccurate, as I only met her once, though the word acquaintance feels improper too, and that one's worse, as it's distant and cold. She was a woman I knew. And I cry now for what is lost.

I met Errin two months ago at Megan and Mindy's retreat in the Blue Ridge Mountains. When Brock and I walked in their cabin for the big party on Saturday, Errin was instantly the most likable person in the room. I'm not romanticizing this because she's gone now; it's simply true. She had two dogs, Matrix and Lupin, and she loved that King and Nola showed up. A lot of Megan and Mindy's friends, and Megan herself, are not dog people. Errin was dog people, and people people. She sensed that Brock and I knew no one there, and she came right up and started asking questions. Haply, she had a fuck-up brother and we decided he'd pair well with my fuck-up sister. We laughed a lot, and while there's no way not to be maudlin when describing a dead person's laugh, she had a fucking great one. Meaningful, you know? It wasn't an easy laugh, she didn't laugh when something was halfway funny. Oh, she'd smile, because she was friendly, but when something was funny, the laugh was earned and it was hard and deep. She bent over when she laughed, slapped her knees, just like in the movies. Except that she meant it. Here's a picture of us talking. She's in the middle, in the pink:



Showing you this picture makes me slightly guilty, as if I'm proving to you that I knew her, and am worthy of writing this, of suffering something as a result. Death writing is difficult, perhaps even more so when the writer is not intimately connected to the dead. But even that previous sentence, though I feel it to be true, brings enormous guilt: here I am, implicitly apologizing to my reader for bad writing, for not having enough at stake here, because I'm writing about a death I was not intimately close to. Yet all the while I'm still feeling something, for her and her loved ones. And also, yes, for myself.

Last night I came up to my office to finish yesterday's blog. Brock walked in and said dinner was ready. Upon just seeing him I started crying and saying I didn't want him to die. Don't want my mother, my Lala, my sisters and friends. Again I'm a child and insisting we'll be the lone cases, I'll find a way for us to avoid death. Bugginess will protect us. I'll wrap every loved one in a big blanket and feed you with my love, and insist we never drive a car again. C'mon, we can make this work.

Annie Dillard has this stunning, impossible essay in her book For the Time Being. The essay, and the entire book, asks us how much individual lives matter. Think tsunamis, she says, think war and destruction and all those billions of lives. She asks the reader:

"What were you doing on April 30, 1991, when a series of waves drowned 138,000 people? Where were you when you first heard the astounding, heartbreaking news? Who told you? What, seriatim, were your sensations? Who did you tell? Did your anguish last days or weeks?"

This happens all the time, we're perfectly aware. How can we grieve for them all? Of course we aren't supposed to, it's perfectly okay to reach a greivance quotient, but how do we accept that notion if it's one of our own? World, you must know, that there is no one out there like Brock, like Rosita, like Lala. The loss would be more than my own, it'd be yours, world. But you don't believe me, since you have so many. But I'm telling you! I'm screaming it to you in your air! Should I stick my head in your Atlantic, try insisting underwater, what real loss is?

I know, I know: maudlin.

Another disturbing thing about this death, other than the fact that it's a death, and my greiving quotient is long and firm, is that, like so much other daily news I find, I learned this through Facebook. Megan sent out the announcement yesterday evening. Here's what it read:

"rest in peace, errin vuley. errin was a dear friend of mindy's and mine. she was killed instantly in a car crash this morning. errin worked tirelessly on behalf of a wide array of non-profit groups, and the city will suffer greatly for her loss. we will all suffer for it, especially her partner, dana, her brother and her parents. she had a deep belly laugh that one could recognize easily carrying across a pitch black auditorium."

What also distresses me is that I don't have a right to feel distressed. This woman was on the periphery of my life, a Facebook friend. I don't write this blog in hopes of consolation for my loss, because it isn't mine. It's Megan's and Mindy's and Dana's and the loss of so many others. I'm actually in the perfect position to do the consoling, because Megan and Mindy are my friends. But the thought of calling them today is impossible. I actually picked up the phone as I scrolled through the Facebook pictures (I should not have been doing the latter) and began weeping. For this loss, for the loss of Broc and Jen, for the infinite losses that will come my way despite bugginess and all the love radiating even through my toes. The toes, and the love, will someday go.

Here's my paraphrase of the news report, which I found on the online Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

A woman, Errin Vuley, 35, was driving on Memorial Parkway at 8 a.m. this morning when a car coming the opposite direction crossed lanes and slammed into her minivan, where she died instantly.

Where she died instantly.

What the role of technology here? Did reading the news report make her death more vivid for me? Did I imagine myself in her seat because we all drive on highways at 8 a.m. going off to work, going off to life? Am I mourning her death, or my future one? And can I still be a good person, please?

And thanks to Facebook, where Errin had over 300 friends, will her funeral be better attended? How many Facebook members die per year, and what do we do with their accounts? Do we continue to write our feelings into a void? Will her partner Dana be better fed and consoled these next few weeks because Mindy is using Facebook to coordinate as I type?

Leave it to the living to ask strings of impossible questions to the other living, so that they can absorb, perhaps greive too, and have some dinner, drive home from work. As Errin did, as I do.

One last distress: I just thesaurased "distress" because I felt I'd used it too much, I needed another word. I found some: agonize, torment, afflict, aggrieve, painful, dreadful, worrying, harrowing.

Because I'm a writer, you see. I tell you about my feelings, about what it feels like to know someone who no longer has feelings, who's no longer a someone. I've got to use my tools, I've got to get things right.