To Wills, On Grief

1. Wills

    I think I was thirteen or fourteen when I first met Wills. He was a newcomer at the dojo I exercised at. My first impression of him was: oh wow, he looks really nice. A confusing thought to have, when you've never had that kind of thought before, and that was pretty much the start and end of the logic of my first crush.

    That sounds really mean. Crushing on Wills was not some horrible illogical mistake. He was charismatic, friendly, tenacious, playful. He adapted quickly to the family-esque dojo culture we had. A few of the senseis saw themselves in him and took him under their wing. The jujitsu instructor we had, in particular, made him something like a protégé. 

    I, of course, being - I think a year or two younger than him? - and madly infatuated with him, have all his other traits rose-colored. I remember someone saying he was hot-headed, and some others mentioning he had a little bit of an ego. Ten years on, I can see where they came from. But I mostly remember him being so nice. I remember a girl my age crying, and him comforting her with all the right words. I remember him putting up with my incessant clinginess. I remember how he gently let me down, after I confessed my feelings to him. 

    That last one I still think about a lot. I confessed to him and he took it neutrally. Maybe two days later, he pulled me aside in private and let me down about as gently can be expected of a 16 year old boy. He left it on no unequivocal grounds -  "I don't think I could ever date you" - which sounds really harsh, but you have to believe me, he was really nice about it. He never made me feel horribly ashamed for it. And he never made fun of me for it. I often had anxious thoughts about - what did he tell his friends about me? Did I completely embarrass myself, was he making fun of me, did his friends think I was a total dweeb? - but if he did, I saw no sign of it. I accredit his mostly-gentle, considerate rejection as to why I didn't fear rejection in my future relationships. It sounds like a small thing, but for me, it wasn't. 

    Crushing on Wills was not illogical in that "he was a bad guy". He was a great guy, as far as I can remember. But I know that he and I would've never worked out. I think back, and I can't  remember knowing him very well. He really liked wrestling. He was good at it. He loved dirt biking. He liked adventuring after hours, getting up to mischief and hanging out with kids at the dojo I never quite fit in with. We lived in different worlds. But he had an aura I admired, and he colored a significant part of my youth in a positive light. 

    After he left the dojo and I went to college, I remember seeing on Instagram that he'd gotten a job working dirt biking events. Good for him, I remember thinking, he's doing what he loves. 

    After the dojo, we never spoke again. 

2. On Guilty Grief

    I got a call towards the end of my senior year from one of my best friends. She asked if I'd seen the dojo news, and I hadn't. I hopped onto Instagram expecting to see something interesting. Instead, I saw an announcement that Wills had passed. My friend had asked if I wanted to stay on the line, but I told her I needed to take some time to process on my own. 

    Of course, I was already crying. I was crying and sobbing within minutes. But it's like that Richard Silken quote; 

“Eventually something you love is going to be taken away. And then you will fall to the floor crying. And then, however much later, it is finally happening to you: you’re falling to the floor crying thinking, “I am falling to the floor crying,” but there’s an element of the ridiculous to it — you knew it would happen and, even worse, while you’re on the floor crying you look at the place where the wall meets the floor and you realize you didn’t paint it very well.”

    I was crying my eyes out thinking, "I am grieving Wills because he is dead. Wills is dead and he's not coming back."

    (The tears are happening again as I am writing this post, like I knew they would.) 

    My version of the wall meeting the floor was realizing - when was the last time I actually spoke to Wills? When was the last time I even spoke to anyone who really knew Wills? I was having the dreadful, stomach-churning realization that I wasn't really grieving Wills. I was grieving the loss of a position. It wasn't so much "Wills is dead." It was "my first crush is dead." I kept searching for details for how it happened online, because I didn't know anyone close to him I could ask. 

    I felt like a horrible person. I felt like I had no right to grieve. I felt unworthy and embarrassed of every intrusive thought that entered via grief's doorway. Now you'll never get to tell him everything you wanted to. Now you'll never get to see him again.

    I knew, in my mind, that I probably would've never seen him again anyways. So why was I crying? I had all these strange, twisted notions in my head that I was putting on a performance - alone in my room, with no one on the other end of the phone line - to make someone pity me. That somehow, I manufactured the entire hurt in my heart for sympathy. 

    Regardless, I sought out the details of a memorial. The dojo family was organizing, and many people I knew would be in attendance - even more that I didn't know. My father went out of his way to pick me up from college. We went to the beach. 

    There were a lot of people at the memorial. Most of them were his friends from the dirt biking community. They shared stories about him - most of them involved some level of bright recklessness, some degree of bodily injury, and a lot of laughter. I was crying the whole time. I a little bit like a fool, learning about him as I was grieving him, making my surgical mask soggy, watching his mother smile and hold it together better than me. 

    His mother was incredible. She was celebrating his life in full force. I think I could sort of see where Wills got the magnetic part of his personality - even though the memorial was for her son, she was directing the crowd. She was asking questions, prompting speakers, responding with a clear, strong voice to questions. She cried, but stayed upright. I don't know. I think, for how much I and others were falling apart, she looked superhuman. 

    I managed to tell her the words I'd been turning over in my head. I confessed to the crowd he was my first crush, and I tried to explain what that meant to me; I tried to tell her something to the effect of, even though we weren't in each other's lives anymore, that he had left a positive impact on me. And if I existed, then surely there were hundreds of other people out there like me - people he didn't talk to, people he'd completely forgotten about that remembered him with some fondness. 

    She hugged me and joked that he was stupid for letting me go. She hugged me really tight, I remember that. I hope that means my words got through the way they were meant to. Part of me still feels a little guilty - wondering if she felt like she had to comfort me, rather than me comforting her. 

3. On Grieving

    On the car ride home, I thanked my dad for taking me to the memorial. He told me something to the effect of, "Of course. I want to support you. I remember the first time a friend my age died, and..."

    I was starkly reminded that my father wasn't just my father. One day, he was a person hearing about the death of a person his age, the first in his circle to die. I wondered if the shock and sorrow felt the same as mine did. The unfairness of how young they were. If it was someone he didn't know all that well. 

    If the grief was this weird pebble in his hand; not overwhelmingly difficult to bear, but a part of his mind belonging to it. Our fingers were always consciously wrapped around it. If we squeezed too hard and focused, we could feel the edges digging in. 

    If it brought into sharp relief everything we never said to this person we didn't know very well. If we both suddenly realized how much there was we'd wanted to say. Even if it was just a far-flung fantasy: Thank you for being nice to me. I'm doing well, are you doing well? How funny was that class we took? Do you remember this place the same way I do?  

     And I think that's what this post was about. Grief doesn't stop at the logic of "I knew you". Grief was - reminding me of someone nice I knew. Someone I cared about had something bad happen to them. And my care for them didn't end when we stopped talking, when we stopped knowing each other, or when he passed. We both had our lives ahead of us, in our completely separate worlds, and it doesn't make sense for his story to end when mine was barely out the nest. I cared that his story had a good ending. I resent that it didn't. 

    Somewhere, glowing in my past, is a nice memory of Wills. It's a warm orange candle that lit up small corners in my mind that otherwise would not have been illuminated. There are parts of my youth I remember because he was there. Grief was there to say - I remember you. I remember you fondly. I'm sorry the world will not get more of your good moments, which I was so lucky to have. 

    To Wills. I'm sorry I never had the tact and the courage to tell you everything you ought to have known. (Mostly apologizing for how cringe-inducing I was when we were young. Also, thanking you for being nice to me, when you really didn't have to be.)  You made a positive impact on my life. I hope you know your life, too unfairly brief, lives on in this tiny ripple.