A Candle for the Unfinished Goodbyes

Later today, I am going to light a candle.

Brandon “Gypsy” Birch. Brendan Roche. Brendan Myers. Chris Benson. Lisa Rondeau. “Parsnip” Thomas. And there are others whose names I know are there, somewhere in the back of my head, refusing to come forward at this particular moment. That bothers me a little, but perhaps it should not. Memory does that. Sometimes the face comes before the name. Sometimes the laugh comes first. Sometimes it is a stupid story, an argument, a road trip, a fire, a character someone played, or one seemingly insignificant moment that suddenly places a person right back in the room with you.

All of you, in one way or another, were gone before what I would call your best-before date. Some of you were in your prime. Some of you had probably not reached it yet. All of you still had something left to give.

It has been a rough stretch of years for watching people disappear.

Chris, your antics as Jacques McGregor are permanently lodged somewhere in my head. There are things people do that become part of our internal archive, whether they ever realized their importance at the time or not. Years later something triggers the memory and suddenly there they are again.

Gypsy, yours is more complicated.

I was one of two people who responded when you took your own life. I have written before that the events of that day changed me, and years later I don’t think that statement was dramatic enough. There are days that divide your life into before and after. That was one of mine.

And what followed your death did not end with your death. Grief spilled outward. People dealt with it badly. I dealt with it badly. Brendan dealt with it badly. A friendship that I honestly believed could survive almost anything became poisonous under the weight of it. We had worked together, lived together, travelled across the country together, shared things with each other that neither of us shared freely with other people. We had survived thirty days practically living in a van together. I once watched him nearly die in an accident and remember thinking afterward that if this friendship could survive everything we had already thrown at it, it would probably survive anything.

I was wrong.

After Gypsy died, Brendan and I fought. Then we barely spoke. Eventually I left. Looking back at something I wrote years ago, I said that for me, Brendan and Gypsy both died on August 20, 2018. It was harsh language, but it described what I felt at the time. I lost Gypsy physically, and in the aftermath I lost Brendan as the person I had known him to be.

Which made Brendan’s actual death hurt in an entirely different way.

There was unfinished business between us. There was an argument that never really got resolved. There were things that should have been said and weren’t. Yet despite everything that had happened, Brendan was probably the last person I had whom I could honestly describe as a best friend. There had been a time when I could tell him virtually anything. He knew where a few of my skeletons were buried, and I knew where a few of his were buried. Some things will stay that way.

Then came the day you died.

That one still makes me angry.

You were in the hospital. You were still alive. People knew. People made it from Ottawa before you died. Someone could have contacted me and said, “Hey. Be here.” I cannot simply convince myself that there was no opportunity. There was.

I found out afterward.

And perhaps part of why that particular wound cuts as deeply as it does is because I have lived that feeling before. It was horribly reminiscent of the day my brother died: discovering that something irreversible had happened after the window in which I might have done something, said something, or simply been there had already closed.

People sometimes wonder why anger gets mixed into grief.

This is why.

Grief is not always the clean sadness we portray at funerals. Sometimes grief carries an argument with it. Sometimes it carries guilt. Sometimes betrayal. Sometimes it carries the phone call that never came, the apology that was never made, the last conversation that should have happened and never did. Death does not neatly resolve those things. In some ways it does the opposite. It freezes them exactly where they were.

There is no final conversation afterward. No clearing the air. No “you know what, that whole thing was stupid.” No opportunity to discover that maybe both of you had softened with time.

That is unfinished grief.

And perhaps one of the harder lessons I have learned is that grief does not require us to tidy it up before we are allowed to remember someone fondly. I can still be angry about what happened when Brendan died and miss him. I can regret how our friendship ended and still remember the years when he was effectively my brother. I can remember Gypsy with affection while still carrying the damage left by the circumstances of his death. Love, anger, sorrow, gratitude and resentment are perfectly capable of occupying the same room.

Maybe that is what the candle is for.

Not closure.

I have become suspicious of that word. Some doors do not close. Some losses simply become part of the architecture of who we are.

The candle does not fix anything. It does not rewrite an argument. It does not excuse anybody. It does not undo a suicide, reopen a hospital room, return a phone call that never came, or give any of these people the years they should have had.

It simply says: I remember you.

And today, perhaps that is enough.

So later today I will light a candle. For Gypsy. For Brendan. For Chris. For Brendan Myers. For Lisa. For Parsnip. For the others whose names will probably come wandering back into my head five minutes after I publish this.

For friends, brothers, acquaintances, characters, troublemakers, confidants and people who wandered through my life and left something behind.

You were here.

You mattered.

You should have had more time.

The rest of us are still here, carrying pieces of you forward whether we realize it or not.

Godspeed.