Walking the Wild Edge of Grief I On Loss and Awe

I lost my closest childhood friend Uta to cancer this week. We met when we were 3, two German tots in a French-speaking preschool in Brussels, and remained besties throughout our teens and twenties, building up a repository of pranks, adventures, rites of passage, embarrassing secrets and shared jokes.

In our thirties and forties our relationship became increasingly predicated on preserving the memory of our young rebellious selves. The ritual retelling of those anecdotes became a way of measuring who we had become and how our grownup lives aligned with the snapshots of our younger and wilder selves.

In Levels of Life, a memoir of grief, the novelist Julian Barnes writes of the erosion of memory when it is entrusted to a solitary keeper-in-mind.

And yes, it is true, the memory of earlier times does return, but in the meanwhile we have been made fearful, and I am not sure it is the same memory that returns. How could it be because it can no longer be corroborated by the one who was there at the time. What we did, where we went, whom we met, how we felt. How we were together. All that. “We” are now watered down to an “I.” Binocular memory has become monocular. […] Those old familiar snaps of happier times have come to seem less primal, less like photographs of life itself, more like photographs of photographs.

Since Uta’s death, I have come to see how much she shaped my identity —and not just because she was a guardian of secrets and memories. Beautiful, confident, funny and radiantly competent at life, she was my role model and rival, mirror and muse.

The ferocity of grief keeps taking me by surprise. But with it comes a feeling of bracing clarity. I took the photo the morning after I heard the news of her death and it renders something of the awe and painful wonder that accompanies me these days.

For once, music comes up short. The elegiac pieces that we traditionally hitch to the heavy cart of mourning just don’t “do it” for me right now. If I want to summon Uta’s spirit, I blast Tina Turner’s “The Best”on the car radio.

That was more her speed. Come to think of it, that was her.

Even so, in the spirit of brilliant lives cut short, here is a gorgeous, heavy-hearted piece for string quartet by Guillaume Lekeu, a Belgian composer who died at the age of 24 from typhoid having eaten a dodgy sorbet. 

In the meantime, I’m rereading “Levels of Life” (which is as much about the history of hot air balloons as it is about grief.) Especially this:

You put together two people who have not been put together before. Sometimes it is like that first attempt to harness a hydrogen balloon to a fire balloon: do you prefer crash and burn, or burn and crash? But sometimes it works, and something new is made, and the world is changed. Then, at some point, sooner or later, for this reason or that, one of them is taken away. And what is taken away is greater than the sum of what was there. This may not be mathematically possible; but it is emotionally possible.