Maybe Next Year - Jenny Owen Youngs
A song about missing someone at Christmas. The opening piano chords made me think this would be a real downer, but the mood is more one of wistful melancholy:
easy to let you go most of the time
the ache in my chest has been slipping my mind
see on the screen it’s a wonderful life
The week after Zach died, my dad showed up on my mum’s porch and handed me the book Levels of Life. The third and final part, pages 73 to 128 in my edition, is composed of precise and personal reflections on the author’s grief after his wife (“The heart of my life; the life of my heart.”) died of cancer. From page 78:
One euphemistic verb I especially loathed was “pass”. “I’m sorry your wife has passed” (as in “passed water”? “passed blood”?). You do not have to force the word “die” on others, even if you always use it yourself. There is a midpoint. At a social event she and I would have normally attended together, an acquaintance came up and said to me, simply, “There’s someone missing.”
This feels correct to me, too. For the first few months after Zach died, even though I’d seen their cold body and spoken at the funeral and all the rest, I still sort of expected to get a call from their number. It did not feel like they were gone. It felt like they were missing. Wish you were here. Maybe next year.
After two and a half years, I’m closer to believing that I’ll never see Zach again. I was posting recently about how I’m tired of only talking about Zach in a way that requires a “[cw: grief]” in the subject line. The fact that Zach is dead and I miss them is simply not the most interesting thing about them! In that spirit, a few cute seasonal stories:
I used to fly into Toronto on December 20 or 21, with just enough time to be seriously jetlagged for my family’s annual solstice party. Zach and I would often go for hours without talking at those parties, even though solstice was the first time in months we’d been in the same timezone. This was, to be clear, a gift to me; they would flash me a reassuring smile from a circle of our mutual friends across the living room, which meant “I have this section of the party handled, don’t worry about splitting your hosting focus”.
Zach (far right in the red sweater) entertaining at the 2017 solstice party.
Late December was sometimes the only time of year I was in Ontario, which meant I’d try to see a lot of friends and family as well as Zach. They were pretty mad when I was too optimistic about timing ("it's not that I'm double-booked, per se, I just left no time to travel between seeing my friend on the other side of the city and meeting you at the board game café") and left them waiting around. Quite early in our relationship, Zach caused me to buy a watch (now one of my most prized possessions) with a single-sentence argument: “being late means you’re treating other people’s time as less important than your own”. The watch improved my time-optimism, but did not solve it, nor did our tearful Boxing Day readings of Paul Christiano essays.
We eventually just decided we needed to set aside a stretch of holidays where I wouldn’t try to see anyone else. The apartment of mine that Zach took over in Waterloo had a gas fireplace and we’d spend hours reading out loud by the firelight. It was warm and dark and drowsy; Zach would occasionally pause to ask me if I knew what had happened in the last paragraph. I am still a bit unclear which Sharing Knife plot points I dreamed.
Remembering fondly,
- Tessa