One year ago, today.

Dated 7 September 2021

One year ago, today.

I don’t know when or how this social phenomenon became so pervasive. It probably started on the radio, when disc-jockeys started turning back the clock to look at the top hits from another decade. More recently, it may have been Snapchat that did it, or Facebook, and now even Apple’s caught wind of the efficacy of creating and signaling “memories” on their platforms. I’m sure, like many aspects of social media, that there was something earnest and good mixed into the allure of “One year ago, today”—but it’s also turned our memories into further conduits for their own advertising schemes. You open the app (sometimes it doesn’t even take that much, you get a notification that a “memory” awaits) and so follows the siren call, pulling you back in time to look at the photographs and words of your past. It can be beautiful, it can be heartwarming or funny, and it can be painful—excruciating, even—but it does prompt reflection and remembering. (The cynics will remind you that, behind the very real reflection that it prompts, these mega-companies are very much still profiting from your “memories,” exploiting our already-waning attention spans and our insatiable desire to feel connection, all to present us with advertisements that make them gobs of cash.)

So what were you doing a year ago today? 

For many, it may have been another work day, perhaps it was a holiday day, but most days, in the end, we will not remember very clearly (if at all), which adds to the irresistibility of the “One year ago, today” effect. Every person on this earth has a different way of defining their own banality, because it is within our own frames of reference that the mundane makes itself known. What is the moment of a lifetime for one person could be another person’s day job. It is one of the many incredible aspects of the human psyche and body that we can get used to just about anything—soldiers grow strong in pounds upon pounds of heavy gear in Kuwait, where the thermometer screams at 117 degrees Fahrenheit; in certain reaches of the world, entire families subsist for one week off of the food that a single person in the U.S. eats over the course of an afternoon. From the world’s royalty to the people living on the street, there are Tuesdays in waking memory that will never be recalled in full. 

If you ask certain philosophers, anything we do recall is nothing more than a self-made fiction. But the details of the past are tattooed on time—even if you were able to remember them, your “memory” would chafe against the historical record guarded by the hypothetical zookeeper-librarian-archivists in my head that tend to every event that has ever have taken place over the course of human civilization. Nothing you can do will change the fact that you spent Saturday at the museum, or the strip club, or the grocery store. Your memory of those things may warp with time, but the universal record of what happened is resolute. For the historians reading this, of course, where would their life’s work find meaning in this mess if everything was irrefutable? To them I say, we live in a new age—this technologically super-saturated Information Age has tricked us into thinking that we have strong memories. We do not. We have tools that enable us to capture, if we so choose, -illions of moments—and we can recall them with nothing more than a few touch screen commands from a device that fits oh-so-neatly in our hands and in our pockets. Pre-iPhone, history was more of a mystery. Now, my children will know exactly what I found funny, they’ll know what I looked like, sounded like, at their age, and how I spent my time—all because of time-stamped photographs. The way we regard history will certainly evolve, and as for the lines that divide sociology, anthropology, and history—I’ll leave that to the experts.

So where does that leave us?

Well, what were you doing a year ago today? Can you answer that question without opening your phone?

I can. And I don’t know that I’ll ever forget the details of that day. Every moment that passed after the late morning was shrouded in a bitter cloud of incredulity. And to think how pleasantly the day had started off. 

I’d had five friends come to stay at my parent’s lake house in Waukesha County, Wisconsin to celebrate Labor Day weekend at the end of a summer that was stifled by the aughts of the COVID-19 pandemic. My parents were away for the weekend, and I thought it would be my chance to introduce a bit fun before we all went back to a long, uncertain stretch of working from home. I was yearning for occasion—for a chance to wear a dress, for my friends to dress up, for all of us to feel special for a moment and drink some champagne (even if the champagne was only brut). So the night before one year ago, today, I was with my dearest friends, dressed up and eating a dinner of Bon Appétit sausage fennel pasta that we’d cooked together, drinking and dancing to songs we played on my parents’ Sonos speaker. We finished dinner and started a fire outside in their fire pit, and sat talking and listening to music. All was right.

I went to bed next to Rachel after cleaning the kitchen after the others had gone to bed. I definitely snuck a cookie from the bread drawer as a self-given reward for doing so. When I woke up on the morning of the 7th, it was still early, and so I tip-toed out of the room and left Rachel sleeping. I went to turn on the Formula One grand prix. Max joined me at this point, and we tried to keep the (then new) puppy, Gus, as quiet as possible while the others slept. I made coffee, we talked tyre strategy, he told me how he’d shared this sport with his grandfather growing up. When the others emerged, stomachs grumbling, Jared suggested that we make buttermilk biscuits with our brunch—and how could we say no to that?

So he and I jumped in the car and drove to the grocery store to pick up some buttermilk, chattering away and listening to music. It was just a quick trip, how much could we really miss?

When we pulled back into the driveway, I saw both my parents standing in a huddle. They weren’t supposed to get back until that night, but I supposed—well, I will admit that I don’t really know what I thought had happened. I recognized that it was strange, and I was a little embarrassed all of the sudden as I stepped out of our powder blue Prius that my mom’s eyes were rimmed red. Maybe they’d had a fight, but they were standing too near for that. I sent Jared inside with the buttermilk, and walked in the other direction toward my parents.

It wasn’t long before mom blurted out the sickening truth: “Uncle Mark is dead. Mimi found him this morning.” And in the same moment that my eyes tightened with tears and a cascade of no tumbled out of my mouth, my legs failed me, and I was in a pile on the ground, staring up at two people who in that moment were no more adult than I was. We were heartbreak, we were pain, we were confusion.

I vaguely heard, through a deafening chorus of silent mental sirens, how my mother tried to share the details of what had transpired the night that my friends and I drunkenly danced and shared stories around a lakeside fire. Mark hung himself using a piece of sailing rope that he’d gotten from the garage. He left only one short note, that he was to join his dad and Nils in heaven, and that he loved his mom. That was all the explanation we got. It wasn’t until a few days later that my mom showed me a photo of the suicide note. The next thing I remember was finally getting to my feet, walking in the lower story door, only dimly thinking that my friends were upstairs, waiting with a bright brunch spread.

How to face them. How to cover up the tears, the sobs that came every time I tried to breathe. Did Diana know? Did New York City know what had just happened? We’d lost one of its greatest living members, out of the blue—no therapists, no mention of life’s lack of meaning, not a single sign. I felt my foot take another step forward onto the carpet and my stomach lurched—across the room, Josie was standing there at the bottom of the stairs by herself, shaking her head knowingly, and before I had the chance to try to explain the pain away, she had my sobbing, shaking body wrapped in a hug, an anchor that I desperately needed in that moment. Gone? How could he really be gone? She held me as I cried, unafraid of the storm of feelings that was raging inside me in that moment. My most courageous friend, facing me even though neither she nor I had any idea how to act in that moment. It was full of love, full of silent understanding for a thing that made no sense, and I’ll always remember that moment, that embrace. Thank you, Jos.

I tried to wipe away the tears and carry myself up the caramel-colored carpet to meet the others, each one waiting to give me a hug, there in a way I never knew I would ask for. And to this day, I still don’t think I’d have had it any other way. I know I can’t change how it transpired, but part of me wondered: Would you rather they weren’t here? My answer then was no, and today it is still no. I was met by the most gracious patience, by a loving group that bore witness to a pain that I would never wish on anyone.

The food was ready for all of us, and my parents and I sat down and ate a brunch that my friends had prepared while it sunk in that one of our family’s most iconic and essential pillars lay in ruins—would forever lay in ruins. We could not undo that earthquake.

You’d think I wouldn’t have remembered the brunch either, but I do. I remember wanting to be hungry for it, wanting to eat the soft scrambled eggs that steamed from under a garden of herbs that Katherine had so nonchalantly turned into green confetti; the bacon; the fruit; the biscuits that Jared had made in the interim. I nibbled, unsure if it felt good or not to eat something. I just kept looking at others for cues of how to act. Nothing in my own mind was feeling passably normal, passably anything. My systems were failing. I felt my shirt collar soaking up the tears that were silently streaming down my neck, little rivers that kept reminding me that Mark was gone.

The rest of the day was a distraction game. It was sitting on the porch with my family, trying to set my five friends up with activities that could occupy them while, from the deck, I messaged Mark’s friend Massimo in Rome to tell him that the man who introduced us just a year prior was now gone. It was sending my mother every photo of him that I had, watching as my greatest heroine tried to grapple, in disbelief, that her best friend and closest confidant had taken his own life without so much as hinting at his plans. “He could hardly decide what he was going to eat for breakfast every day, or when he was planning on traveling anywhere without talking it through a hundred times—how the hell did he decide to do this?” she said.

The puppy was running around with my friends, who bravely faced the discomfort of the house. To them, I say thank you for being so brave. We ended up getting in the car together and leaving my parents and Diana at the house, leaving them to carry on doing the things that you do when someone dies. With my friends, we went to look at Lake Michigan, ordered Mexican mochas at Colectivo coffee, went to dinner in the Third Ward. We listened to music, we talked nonsense, and I was so glad to have a break from the reality that waited for me at the house.

One year ago, today I lost a hero—a role model, a best friend—to suicide, and with it, the light that he brought to this world. It was a humorous light, too—one that cautioned against taking yourself too seriously, one that made time to see your mom and call your family, the kind of light that never wanted to pay more than $13 for a cheeseburger, that pulled pranks on people, that laughed at the same joke on its 300th run, that brought out the child in us all, but met it with respect and appraised it with dignity, because what time in life is better than childhood? 

+

A few weeks before he died, Mark and I spoke on the phone for oh, an hour and a half, I’d say—my Strava has it recorded as a walk that had us talking about the New York that wasn’t ridden by the palpable anxiety of COVID, the New York where he lived on the Upper East Side and walked around the town like he owned it, because as far as I’m concerned, he did. Mark and New York City two Aces, larger than life, and classics in their own right. He and I talked about how the city bounced back from 9/11, so it had to from COVID, too. We talked about my crazy sister and how things and people never seemed to change all that much, but how we found that, as our and our loved ones’ trials and troubles stuck around, he and I were growing more honest ourselves, and that was something, at least. Relationship troubles—his ex-girlfriend, my ex-boyfriend (who he rightly pointed out was a little stiff for me, don’t ya think?) We laughed. Then he told me how he’d had his first anxiety attack and how scary it was. I told him how deeply I understood that fear, how my own bouts of anxiety would leave my arms paralyzed, how I was so overwhelmed by my thoughts that I struggled to do anything but move my legs along a sidewalk. I told him that bit as I stared across the Mertin’s cornfields. And a little while later, as I crossed Highway C to finish my walk home, he told me that he hadn’t laughed so much in more than a month, that life in isolation made it hard for him to sleep, that he loved me—I told him how it was time for us to start dreaming of when we’d go to Rome again, to run around with Massimo’s polo ponies and eat chunks of fresh pecorino, how we’d go boating around Long Island again soon. I told him how, a few weeks later, I’d have my friends to the house and we’d enjoy the activities of Camp Felix—how dearly I wish he could join.

+

On Sunday, September 6th at 9:57 p.m. I messaged him saying how much I wished the world was different so that he could join us. He said he would “LOVE THAT” and when, a minute later, I wrote back “Next year…” he Loved the message, and that was the last thing I ever heard from him. Because, just a few hours later he, well, you know.

So on this One year ago, today, the reason I don’t need to open my phone to remember what happened that day is because I’ll never forget what happened that day. Because since that day, I’ve had flashbacks of his sun-worn Rangers hat sitting backwards on his head as he drove his Range Rover across Vermont summer country roads, the radio turned up loud, and his floppy golden hair poking through. I remember running into him at the Union Square Nordstrom Rack returning trousers. I remember his color-blind outfit choices that paired color with more color, thinking it was a fluke (I no longer think it was a fluke). I remember his loafers with the candy button soles poking out from underneath our Suburban at the back wall of Valentine Elementary when he flew in to surprise us one year. I remember talking to him about The Cars and heartbreak in Mimi’s kitchen, talking about how people in this world are just so damn crazy—nut jobs, he would say—and how grateful we were for each other. He’d say I was the best. I’d reply, saying it was he that was the best. And he was.