I spent a few hours this afternoon helping to put my friend Liz’s music classroom back together after it got a new paint job. My main task was vacuuming before furniture (and drum sets, and computers, and music stands) got moved back to their original locations. At one point we were listening to Adele and I was vacuuming; something about the way my feet were moving around as I cleaned the carpet made me think of this video of my dear friend Jesse dancing at a benefit for Hurricane Katrina victims.
Obviously there is no comparison between that and my vacuuming. It struck me, though, how often I think of him despite his death being nearly seven years ago. I mean, while cleaning?! But there he was: dancing right into the forefront of my mind.
He would have liked Adele, I think. It is strange to me that her first record came out two years after Jesse died. I still feel like it’s not fair that there are songs that he never heard but would have loved. Because he could have danced to them if he had lived but he didn’t. It just makes me so sad – still, all these years later – that he isn’t here. It surprises me that the Earth has kept turning without him.
Jesse was a light. He was brave and difficult, fierce and complicated, beautiful and stubborn, and true. True to himself, true to his purpose and dreams, and true to his loved ones, including me. And I love him for that. I love him for unabashedly defending me time and again against cruel words from others as well as from my own inner voice. He was my champion in every sense.
Growing up, I used to dream of seeing Jesse dance on Broadway, of seeing his name in lights and that sparkle in his eyes made even brighter by the reflection of thousands of watts of power. Now I just dream of discovering that he’s still alive. The immense joy I feel in this dream – which I’ve had often – upon discovering that Jesse isn’t dead after all is tempered only by the incredible despair I feel upon waking up and realizing I’m still living in a world without him. The only lights I’ll ever see writing Jesse’s name are stars.
I hope and pray that my grief continues to lessen and that I continue to run into Jesse in the Land of Nod. If all I can have with him now is a date from time to time in a coffeehouse that doesn’t exist, then I will take it. I want to be the person he believed me to be – I just desperately wish Jesse was here to encourage me with his presence instead of just his memory. Because as treasured as each and every moment I had with him is, I know that a life with him still in it would have been far greater.
And I hope that I am able to teach Eli so many things that Jesse taught me, not least that it is always, always, an appropriate time to dance.
(On the one-year anniversary of Jesse’s death, I wrote a blog post that included the text to W.H. Auden’s poem “Funeral Blues.” The poem is as true as ever and these words are the ones I think of when I think of Jesse, who was my North Star; so I’m posting it again.)
Funeral Blues
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He is Dead.
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the woods;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.