On unspeakable loss & silly antics

For Wills & David, Clare & Karen

Welcome to Getting Better. My name is Miriam, and I share weekly personal essays to offer moments of pause and reflection.  My pieces touch on motherhood, loss, chronic illness, and questions of human nature. I share all my work freely right now. Subscribe for free, or upgrade for the price of an oat milk latte — my favorite / unequivocally the best drink on any menu 🥰  Sign up here:

waiting on hope; Plovdiv, 2017, Miriam Cruz

Wills Barnett is my first crush. He gives me a thin, silver box with a crisp red bow in 5th grade (was it Valentine’s Day?) and asks if I’d like to go to the movies with him that weekend. I take the box and say “I can’t” to the movie and that was that, unfortunately. I get home and unwrap the box — a rock climbing outfit for Molly, my American Girl doll. This breaks my heart — I want nothing more than to go to the movies with this beautiful boy who sees my soul with this perfect outfit for my doll. But how could I possibly ask my mother to drop me off at the movies by myself, without any explanation? And what’s the alternative? Tell her I have a date? Even if I do this and she agrees to let me go, how embarrassing for him to see my mother drop me off at the mall. The very thought makes me squirm.

(Wills is in 4th grade, by the way.)

Wills moves to Texas that summer, and I’m haunted by the unexpected parting and what could have been. (It feels synchronistic that The Notebook comes out around now.) I spend hours one 6th grade Fall evening going through my CD collection and scanning the radio for anything that might capture the essence of our love. I download Ride Wit Me and My Boo on Limewire, and make my first mixtape.

As soon as the CD slides out, I feel an urgency to get it to him, to let him know I haven’t forgotten him. But I’m faced with the awkwardness of not having his address or phone number. I ask my teacher the next day if she has it (I’m sure I came up with a thinly veiled reason for needing it — I wonder if she was laughing to herself all the while 😂) and she doesn’t, but says she’ll see if she can find it.

The waiting makes me anxious, because I know Wills is trying to get ahold of me, too. I can feel his distraught days and restless nights. I look up at the moon sometimes and imagine him looking up at it, too. This brings me some comfort and a mountain of pain. Here we are, 600 long miles apart, yet tethered together by the sheer force of a shared destiny, a mutual fate of belonging to one another.

My teacher finally finds his new address, and I realize I’ll need to ask my dad for a special envelope to mail a CD. I would rather die than do this and face any follow-up questions, so I keep the CD and write a letter to Wills instead. (I know where the standard envelopes live and what postage they require.) The final step is tedious — I stare out the window all afternoon waiting for the mailman to turn onto our street. I have mere moments to slip this into the mailbox unnoticed, before the red flag screams HEY. HEY! GET A LOAD OF THIS! MIRIAM’S GOT A LOVE LETTER IN HERE!

I receive a reply several long weeks later, and I feign surprise when my parents tell me Wills Barnett sent me a note. I act casual, carrying it up the stairs between a stack of books and clutter — as if it’s nothing — to the privacy of my room.

He writes, “Hey Miriam! I was so surprised to hear from you haha!”

And just like that, my heart shatters and I experience for the first time that hollow aching in the pit of my stomach from the swift and unexpected departure of an all-consuming fantasy. After that “haha” he says school in Texas is weird, he has to recite the national anthem every morning, and it’s hot. I don’t remember anything else, but I’m pretty sure he signed off “Stay cool, buddy.”

I vow never to listen to my CD again and I never write back.

Wills and I reconnect via Facebook a few years later, once the awkwardness of friendship-turned-broken-love is well behind us (me) and the value of more friends reigns supreme. We rarely message or poke, but his presence in my world feels grounded and certain. I hold a map of my world in the back of my mind, and he’s woven into the fabric.

Wills commits suicide 7 years after I last see him; I keep trying to come up with a softer segue to introduce this concept without really naming it, and I can’t. Because it’s not just a concept, the dark magical realism it feels it must be. And it’s not theoretical. It’s the reality of a sharp, unspeakable loss that so many rub against. The day he dies, something fragile inside of me that I never knew was there shatters. These fragments still ripple through my world — when I hear a certain song or when the clouds sag in the sky.

I think of Wills, and I always think of his mother, Clare. Sometimes I picture her at the grocery store — I don’t know why, but it’s always the grocery store. Someone in line behind her rolls his eyes, muttering for her to hurry up.

This week, I can’t stop thinking of David Foster Wallace — and of his widow, Karen Green, who has been defined by his death. I wonder where she is right now, and if she’s making art today. I wonder if I ever walked by their house in Claremont, where I started college 3 years after his death.

I picture Karen at the grocery store now, too. Reporters coming up to her as she holds her baguette in one hand and a heavy bag of fruit in the other, asking her again and again what that day was like for her.

I want to cry and say, Leave her be, can’t you feel she’s hurting?

Can’t you feel we all are?

I don’t know why the grocery store scene stays with me — something feels particularly heartbreaking about tending to life’s most basic needs, and facing life’s grumpiest patrons, after this loss.

It seems wrong sometimes, when I feel these echoes, to keep living my life — one so full of love and joy and silly antics. How can I go on laughing at your antics when anyone, anywhere, feels this anchor of loss, pulling them out of the joy of life and into its depths?

And so I practice:

May I be happy.

May you be happy.

May all beings everywhere be happy.

And this practice reminds me that the laughter and the antics, they are worth protecting for all of us, at all costs.