I’ve been flying on planes and crying a lot recently. Which is to say, for my entire adult life? It comforts me to think everyone’s more emotionally volatile on planes. We went to see All of Us Strangers (on the ground, thank goodness, see this interview at 6:30 where Andrew Scott talks about watching a movie on a plane), which I do not recommend for people who are already emotionally down, although it is a beautiful quiet movie. Every scene of Andrew with his parents made me so sad, like an internalized playbook of how you wanted to have the hard conversations you could never have in real life. I kind of got jealous of him at a certain point and wondered if other grieving people have really intricate, meaningful conversations in their imaginations with their dead loved ones.
On my long plane ride back to the States, I woke up with tears rolling down my face after having a sweet little dream about Noah. This is what I wrote in my Notes app right after: “I ran into my friend, and she was talking about parking and jumping on the Blue Line and probably shouldn’t have parked in a family spot. Then I noticed Noah had appeared, and his arm was around our friend, and I started ugly crying and leaning in for a group hug. I think the person I did this with didn’t realize at first why I was crying but then hugged us anyways.” The plane wasn’t full, so I just cried a little longer in the quiet, dark cabin, maybe crossing the Equator. Noah had told one of his brothers that he thought I cried a lot because I was in sync with my body (or something like that). He cried very little, up until the last few years of his life. I remember him telling me that he cried at his uncle’s memorial service right after he had been operated on for cancer the first time. He was aware that it was a strange thing for him to cry in public like that, and he thought it was probably because of his diagnosis and the reality of his mortality.
I’ve had a dream where I am trying to convince Noah that I’m really really missing him, that I’m going to miss him so much when he’s gone. He acted nonchalant, like, “Okay babe, let’s tone it down a little.” I’ve not yet had a dream where I am coherent and clearly communicating what I want to really tell him aside from “I LOVE YOU!” or “I MISS YOU!” But I also feel that I did communicate with him quite a bit while he was alive, and I didn’t know all the things I know now before he died, as hard as I tried to know those things beforehand.
On Valentine’s Day in 2022, about 5 months before he died, I made Noah a photo book with stories from people from his life. Some of the stories and photos were simple, like a childhood memory of going sledding down the hill in their neighborhood, and some of them were elaborate and multi-layered epics like his dad’s story about going to London, just the two of them. I scoured for old photos on his Facebook account and scanned some prints from his childhood to include in the book. This was an idea my genius therapist had suggested, because I was thinking about how much people loved him but it was hard for him to reach out to all of these people without feeling vulnerable. He hated feeling sick and having other people seeing him as a sick person. Actually, I don’t think I communicated to other people very clearly how sick he was in this moment; this was already in the window of time where he was becoming bedridden and the paths to recovery were closing down. Lots of friends and family members sent such sweet, joyful memories. I made a big book and presented it to him for Valentine’s Day. We also got a thousand things from an Ethiopian restaurant, which was delicious but way too much food for just the two of us. I remember he flipped through the book, read a few entries, and had to take a break, saying something like, “I don’t know if I can handle this right now.” I’m jealous of people who had the wherewithal to hold parties before their loved ones died. The one thing I would have changed about the St.Louis memorial we had in 2022 was that Noah would have been there. When he was really sick and feeling down, I wish he could sense all the people who came out that day, and he could see their faces, hear the music, see all the photos and art, and laugh and appreciate the stories of his beautiful life.
We have rituals for a reason, like weddings and birthday parties and graduations and funerals. When we have that social pressure, it gives us a push to say things we don’t usually say casually. We reflect on funny memories and decide on the meaning of it, for the moment or the relationship. I love the thought of the idea of Noah being constructed from everyone’s memories and feelings. I also hate the thought of Noah becoming an idea, like he wasn’t a real person who would waste time on Twitter or ate with his mouth open sometimes. I don’t like that he becomes more of a lesson learned or like spiritual figure (even though, which other spiritual figure is cooler than Noah? can’t think of one) as time inevitably goes on.
4 years ago, I went to visit Noah in New York over Martin Luther King weekend. He was just putting up his Many Tellings illustrations and zine for the SVA show displaying his work from the first semester of his MFA program. He was so excited about all the illustrations he had made, a mash-up of folk tales and multiple universes theories. He fidgeted with the zine he had gotten printed to place it just so on the shelf. We went on a snowy walk in Chelsea, poking into different galleries. He got a hot dog at a stand after going on a nice walk in Central Park. He was probably already sick again, but we didn’t know that. He was wearing his new-ish Blundstones that I had gotten him for his birthday a few months before. I think I was pretty excited to wear my winter clothes, still living in LA at the time. I packed my thick turtleneck sweater and all of my gray winter accessories (my “groutfit” as Noah would call it). Even being long distance was kind of thrilling, because I could watch how he was really into the work he was making in school, and he often said how excited he was for me to move to New York soon so we could go on trains together and explore the city.
In present time, I realized that the Ruth Asawa show at the Whitney was closing, so I just popped up for the long weekend to check it out. Which is like, a cool casual thing to do on the East Coast when you don’t have a job. Amtrak was running on time, and it even snowed when I was in the city, how magical. I’ve been aware that walking around going to places Noah and I have gone together or would have loved (like a diner in Prospect Heights…which Suzanne Vega’s “Tom’s Diner” is about?!) is self-destructive, in some ways. I describe it as digging around in your own wound, because “picking at your own scab” just doesn’t seem gross and terrible enough. Despite the disgusting metaphor, I think leaning into replaying good memories and being physically present in spaces is helping me reflect on how I am still alive. Someone described that in grief, it takes a long time for your brain to adjust to the new reality of not having your person, because your brain has gotten used to believing that the person is always coming back (even if they go away for a long trip, for example) which helps you live your day-to-day without fretting about their safety all the time. When teachers use the phrase “Mommies/Daddies always comes back,” it sets me in a mini-panic because I know some mommies and daddies never come back. I guess I try to stay away from the extreme promise of “always” now. Being in the same spot that I’ve been in the past, knowing Noah isn’t ever going to be in that spot again, it’s somehow rewiring myself again and again. My mind knows my reality, but my body is taking a long long time to know it. And sometimes you have to destroy first to rebuild, maybe? We’ll find out.
I’ve also been watching season 15 (from 2018) of Top Chef only to realize that one of the contestants has since died from cancer. It made me think about if her friends and family watch the show to see her in action, talking about her family and heritage during a cooking challenge or making silly jokes with the other contestants. I don’t know why our deep-fake technology hasn’t advanced enough where I can watch endless episodes of The Noah Show, although that might be kind of boring with hours of him sitting at his computer typing out invoices and walking to Trader Joe’s. Obviously I’d watch the whole thing over and over, if I could. But Noah would make fun of me, he’d probably tell me to watch something new once in a while.
Just a reminder it’s impossible to take a good image of a sunset on your phone.
Love, Hitomi