Then, just a few days after Thanksgiving in 2011, I got one of those phone calls while I was at work, one of those calls that you never think you’ll get, which you can never see coming. My sister-in-law was telling me that Josh had lost his life behind the wheel of an automobile. He was only 22.
It’s hard to describe the feeling when you hear something like that. For me, it was as if my whole environment sort of changed instantly; the people and things around me suddenly lost focus and I was suddenly walking through some kind of dream world. It’s difficult to even comprehend that it is really happening at all. As a matter of fact, I finished my shift at work that day, although I have no memory of it and I can’t imagine how I was behaving. Probably like some kind of PharmTech robot.
At any rate, once reality actually set in, most of my thoughts were, and have been ever since, about my brother and Josh’s mother Beth, and my niece, Josh’s sister, Brittany. To me, the enormity of their grief somehow dwarfed my own, their loss and despair so great that I didn’t even have a frame of reference for it. So in a way, it’s been easy for me to sort of set my own feelings aside as somehow insignificant or even anecdotal.
Birthdays are weird. Other peoples’ birthdays, that is. While they’re around, birthdays are a reason for a party, a reason to cut cake, unwrap presents and make wishes. They are day to marvel at how far we’ve come. But after we’ve lost someone, their birthday becomes a bittersweet anniversary. It’s a day when we try to appreciate the gift we were given, the time we were allowed to have with that person, but it also becomes a day when old wounds can feel especially fresh, and we can really ache with the missing of that person.
So has this day become for our family. Once again, I imagine the guts of my brother and his family, tying up in knots as August 16 draws near. But even for Josh’s uncle, way up here by himself in Massachusetts, the day has gravitas. I want to write about it, but it’s exceptionally hard.
Funny, for someone like me, who finds his most eloquent voice in the written word. With inspiration, it is easy to write like a maniac, struggling for your fingers to keep up with the ideas bouncing around in your head. Other times, you can stare at the proverbial blank page for hours and- nothing.
For me, sometimes it’s easy to write flip little stories: amusing, ironic quips and the occasional clever turn of a phrase. But when it comes to writing about anything really personal and potentially distressing, it’s something I approach with trepidation, if at all. Part of the process would involve the intentional removal of carefully placed bandages to closely examine a potentially gruesome injury.
I felt this way a year or so ago, when I had spent a week in Baltimore as my father languished in the hospital. I knew, along the 10-hour train ride home, that I would probably never see my father alive again. I took out my laptop, flipped it open and turned it on, knowing that this was something I should write about. I should somehow take the things I had seen, and heard and felt over the previous week or so, and even what I was seeing and feeling at that very moment on the Amtrak train somewhere in Delaware, and write it all down. But it was too hard, too real, and too scary, like staring at your own face in the mirror on LSD. So, I watched “Skyfall” on DVD instead.
Anyway, over the past few weeks, as this day drew nearer, I would occasionally chide myself that I needed to commemorate Josh’s birthday this year the best way I could, by writing about it. But how? Every time I tried to think about it, I just kept saying to myself that I just didn’t know him well enough.
So I guess that’s what I have to write about. I didn’t know him well enough.
I flew the coop early in life. I moved out of my parents’ house for the first time when I was only 17 years old, and for the last time when I was 18. As Jimmy Somerville said in “Smalltown Boy”, “Mother will never understand why you had to leave, but the <answers you seek> can never be found at home.”
I had moved to Provincetown by the time I was 24, long before Josh was even born. I had a fabulous life going, young, single, independent, self-sufficient, all of that. But there’s always a trade-off, whether you know it or not. And my trade-off was that I was absent from my family. I suppose it still is.
Of course, like many gay people, I did feel a certain amount of alienation from my family, so I didn’t really spend much time thinking that I was missing anything. It’s only when you reach my age when you realize that while that alienation may have been real, it was, and is, to a great degree, largely self-imposed.
So, while I was here, mourning deaths, falling in love, celebrating holidays that my family knew nothing about, I was missing all those milestones back home. And now, when I think about Josh, I keep thinking, “I just didn’t know him well enough.”
One thing I did know about Josh was that he definitely had a wicked, twisted sense of humor, much like my own, and much like all the Halleys, as a matter of fact. While he was alive, I found myself thinking that I couldn’t wait until he was A Man, when he came to visit me with his wife and a couple of bratty kids, he and I would be hanging out telling funny, ironic stories about our lives that only grown-ups can relate to, or maybe laughing at the same sick movie that only he and I found funny. I kept thinking that later would be better. So I missed my chance.
There are other things which I do know about Josh. I could say that I know he liked things like Skittles and Mountain Dew, but that sort of thing just ends up sounding silly and trivial. I know that his friends called him “Cheese”, which makes me smile even though I’m not sure why they called him that. I actually asked some of his friends what it meant, at his funeral, but they just sort of looked at one another uncomfortably as if there was no way in hell they were about to explain that to some lame old man. What they don’t know is that that alone makes me smile, too.
My nephew Josh came to my wedding. That may not be a big deal to some people, in some families, but to me it’s a different story. As Politically Correct it is to be pro-Gay, pro-Marriage Equality, pro-Diversity these days, I am fully aware that “faggot” is still just about the worst epithet you can throw at a white, teenaged male in this country. Not a whole lot of young men are going to stand up proudly in the lunchroom and announce that they have an uncle in Massachusetts who is “Gay-Married”. (back then I think we were still the only state that even recognized same-sex marriage and it was still sort of a novelty) So, I applaud Josh’s courage and his own self confidence which allowed him to come and participate.
I think Josh struggled with the same stuff I have struggled with, which his dad undoubtedly struggles with. I think he had very strong ideas about his own definition of “success”, and he struggled to find the balance between living a life full of joy and pleasure and self-actualization, versus a world which demands conformity and drudgery and self-denial. I still have a hard time finding the sweet spot. But I believe that Josh knew deep down what the right answers were. I think he would have found himself a life full of beauty and prosperity both, had he only been given the time. And I think that there is where my own grief for him lies.
Josh had the most amazing eyes. Anyone who ever met him will tell you that. Their beautiful, bright blue color and the long, dark lashes I like to think he inherited from the Halley side of the family. Their beautiful, almond shape he undoubtedly got from his mom. If the eyes, as so many have said, are indeed windows to the soul, then Josh’s eyes showed us the merest glimpse of a miraculous, delightful, playful and wise spirit.
Happy birthday, Josh.
Uncle Paul
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