Among the Lessons I Learned from Chris Bowler

The Facebook list of friends available to chat says of Chris’s status that he is "unavailable but you can still send him a message.”

So I decided, Okay, Chris, I’ll send you a message.

First, it’s been almost two months since you’re gone. In the past year, we’ve had too few times of talking or writing. We’ve exchanged a couple of emails, and shared most of our communication by commenting or liking the same posts. If this qualifies as keeping in touch, then we’ve kept in touch. As far as I’m concerned, it was too little. But that is hindsight: I am here, you’re gone, and I am sending messages to someone no longer on this Earth of ours. So of course it was too little.

I have tried, with minimal success, to live with a bit more of your spirit these days. I am rarely as laid back, rarely as funny. When I am funny, nine times out of ten it’s been too inappropriate to print or repeat. Unlike your humor, of course, which was fit for all ears.

I think about you all the time. At dinner tonight, for example, when my daughter A. laughed like you. She doesn’t do it all the time, just when she really gets going and is laughing so hard she can’t stop herself—then she starts this very fast chuckle that is all yours. Although I have told everyone in my family before that sometimes A. gives a Chris laugh, I didn’t repeat it again tonight. I kept it to myself. Now I am writing it here.

Donn says this will happen for the rest of my life. That there is no hope of going long stretches without a reminder of you. I would like to say this brings peace, and a sense of knowing that you will always be with us, but I am afraid it will also always mean that I will always remember you are not here, with us.

Which brings me back to the passage of time, and how too much passed with both of our lives going in different directions. This, too, seems inevitable. I don’t know how we could always stay in touch with everyone and keep making room every day for all of the new people who show up, but sometimes you have to step back and wonder. I am not sure what exactly I am wondering, but I spend a lot of time thinking about it anyway. Wondering.

Chris, Grandpa, Katie

This is a picture of me and you with Grandpa: 

I asked Donn to scan the photo for me and he did. Then he put it in an envelope that I passed along to a colleague without realizing the photo was in it. She stopped in my office to drop it off before I even realized it was missing. Well, of course I ended up in tears. Now the photo sits beside me at work. I might even get it a frame. When T. dropped it off and I was suddenly, unexpectedly, in tears, she said, “I don’t know what you believe, but I like to believe that this is your cousin, coming to tell you hello today.”

I could use your hellos every day (and I also wonder: what is that pink cape I am wearing?).

I used to look at this image and think it was the only photo I had of me and Grandpa. He died not too long after this photo was taken. Now I look at it and think I am the only one still living.

Ah, I see: this is also a photo of mortality!

I called my dad one night shortly after you died, frantically looking in my attic and in box upon box of photographs for a photo taken of the two of us on my tenth birthday. Could he look at his house too? I asked. I had a 1950s party. Most of the kids from our class were there. The girls wore poodle skirts. The boys slicked back their hair. Everybody danced. Do you remember how we got everybody to dance? We were the ones who had to dance together first. I remember being very nervous: all those eyes on us, no one wanting to dance. Somehow, you made it easy, and before we knew it everybody was dance, dance, dancing. It is very likely that the first boy I ever danced with was you, my cousin and pal, and both of us looked like very happy kids having great fun in that photo.

The photo isn’t here, in this message to you, because I haven’t found it yet. It is etched in my mind though. It’s there so deeply that I know the strands of your hair and the smile in my cheeks and the lift of your right foot as you step into rhythm.