Halloween afternoon, 2021

Just in from a long walk with Beckett through the boneyard and back. Since he's been a bit under the weather this past week, we took it very slowly, but he paid his usual assiduous attention to every leaf, blade of grass, tree, curb, gate, wall, and gravestone. So it took a bit of time. It's an exquisite Halloween afternoon—I'm not sure if it's the fact that the rain finally stopped, or just the joy of the day, but families were out together glorying in the perfect autumnal weather. I was unaccountably moved by the number of children in Halloween costumes, obviously going to or from Halloween parties just for them. I was likewise moved by the number of parents who were throwing mini-Halloween parties in the park for their kids, obviously determined to give them Halloween memories of childhood that will hopefully last at least as long as mine have. There is likewise a truly lovely post-pandemic sense of the world returning to normal. It was very different last year, as I noted in my journal on that day. But the best part of it is the absence of tense defiance of the virus that was present earlier this year—shrill and sharp as a dentist drill. No, today it was all smooth and warm and genuinely joyful, with the light as orange and yellow as candy corn, and the anticipation of Halloween night growing by the second.

"Ghosts" by Michael Rowe: October short-short fiction

I saw you standing just inside the wrought-iron fence around the graveyard at the corner of Winchester and Sumach this evening when I was out with the dogs, right around sundown.

I waved, but you didn’t wave back.

Two fourteen-year old boys went right by you on skateboards through a cloud of dead autumn leaves. I didn’t see their faces under their helmets and untidy dark hair as they flew past through the lengthening shadows.

Remember in the 70s when we were kids and no one ever wore a helmet for anything? We used to make retard jokes about kids whose parents made them wear helmets, even for skating. Isn’t it odd how something that sounds so cruel today seemed so funny back then? I never wore a helmet for hockey. You never played hockey.

Remember that time I teased you about how you should be wearing white skates with black heels and done figure skating with the girls? Dad always told me to shut up when I teased you. Once he even slapped the back of my head, hard. I pretended that it didn’t hurt, but it did. I hated you when he did that.

But he was right. It was a mean thing to say. You couldn’t help the way you were, but I could probably have helped being an asshole about it.

You didn’t even look at the boys on the skateboard. I figured they reminded you of the guys we grew up with in Auburn — guys like I was: guys who played hockey, who chased girls, who weren’t afraid to get into fights.

I wonder if they even saw you? I wonder if they might have felt a sudden cold as they thundered past the cemetery. What would they have seen if they’d looked up?

But still, I wish you’d waved.

💀

This week, I drove west on the 401 to Auburn, like I always do at the end of October, to see Dad. We don’t talk much anymore, but he likes it when I check in. Since Mom died, he doesn’t do a lot around the house. There’s a widow lady from church, Mrs. Normoyle, who has a thing for him. She’s always bringing him food and tidying up. He tells me she’s annoying, but I think he’s a lot happier she’s there than he likes to let on. It’s lonely up in that big house on the Milton Escarpment with nothing but memories, especially in October.

It’s the month of ghosts, especially family ghosts.

The rooms seem darker now that Mom is gone. Maybe Dad turns the lights on less, or maybe he keeps the blinds drawn more than he used to. Dad always says Mom took the light with her after when she died, after forty years. Even though he didn’t mean it literally, the other day I remembered that another word for ghost is “shade,” which made me smile. It also made me switch on a couple of lamps in the living room next to Dad’s chair.

In the lamplight, pictures everywhere. On the walls. On the tables.

Mom and Dad’s wedding. Mom holding me in her arms when they brought me home from the hospital. Me, at five, reaching up to touch you when they brought you home from the hospital. Birthdays. Disneyland. Hockey pictures — me, not you. You, at your modern dance class recital. You, gently holding Maven when she was a puppy. Maven licks your face with her pink tongue. The colours have faded, but Maven still looks like a small bundle of soft black mink. Your smile is beautiful in that picture. You’re cradling her in your arms like she was your baby.

“I know,” Dad says. I didn’t hear him come up behind me. He puts his hand on my shoulder. “Never a day goes by. A handsome boy.” His voice sounds unbearably old all of a sudden. “It was easier when your mother was alive. It’s against nature. It should have been she and I. You two boys should have outlived us both.”

“I’m still here, Dad.”

“I know,” he says. “I know you are. I wish you had…” His voice trails off. The bitterness has mellowed over the years like old brass. It’s still there, but it gleams dully.

“Dad, stop it. Not now. It’s not fair. Not after all this time.”

“I’m sorry, Robert. I didn’t mean it that way.”

When I look at him, there are tears in his eyes. Old-man tears. I touch his shoulder. I want to hug him, but I know he’d rather not have the human contact right now. So I squeeze his shoulder, the way real men do. Real men. Jesus.

“Yes, you did, Dad,” I whisper. “You did mean it that way. But it’s OK. I agree with you. I wish I’d been there that night with Scotty too.”

💀

Brothers. Loaded term. Born of the same parents, raised in the same house. One normal, one — well, different. We knew you were different, but we never talked about it as such. Mom called you “sensitive.” When you were little, you’d follow me around everywhere. You drove me crazy with your love. Later, you embarrassed me with your mincing and prancing. My friends laughed at you. I joined in their laughter. My girlfriend, the incredibly hot born-again Christian to whom I lost my virginity, asked me if you were an actual fag, or if you just acted like one.

Dad was angry with me when you came home with your latest black eye.

“Why can’t you look after him? He’s your brother. He’s the only brother you’ll ever have. You’re stronger than him. You need to protect him.”

I said I’d rather have no brother at all than an embarrassing queer one.

Dad slapped me across the face. “Be a man, Robert. It’s time for you to grow up and act like a man.”

I told him that I hated him, and I hated you more. I stormed out of the living room. When I saw you crying in the doorway to the kitchen, I passed you without a word. You held out your hand. You touched my elbow as I went by.

“Robbie, I’m sorry. I — ”

“Fuck you, Scott. I hate you. I wish you were dead.”

Three years later, when I was home from university, you told us you were moving to Alberta with some guy you were “in love with.” Mom cried. Dad went to his workshop and locked the door. I told Mom and Dad that I was done pretending.

I drove back to school. In my dorm, I threw the only framed family photo across the room. It shattered against the wall, spraying shards of broken glass across the floor.

Dad called me from the hospital in Calgary. My girlfriend woke me up and passed me the phone. It was three a.m. At first, I didn’t recognize his voice at all. It was the voice of a man nailed to a cross.

“Your brother’s been hurt,” he said.  “We’re in Calgary. Mom and I. Can you come right away? We’re at the hospital.”

“Dad? What happened to Scott?”

“They hurt him,” he said. “They beat him up. He’s in intensive care.”

“Who?” I asked stupidly. “Who hurt him?”

“Who else? The same ones that always hurt him.” Dad was crying now. “Damn them.” He was silent for a few moments, trying to compose himself. “Your brother needs his family with him now. You have to come.”

“Dad — ”

“You come now, Robert. I mean it. It’s time for you to be his brother again. It’s past time.”

Then he told me what they’d done to you in that alleyway outside the bar.

💀

Three hours later on the plane to Calgary, I dreamed horrible, unformed, crimson-tinted dreams. I heard the terrible crunch of bones cracking beneath the weight of fists and boots. I saw the puddles of congealing blood. I must have cried out because the flight attendant asked me if I was all right. I told her I was. She handed me a napkin. I reached for it, suddenly embarrassed to have allowed this woman see me cry, even in my sleep.

I landed in Calgary on the bluest October morning. The houses across the street from the hospital had carved pumpkins by the front door. Of course, I thought. It’s Halloween morning.

“We did everything we could,” the doctor had said, holding a clipboard under the fluorescent light. “I’m so sorry.”

Perhaps his clinical choice of words had been intended to be anesthetic — blunt force trauma, massive head injuries, persistent vegetative.

As the machine measured out your remaining heartbeats in flattening spikes of green light, I touched your broken fingers and promised myself — and you — that I would be strong for Mom and Dad.

When it was over, we stepped out of the hospital into the sunlight. Across the street from the hospital, two little boys displaying the effortless familiarity of brothers raced along the sidewalk to school, laughing. One was draped in a bed sheet, a ghost. His brother wore a pirate costume. The older of the two, the pirate, reached out and took his younger brother’s hand, pulling him joyously along the sidewalk towards school.

It had taken me exactly seventeen minutes to break my promise not to cry.

💀

These days, I can quantify my remaining decades. I can measure them out in life-events. I can gauge my value as a man by who I’ve loved, who has loved me, and by the ones I didn’t love nearly enough. My marriage didn’t last, of course. No one was surprised.

But our son, Scott — named after you — is the one thing we did right. He’s away at Western this fall. He’s your age. The age you were when…well, when whatever.

I believe in ghosts. And I see you everywhere.

The first time was just before I turned on the soft nursery light, the night we brought Scott home. You were standing over his crib, a familiar shape in the dimness.

Scotty, I whispered. Then I turned on the light.

The room was empty except for my sleeping son. I felt no fear, just the gentle spectral aspect of something peaceful and benevolent.

But you were there. I know what I saw.

💀

I’ve seen you many other times over the years, sometimes more clearly than others. I’ve seen you in my son’s handsome sensitive face as he’s grown. I’ve felt your spirit in his sweetness, his trusting nature. I’ve heard your voice beneath his.

I feel your spirit moving in me when I react with patience and kindness to the fact that he’s not like me, and in fact couldn’t be more like you in many, many ways.

And in loving that in him, in knowing that he might someday tell Susan and I what you told Mom and Dad that terrible afternoon thirty years ago, I’m granted some sort of absolution, a redemption I don’t deserve, in knowing I’ll know how to love him at the moment he’ll need my love the most.

In my dreams I see you rising out of that bloody alleyway on a fountain of radiance like some sort of immortal angel full of fire, full of power, full of light.

But other times, like tonight, by the graveyard in late October when the daylight is short and the night chill settles in early, I see you very, very clearly.

I wave.  And I wish you’d wave back. Just once.

Publication history: Autumnplay! (2009), The Good Men Project (2012), Postscripts to Darkness  (2014.)  Copyright 2021 by Michael Rowe. All rights reserved. 

Tubular balls

In 1842, St. Paul's Cathedral in Liège commissioned a marble statue of Satan, the Fallen Angel, as part of a religious installation, from sculptor Joseph Geefs. The resulting statue—a pouty, sexy, androgynous, chocolate-box Satan with slightly parted knees, a demure downward-cast glance, and a plump serpent coiled a his feet—raised eyebrows. Though admired at the highest levels of society, the sculpture was also controversial and attracted criticism for being too seductive and "sublime." In 1848, it is believed that Joseph's brother, Guillaume Geefs, decided to tackle the criticism of his brother's voluptuous rendering by sculpting his own version of Satan. Guillaume's idea of desexualizing Satan was to make him more muscular, athletic, and classically masculine and imperious, complete with BDSM-worthy manacles and chains. Whereas Joseph's Satan's legs were slightly parted, Guillaume's Satan's knees were pressed together, either protectively or defiantly. Trying to remove the homoeroticism from a nude statue of the most beautiful angel in heaven by making him more dominant, rugged, and athletic is one of the reasons 19th century Belgian sculptors might have needed a few more gay friends, if only to advise them on how that business actually works.

Where the witches gather in October

"Autumn Sunrise" by John Ryan. 

This past Sunday, the Hero MD and I took a drive west through the countryside outside of Toronto for the day. In the past few years I have found the city occasionally oppressive, and being indoors reminds me too much of lockdown. We drove through the outskirts of Milton, Ontario were we used to live. The autumn foliage glowed in the late-afternoon sun. We took the country roads along the escarpment region, which was the setting for my third novel, October. I was reminded of the exurban legends I'd heard in the 80s from local teenagers about a coven of witches that met up there—stories which I filed away for later use in the novel. It's absolutely beautiful countryside, and I admit to feeling the pang of loss I always feel when I'm back "home" there. It was a pretty halcyon time, those years in Milton. It was still a small town then instead of the commuter bedroom community it is now. Some of the friendships I made in those years still remain. While probably the most difficult stories I've ever written, October is really a love letter to the town and the surrounding countryside. Writers have the great privilege of being able to immortalize time and place and people in a way that sometimes even cameras miss This photo, "Autumn Sunrise," by John Ryan is the exact vista Mikey in the novel would have had during his hours of biking the escarpment country outside the fictional town of Auburn, and what he would have remembered as the site of the coven gathering upon which he stumbled, setting the entire tragedy of the novel into motion. I didn't refer to this photo while I was writing the book—I found it later—but it brings it all back now.

Melvin Dixon is somewhere listening for his name

 

Author Melvin Dixon by Robert Giard, 1988, gelatin silver print, 14 by 12 2/3 inches; at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art.

Today is the 29th anniversary of the death of poet, novelist, translator, and academic, Melvin Dixon. 

He died of complications relating to AIDS on this day in 1992 in Stamford, Connecticut, seven months after delivering the closing plenary address at the third national OutWrite Lesbian & Gay Writers Conference in March of that year. It was an address with a message that would alter the course of what would become my writing life and later career. 

Dixon's speech had left me shaken and in tears by the end, and I ordered a cassette tape of it from before leaving Boston for Toronto. I probably listened to the speech on that cassette twenty times or more in the coming years. Eventually it wore out and finally broke. I was disconsolate, finally resigning myself to the fact that his message had imprinted itself on my heart. I hoped that, sooner or later it would be transcribed and included in some collection or other. 

Earlier this month, like a blessing, I found it online—the place where everything eventually winds up, where the past is just a click away. Even, apparently, Dixon's brilliant, unflinching address about loss, closure, and the duty of lesbian and gay writers to bear witness to our history and to the generation we were losing to AIDS,  delivered on that snowy afternoon at the Plaza Hotel in Boston. 

In March of 1992 I was twenty-nine, an under-published but determined magazine writer with a handful of half-decent mainstream credits and a single second-place journalism award under my belt. OutWrite 92 was the first writers conference I'd ever attended. I was frankly star-struck. Dorothy Allison (who I would later interview for my book Writing Below the Belt) had become a bonafide literary star with Bastard Out of Carolina, published the previous year. She delivered the opening plenary address. There were enough of my gay and lesbian literary idols in attendance to simultaneously inspire and intimidate.  This was absolutely the group to which I wished to belong, and I wished it as fervently as only a wet-behind-the-ears twentysomething with no concept of how writers' communities and cliques operate could wish it. 

At some point in the weekend I introduced myself to Melvin Dixon. I had loved his haunting short story "Red Leaves" in George Stambolian's anthology Men on Men 2: Best New Gay Fiction, and I was reading his second novel, Vanishing Rooms. He was soft-spoken and gracious. I told him how much I loved his work and he very kindly asked me about mine, which even then struck me as generous coming from a writer of his stature.

Indeed, Dixon's body of work included two poetry collections, Change of Territory (1983) and Love's Instrument (which would be posthumously published in 1995); two novels, Trouble the Water (1989) and the aforementioned Vanishing Rooms (1990); a textbook, Ride Out the Wilderness: Geography and Identity in African American Literature (1987); as well as a translation of the poems of the former Senegalese president, Léopold Sédar Senghor (1991.)

The entire encounter must have taken minutes, but it left an impression. The impression it did not leave was that I was speaking to a dying man,  himself recently widowed, who was maximizing every bit of his remaining energy. In his generosity and grace, he just sounded like someone I was very, very lucky to speak with, however briefly. 

Nothing however could have prepared me for the closing address. 

He started his speech with an a cappella  rendition of the 1937 hymn "I'll Be Somewhere Listening For My Name." He joked immediately afterwards about his singing ability—perhaps as a palate cleanser to prepare us for the deadly seriousness of the message to come. 

I've gone back and forth here on the notion of quoting large swaths of his words from my own transcription of his speech. While they're beautiful and powerful,  I've decided against it in hopes that readers will listen to the recording (linked in several places in this post) itself. My quoting it would absolutely not do justice to Dixon's delivery.  

The address opens with the issues of race and privilege, drawing—with blistering language—a connecting line between the systemic societal oppression of both gays and people of colour, while underlining the protection of privilege that white gay men enjoyed. It touched on the terrible toll of AIDS, and the cost of allowing our erasure by a 80s-era culture that was reluctant to honour our losses, and which we could only fight by bearing witness to our own stories, and by keeping them alive with our writing. 

What impressed me, listening to the speech again in 2021, was the degree of generous intersectionality he was proposing.  His words united those of us in the audience as a community of marginalized writers with a job to do, and with stories to tell.  He embraced our commonalities as queer people without soft-pedalling our differences of class and race, and asked us to do better, but to do better together—as a unified community of storytellers with a common cause, facing common enemies: violence, loss, bigotry, and erasure

"What kind of witness will you bear?" Dixon asked. "What truth-telling are you brave enough to utter, and endure the consequences of your unpopular message? We alone are responsible for the preservation and future of our literature. If we don't buy our books, they won't get published. If we don't talk about our books, they won't get reviewed or noticed. If we don't write our books, they won't get written."

And then, the devastating closing:

"I'll be somewhere listening for my name. You, then, are charged by the possibility of your good health, by the broadness of your vision, to remember us."

Spring was many weeks off when he said that, and Melvin Dixon was dead by October—a particularly beautiful New England October, as I recall, with trees wearing what Anne Sexton had once referred to as their "sourball colours."

In the summer of 1992, I met John Preston, the author and anthologist who would become my literary mentor. He told me, "You spend all your time writing about other people. When are you going to start writing about your own life as a gay man and start telling those stories?"  

It was strikingly similar to the message I'd received, intentionally or not, from Melvin Dixon's address.  Preston was right—if we didn't write those stories, no one would.

In due course, Preston published my earliest autobiographical essays in beautiful hardcover anthologies from blue-chip New York publishing houses. By the time my first book, Writing Below the Belt, was published, he had died of complications from AIDS. I dedicated that book to him. 

Later still, I  wrote for FAB National in Canada and Hero and The Advocate in the United States.  Part of the great gift of having worked for The Advocate in particular during my time there was discovering a community of journalists who cared about those stories the way I did. Again, I was taken under the wing by some of the best and most generous editors I'd ever work for 

In 2000 I created and edited the first-ever gay horror anthologies, Queer Fear and Queer Fear 2, because the horror field was one in which homophobia had always flourished.  I published two volumes of essays, three novels, and an interview collection. In every book, there are stories of queer people entwined  with stories of the non-queer people with whom we live—hopefully honouring Melvin Dixon's directive to share "our perspective on gay and straight experience" in our writing.   It was never lucrative, but it was always worth it, and it feels good to have contributed even a drop to that ocean of stories.

At a time in our history when being either queer or queer-adjacent is as commonplace as not, and when history—even ours, as LGBTQ people—can be perilously rewritten or revised with a series of keystrokes, it seems a useful moment to remember our forbears who lived and died in a time when it took the deaths of almost a million gay men from AIDS for mainstream society to even acknowledge they existed, and were part of life. It's a good moment to remember their stories, and to honour them, and to speak their names. 

It's perhaps worth remembering that our seniors, or near-seniors, have a living memory of a particular queer holocaust that is almost inconceivable today. They may seem funny, or doddering, or out-of-touch, or boomerish to some observers, but those aspects are, more often than not, camouflaging an invisible version of the thousand-yard stare of old war veterans. 

As Dixon said in his speech, "We are facing the loss of our entire generation." 

They were facing that loss; and we, the survivors, lost titans. They're somewhere listening for their names. 

On the anniversary of Melvin Dixon's death, I hope he's hearing his, here. 

[The excellent introduction by poet the Kate Rushin starts at 13:08. The address by Melvin Dixon starts at 17:18]

Halloween in the window of Daniel et Daniel

I walked home from dinner at Bar Verde with my friend Andy last night. The night was a pleasant temperature, but with a chilly undertaste of things to come. In the sky above the city, a blood moon slouched in the saddle of the purple-blue clouds, itself wonderfully low and orange. As I got to the corner of Carlton and Parliament, I was drawn to the window of the local patisserie and fine food emporium Daniel et Daniel. They always do beautiful seasonal displays, and this was perfect. 🎃

Thanksgiving in the Maritimes

 

Some thoughts on giving thanks as Thanksgiving weekend draws to a close: there is a wonderful humility that accompanies the joy of accepting love. Joy like a wave crest, and gratitude like the deeps, are both part of the same ocean. This morning, before we returned home, I tried to remember how many Thanksgivings we'd spent with this beloved family. Blissfully, I found myself unable to do so. That's the joy. The gratitude follows as naturally as autumn follows summer; as naturally as time becomes history; as inevitably as decades spent in the company of three generations of these good, loving folks has woven a quilt of memories that has kept me warm when the nights have grown cold. And continues to, and always will. Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours, and may you find all of this, and more

Someone is enjoying his brand-new dog bed

 

Some thoughts on Mike Flanagan's Midnight Mass, now that I can breathe again

 

I promised to tackle some further thoughts about Midnight Mass as soon as I settled down, following the end of the last episode of Saturday night. It's taken me four days to regulate my sleep cycle, for instance, not because I was "too scared to sleep," but rather because those days following the viewing were like swimming underwater, emotionally, in a lake where a tremendous impact, or a storm, had stirred up the loam and rendered the visibility—in this case, emotional visibility—nil.

Colloquially, I was utterly wrecked. And for all the best resons.

I've never seen issues of faith, or lack of faith, handled as deftly and searingly in horror, in either fiction or film, as well as Flanagan handled them in midnight mass. Entirely absent is any hint of shrillness or can't, and the various questions regarding faith and humanity open into each other like the jewel tones of a kaleidescope. I was deeply moved by the existential question of whether being alone in the universe was something beautiful or something terrifying.

And as a recently self-identified agnostic, I was chilled by the eternal question of what religion truly is, what separates harmless religion from fanaticism, and whom we would be if all the cages in which we contain our true selves were suddenly unlocked.

Sourpusses and snobs can say "it's all been done before," but it has absolutely never been done quite this way, or with this power.

And as a horror fan, I was particularly gratified, because it's occasionally scary as fuck.

Like a lot of people, I seem to have "discovered" veteran actor Rahul Kohli in Midnight Mass, even though I had seen, and loved, his performance in Bly Manor. As I'm not a Muslim, I will leave to the many Muslim fans on Twitter and FB the descriptions of how moving was his performance as a Muslim sheriff on an island full of Catholics, or how beautifully and subtly he showed what it's like to be a minority in an environment where your every natural thought or action, or moral impulse, is subject to the approval of a committee of the majority, and what a modern, current, searingly accurate portrait it actually is.

Likewise, the multideimenisonal performances by Zach Gilford, Samanthal Sloyan, and the epic Annabeth Gish, all of whom were tasked with playing characters that could have easily slipped into caricature in less deft hands.

And Kate Siegel made me cry, quite unabashedly, twice. One of her scenes in particular tore me to pieces. Can we just give her the Emmy now? Thanks in advance.

It's impossible to go any deeper without spoilers, and I've sworn not to. I unfollowed a horror page today to which I was quite devoted, because the only people more annoying than the ones who use the phrase "slow burn" negatively, without really knowing what it means, are the ones who are so stupid that they reveal key plot points without even realizing it, and feel virtuous about their cleverness.

I'm looking forward to one-on-one talks with friends who have seen it later, but my page is a spoiler-free zone.

How's this? Midnight Mass is one for the ages. It contains some of the most beautiful writing I have ever seen or heard in film, and it was directed by a man who knows how important it is for characters are open and transparent and real enough for the audience to care about them, so they can mourn them authentically—a man who understands anguish, which is subtly different from almost any other kind of pain.

It is, frankly, a masterpiece. I feel both renewed in my dedication to beautifully crafted writing, and subtly changed by what it's taught me, or reminded me, about the possibilities, both negative and positive, of being human. And of being afraid. And of being redeemed.

Kudos to the entire team, particulary my friend Jeff Howard, who co-wrote my second-favourite episode.

If you haven't watched this yet, run to your television now, and add Midnight Mass to your Netflix queue. You won't regret it.

Wild Fell in the wild, in Mike Flanagan's Midnight Mass, on Netflix

 

I was beyond flattered last fall when director Mike Flanagan, a longtime friend of Wild Fell, reached out to invite the novel to make a “book cameo” in his then-upcoming Netflix series, Midnight Mass. Now, several episodes into what critics are calling his most powerful and personal work to date (an assessment with which I heartily concur) I don’t have the words to express what an honour it's been to have Wild Fell be even a fraction of a frame of this utter masterpiece. Having taken the Midnight Mass fan vow of silence, I have no spoilers except these two: first, as a viewer, having your heart broken by a piece of filmed art is never a bad thing; secondly, I'm renewed in my longstanding belief that, at its best, horror is the clearest lens through which to explore the mysteries, agonies, joys, and terrors of human existence. And Midnight Mass is horror at its absolute best.

I have only slipped away into the next room: Remembering the gift of light that was Sean "Moose" Schwartz

 

Sean Ryan Schwartz (1993-2021) 

In the days since receiving the news last week of the abrupt, cruel death of our friend Sean Schwartz in the pre-dawn hours of September 4th, I've moved through my own life in a daze of grief—occasionally feeling as though it was someone else's life, one that I was observing from a distance. 

I'm told this is not uncommon when the loss is at a geographical distance, when rushing to the side of the people you feel you most need to be with at that moment—the ones who share your grief—is somehow impeded, in this case by the practical logistics of crossing borders in the age of COVID-19. 

In that sense, distance can be its own anaesthetic, but like all anaesthetics, it eventually wears off. 

Often at the start of a particularly violent storm, you will see a blinding flash of silent lightning so bright that leaves a ghost-imprint of the objects around you behind your eyes, and you will still be in that state of momentary blindness before a thunderclap that shakes the window glass in its casements. 

The light makes you blind, but it's the thunder that makes you startle. So it is with the news of untimely death, particularly the untimely death of a vibrant, beloved twenty-eight-year old man at the threshold of nearly any life he could have chosen. The shock of the news is the lighting. The thunder is the grief, and it rolls on and on.

Even writing these words makes me cringe a bit, and feel the most dreadful imposter syndrome. 

Of  Sean's mourners, I probably knew him the least well, and in the most limited capacity. But in a way, that was one of the things that made Sean unique. The phrase "to know him was to love him" may be a bit of a shopworn cliché, but in Sean's case it went a step beyond. The obverse was also true: to love him was to know him. To be let into Sean's golden orbit, even for a short time, was to know true decency, and a much more complex and nuanced young man than might have been immediately apparent on first meeting.  

The pathways to the constructions of families of the heart are as varied as the families themselves, and this is an abbreviated version of how we became one. 

Sean's mother, Lynn Palutke, is the lifelong best friend of my great friend Laurie Braun. 

Laurie and her late husband, Mark, and their three children, Alexis, Kyle, and Jessica (all of them now parents, and well into adulthood) define the concept of family of the heart. When Mark, whom I loved like a brother, died in 2012, I wrote and delivered the eulogy at his funeral. When Jessica married in 2016, I walked her down the aisle in Mark's stead, in the traditional role of father of the bride. One of Jessica's twins, born this summer, bears my surname as his middle name. 

As so often happens in those situations, those whom they love became those whom I love, which is where Lynn and her three children, Sean, Addie, and Trisha (now also adults) entered my life, and my heart. 

The week of Mark's funeral is a blur. I can tell you exactly where I was when Kyle telephoned me to tell me that his father's motorcycle had crashed. I can tell you which table I was sitting at in which restaurant. I can tell you the position of my left hand on the table as my right hand held my cell phone, almost tight enough to break it. 

But I have no memory of booking a plane ticket to Chicago. I have a faint memory of Jessica picking me up at the airport. There are flashes of Laurie and I together; her ocean of grief; my often incoherent attempts to be there for hers while keeping my own in check as much as possible in order to be strong. It was a bruised, pulpy time, those swollen, sodden days after my arrival in Chicago, and so much of it is literally inaccessible in my memory today. 

Clarity begins for me with the arrival of Lynn and her children two nights or so before the funeral. 

My dominant impression is of a car pulling up to Lauren's house and offloading three utterly gregarious, glorious young people with even features and beautiful smiles—warm, lovely, maternal Trisha, glamorous Addie who, even then, struck me as having fallen out of the pages of a sophisticated fashion magazine, and Sean, the handsome, laconic eighteen-year old brother, who seemed a bit shy on first meeting, but who, in short order, revealed himself to be less shy than possessed of a quality of inner stillness that vastly belied his relative youth.

In any case, the effect of their arrival was electric. 

Inside the house, it was as though someone had opened a window on the gloom and the grief and let in some much needed light; or if a black and white film had been abruptly colorized. I'd never seen that effect before, nor have I seen it done since. 

With every deference to our shared grief, the three young people simply lifted it as though it were a weight they made easy work of as a trio. They clearly adored each other, and the joy they took in each other's company seemed to be on tap and there was enough for all of us. At the centre of it seemed to be Sean, in whom everyone present seemed to take a particular delight. 

In short order, we were laughing. The reminiscences became tinged with joy. For a brief moment, it seemed possible to imagine life beyond this wall of sadness. 

And I distinctly remember thinking: Mark would have loved this. He would have loved what these kids are doing in his house, and for his beloved Laurie.

I was still writing Mark's eulogy in the chapel office an hour before I was to deliver it, squinting with raw, red eyes to read the words in splotched ink. 

At one point, recalling a particularly tender memory of Mark, I utterly lost it. I wept great wracking sobs. In the end, the act of writing Mark's life, and our love for him—including my particular love for him—unleashed all the tears I had been holding back. 

At that moment some of the kids, Sean included, were in the chapel office. As one, they rose to their feet and walked over to me and put their arms around me. There were no words. There was just a silent, strong wall of empathy. They held me until I stopped sobbing and began to write again. Once they saw my pen move across the paper they released me and let me finish. I delivered the eulogy an hour later, and they were all sitting in the front pew as I read. 

I confess I felt a pang when the kids returned to Wisconsin after the funeral. As they drove away, the brief, unexpected glitter of sunlight was subsumed by the clouds we'd always known were there waiting. 

During subsequent visits to Chicago, I came to know Sean better, and grew to like him immensely. Even within the parameters of the things that separated us—for instance, he primarily (and correctly) placed me in the context of his mother's and Laurie's lives—the intelligence and curiosity I sensed in him on first meeting allowed an actual friendship based on mutual curiosity and respect to blossom.

Having no children of my own, I've always taken a deep interest in the children of my close friends. As a novelist, my primary material is families, and I was absolutely fascinated by the dynamic between Sean and his sisters. The love they shared was startling. It was like oxygen they passed between the three of them. At one point I had to remind myself that Sean and Addie weren't actually twins, even though their energy was utterly twin-like. They finished each other's sentences, literally and metaphorically. 

Sean was one of the most wonderfully unpretentious young men I had ever known, and this was reflected in many of the private conversations he and I had over the years. 

I once asked him in an email how he got the nickname "Moose." It seemed curiously on-point as a nickname even though there was nothing mooselike about him. 

"I don't remember exactly," he wrote by way of reply. "I was sitting in class with friends and we were watching a movie in environmental bio. We were goofing around mimicking the video and I got a detention after mimicking the moose mating call which made everyone laugh really loud getting us all in trouble by the substitute teacher."

Flawless.

In many ways, he was what you most want to imagine when you imagine young midwestern manhood, at least based on the established ideal: grounded kindness, generosity, self-effacement, instinctive self-respect well-grounded in dignity, and, as I mentioned, genuine, respectful curiosity about others. He played sports, he attended church, he loved his family, and he loved his friends. 

I was intrigued by the depth of his faith, which I nonetheless admired, as he never made it an issue. I occasionally had a sense of him perhaps trying to impose order on the chaos life naturally throws at all of us, but it was a neutral thought, and I never got around to asking him about it—something I very much regret in the aftermath of his death.  

I was fascinated by how anyone who might have appeared so ordinary on paper could be so extraordinary in person.  

In 2012, I wrote to ask him if he'd like to be a character in my second novel, Wild Fell, a ghost story set in northern Ontario cottage country. He readily agreed, and, with typical grace, asked me to make sure I let him know where he could buy a copy, as though the thought that I was grateful to him for allowing me to sketch a version of him in the novel had never occurred to him, or that I would send him one of my author copies immediately when I had them in hand. Because, of course, it wouldn't have occurred to him. He would have considered it hubris on his part. 

In December of 2013, I received an exquisite hand-written card from Sean congratulating me on the book. The sentiments and insights he expressed in the card were stunning, and they moved me beyond measure. I replied via email, "I must say, for a stoic young man of seemingly few words, you are a master of them when you take pen to paper. I'll treasure this card forever."

Sean was delighted to learn, in 2014, that Wild Fell was being published in French by Editions Bragelonne in Paris for the global French language market. "That's huge!" he congratulated me. "I can't believe that your book will be read around the world."  

When the translator didn't flinch at the name "Sean 'Moose' Schwartz," leaving it as it was, we noted with some humour that the untranslated "Sean 'Moose' Schwartz" would be literally unpronounceable to the majority of French-speaking readers, which would make him all the more unforgettable in the long run. 

As I sat down to write this elegy, I took Wild Fell down off the shelf and re-read the opening section in which the ultimately doomed Sean "Moose" Schwartz character features. He looks like Sean (certainly to the writer), he has Sean's kindness and humour, and he plays Sean's sports (except the character also played hockey—it's a Canadian ghost story, after all.) The intent was a lighthearted one, a tribute, something he could laugh about and smile about, and maybe one day show his children. But as a depiction, it only worked as long as he was here with us, alive and laughing, finding humour in it, joking with me about which famous twentysomething superstar hardbody would play him in the movie. 

As I started to sift through pictures of Sean, I realized what a mistake it had been to look to words in order to remember someone I'd also made into a fictional character in a novel. There's a truth in pictures that often eludes writing, particularly (and perhaps by definition) fiction, and never was that more true than in Sean's case.

Photographs, on the other hand, capture it all, particularly that smile of his, the smile that was itself a sort of embrace. 

Pictures of Sean and his sisters are an unassailable documentation of a kind of sibling love relatively few of us ever find. Pictures of Sean with children are a testament to how much he loved them, and how naturally they loved him back, and what a magnificent father he would have been. One photograph in particular, of Sean and Laurie on the back of an ATV, moves me to tears, primarily because Laurie's joy is palpable in it, and Sean is like a battery of joy. And the individual portraits of Sean say more about who he was than anyone's words, least of all mine, ever could.

Among my own photographs of him, one in particular stands out: it was taken on the day Jessica was married. In it, Sean is lifting Julian, Jessica's nephew, and swinging him around the room. Sean's face is half-covered by Julian's back. The story is in Julian's laughing face: he's being lifted and swung by a man whose love for him, and whose strength to hold him, is not in question. Julian knows he's not going to be dropped, or fall, and consequently feels free to let his utter joy soar. 

If I had to distill my impression of Sean's essence down to something, limited as it is by my own experience of it, it's this: All of us could soar in his company. None of us were afraid of being dropped. The only unimaginable outcome was his absence. 

If human life is a house, it's a mansion with many rooms. None of us ever enter all the rooms of someone's life. While many of those rooms are the warm, brightly-lit ones into whom we are welcomed, others are the locked rooms, rooms containing heartbreak, or fears, or demons kept safely at bay, or at least out of sight. 

Of the latter type of room, we all have those. The only variance is the security of the locks we keep on the doors, and how successfully we keep our demons imprisoned on the other side. 

I was welcomed into certain rooms of the mansion of Sean Schwartz's life. Others were welcomed into other rooms. A cursory reading of the powerful, heartfelt elegies by his family and his friends online in the days since his death hints at the vastness of those corridors; indeed, how twenty-eight years of deliberate living and loving was more than enough time to deeply imprint on the lives of many, many disparate people, some of whom will go through life never knowing each other, but who are nonetheless united by their love for Sean, and by feeling marked for life by that love, and the concomitant sense of terrible severing now.  

In death, he's put his arms around all of us, and made us all kin—the final gift of a young man who was himself a gift.

So great is the affront to the natural order when the old bury the young that western literature is full to the brim with poetry, ballads, songs, and lamentations on themes of the untimely deaths of young men. 

As a writer and an agnostic, I was more inclined to look to literature than to scripture to understand best how to express Sean's loss. 

I was first drawn to "To An Athlete Dying Young" by the British Victorian poet A. E. Houseman; but the poem, though powerful and entirely apropos in so many ways, is so floridly British, romantic, and upper-class that there was nothing of Sean's gentle, profoundly American stolidity to be found there. I imagined Sean's face as I tried to explain to him what an "early-laurelled head" was. He would have been polite about it, I'm sure. 

Ironically, I eventually found what I was looking for in "Death Is Nothing At All," a resolutely straightforward piece by yet another Victorian poet, Henry Scott-Holland, a 19th century priest at St. Paul's Cathedral in London. 

It's this, in all it's clean, poignant truth and yearning: 

Death is nothing at all. / It does not count. / I have only slipped away into the next room. / Nothing has happened.

The darkness in which we currently find ourselves notwithstanding, Sean was a light-bringer. He was a thousand candles. He brought warmth and humour and joy to the people around him as guilelessly and open-handedly as a child with fresh-picked wildflowers. Any man would have been proud to have had him as a son. 

As unbearable as is the loss of that light to all of us who loved him—in particular, his mother and his sisters—I cannot shake the feeling that he would want us to imagine him close by, in the next room. 

Sleep well, gentle soul. And thank you for touching my life, however briefly. Thank you for making a room for me in your house. 

Sean with Julian, Streamwood, IL, 2016

The first page of the first edition of Wild Fell, 2013

Sean and his sisters, Addie and Trisha, at Jessica Braun's wedding, 2016. 

Sean with Laurie Braun, 2016 

Sitting at the top of the hill with the Labrador, watching the sun go down

As the weather evens out from a summer of cruel heat and constant rain, I have taken to sitting at the top of the hill at Riverdale Park with Beckett every evening. We did this when he was a baby, around the same hour, but we lost the habit of it.

We watch the baseball players, or the soccer players, or the Ultimate Frisbee players. I speak softly to him and finger-comb his coat. He sits very still, or licks my hand, or just lays down and watches the games, and the the other dogs, and the people. It's a very personal communion; we sit very close together and just...connect.

I was thinking about the pandemic this afternoon, how unmooring it all was to have the dailyness of our lives pulled out from under our feet. It's an old plaint, and I'm bored with going over it. But in this case, it was part of a larger thought. That very unmooring contained a hidden blessing.

It allowed me to separate myself emotionally from people, places, and things that I wanted terribly, but which were never meant for me. It allowed me space to forgive betrayals even as I said goodbye to the people who weren't what I'd hoped and believed them to be.

At the same time, I found myself steadily and surely returned into my own actual life, my own space, my own time. I was filled with new love for the people who had never wavered in their love for me, and who had always been there—the heart-bricks of my true house as it were; the true keepers of my true memories. Most tellingly I was reconnected with my own cherished hopes and dreams, my sense of myself as...well, 𝑚𝑒.

Tonight, on the way to the park, I met a friend I hadn't seen for more than a decade. He was one of the brightest lights of a very happy, very cherished, very specific garland of memories. I was delighted by how well I fit into his embrace, and how familiar he felt, and how familiar the joy I felt in his company was. We parted company with plans to have dinner soon, and we will.

I approached the top of the hill with a very light heart.

The sun was setting, and the games were winding down. Beckett flopped down on the grass as I began to pet him (the only break from that peace was the hog-wrestling I had to do with him to get this shot of us.) As the light faded from the sky, I spoke softly to him and pressed my face into his fur, and remembered how, a nanosecond ago, he was a small, sleek, impossibly shiny puppy. He still smelled the same to me, and the rhythm of his breathing had only very slightly changed.

In that moment, there was literally nothing more important than this communion with a beloved Labrador who wasn't always going to be with me. There was nothing more important than the joy of rediscovering my friend after all that time, and finding my love unchanged. I don't know if I missed this before, or if I always knew it, but it all rang deeply and resonantly new, and true.

So, of course, fuck you, COVID, for what you did to all of us. That's a given.

But also, thank you.

Thank you for locking me in a small room with my own life for a year and half, and not letting me out until I'd made some peace with some of it. Thank you for the reminder of what, and who, is actually important, and how much of the rest of it was me playing a part in someone else's narrative for so long that I'd mistakenly begun to believe it was my own script all along.

Thank you for reunions with long-absent friends. Thank you for later-summer evening sunsets. Thank you for 11-year old Labradors who hate having their picture taken, but who still, inexplicably, smell like puppies. Thank you for clearer sight going forward, and all the lessons that go with that. Thank you for second chances. Thank you for open roads.