All of Love is Letting Go
reflections on life and death from the other side of a Twelfth House year
Honestly, I had every intention of getting back to business as usual around here after I finally managed to write and send my last letter. I felt like I had really broken through some resistance and learned what I was supposed to learn from that bizarre little blip on the radar of my creativity, and now my expectations of myself could just go back to normal. I started compiling a list of delights for April, made a note on my schedule to solicit subscriber questions for the monthly Q+A, and began assembling the skeleton of the next essay.
And then my friend died.
Since there’s no easy way to tell the truth about things like this, that sentence is how I’ve worked the language through my body and decided to say it. That’s something grief does, apparently, or at least this grief has done to me — it has emptied me of efforting, gotten me straight to the point. Because I no longer have the energy for any other tone. This is just what happened. It cannot be undone.
And while I’m here, telling the truth, I may as well let you know that I’d actually felt death coming somehow, in some way, over these past few months. When I found out about Elle, I already had Joan Didion’s, “The Year of Magical Thinking” at the top of (one of) the stack(s) of books on my bedside table(s). I’d checked it out from the library months ago, not really knowing exactly why. I’d barely read it because it had barely resonated, but for some reason I just couldn’t take it back.
Similarly, for some reason, the top pinned note in my notes app is (still) titled “February essay on death?” because earlier this year I (obviously) got the idea to write an essay about death. The note contains only four lines, and three of them are basically me trying to figure out why, exactly, I felt the need to write about death in the first place. At the end of last year, one of my best friends had a major medical emergency, and looking back it feels like that incident tore some kind of veil. She survived, but that situation brought death closer than it had ever really come before. And I have sensed it lurking over my shoulder ever since. It’s hard to explain, but maybe this is just a fact of getting older.
Actually, I’d say that I know for sure now that it is.
But still… I never expected this.
My darling Elle, what feels good to tell you about her? I mean, I’ve spent the past two months quietly working this out because it’s complicated. Both the specific circumstances surrounding her death and the nature of our relationship over the past few years. The truest thing I can tell you is that I loved her enormously. In my waves and phases of processing over the past weeks, I’ve come to understand that even though our closeness had recently shifted — the last time we texted was Christmas — what will always feel most significant and true is that the beginning felt like magic.
Elle and I first connected almost ten years ago when the combination of mutual friends and Tumblr (how very 2015 of us) brought us into each others’ orbits. And the only word I have to describe those early days of our friendship is “soulmate”. We both felt it, right away. Like we were remembering something familiar and discovering something unprecedented at the same time.
I’ve heard since her passing just how often and how highly she spoke to others about me. In fact, there’s a pretty substantial amount of people that I now know found me and my work through her. And I’m not surprised in the least… because that was Elle. I’ve never met anyone like her before or since — she championed and celebrated absolutely everybody. No matter who you were, if you were in front of her you were the most brilliant person she had ever met. And she wasn’t bullshitting you — she could (and would) tell you, relentlessly, exactly why you’re remarkable. Because she genuinely believed it and wanted you to believe it, too.
Elle was one of the first people that I can remember really feeling like I knew believed in me. She was the first person I texted when I decided to pivot the path of my life and go back to school in 2016. For years, whenever I would write something, she was the first person I sent it to. Including my book… which she then, of course, told absolutely everybody about.
Writing was actually our primary connection point, our shared strongest passion. Which is why this letter has been both agonizing and therapeutic to bring forth. In a very real sense, my friendship with Elle is why and how I really started writing. Started believing that I had something worth bringing forth in the first place. And the funny thing is, for all of the praise she lavished on my me and my words, she was always a better writer than me. Freer and effortlessly poetic. Often, when I’d share a piece with her, she’d respond by telling me how brave I was… but the thing is: she was always braver than me, too.
And I don’t know if what happened to her is because she knew that or because she didn’t.