Goodbye, Marcel

Written: 2014

It was a Thursday morning in late June and I was at the administrative assistant job I hated, feeling extra antsy because I was so close to realizing my biggest creative dream—my first novel was coming out in 12 days! The only good thing about my job was that I’d accrued a bunch of vacation time, so I’d taken off most of the following month to celebrate my book release with a mini-book tour of the West Coast. I was pondering quitting the job upon my return, so I was researching how expensive it would be to buy my own health insurance when this message popped up in

Gchat:
10:16 AM elizabeth: hey steph
will you call me when you get a chance it’s important

Elizabeth was one of my best friends from high school, like an older sister to me really, but we’d only recently gotten back in touch. I was a hard person to handle in my late teens—angry, depressed, erratic, drunk—and it had cost me a couple of my dearest friends. Elizabeth and I were working it out, though, and I was planning to stay with her during my west coast trip. In fact, I was afraid that this “important” thing was her canceling on me.

Since I worked in a cube in the center of the office that completely lacked privacy, I went into my vacationing co-worker’s office to call Elizabeth. Even though I remember everything leading up to the phone call—the taste of my strawberry breakfast bar, clicking back and forth between my work email and my covert insurance search every time someone walked by my desk—I don’t remember the conversation with Elizabeth. What she told me didn’t hit me until I called my best friend, Acacia, to pass it on, mainly because Acacia made me keep repeating it.

“You should sit down,” I’d told her when she answered. Maybe Elizabeth had told me that. Maybe it was just what people always said on TV.

“I don’t want to sit down. I’m not sitting down,” she told me, defiant as ever.

“OK, but you should because...I just talked to Elizabeth. Marcel’s been on a road trip on his motorcycle. Last night he was driving through Montana, and there was an accident....Acacia, Marcel is dead.”

She was silent and then she said, “Marcel is what?” “Marcel was in an accident. He’s dead.”
More silence. “Who’s dead?”
“Marcel,” I sobbed.

Silence. “Marcel is what?”

This fucked-up version of “Who’s on First?” went on for at least three more rounds. Acacia, the strongest person in my world, was broken by this news, and that broke me. Eventually I screamed at her, “Stop making me say it! Please, please stop!”

“I’m sorry,” she said, finally snapping out of it. “I just can’t believe it.”

“I know.” A world without Marcel seemed impossible.

We had geometry class together sophomore year. One day, Marcel burst out in laughter over nothing so loud and hard that our teacher made him leave. Our classmates stared at him in shock, but I laughed with him. So began our friendship.

I’d known who he was before that because you couldn’t miss him—he stood over six feet tall with bushy brown hair, and the hint of a smile that made you think he knew the world’s deepest secrets and its funniest jokes. He was an enigma. We both hung out at Scoville Park, where the punk-rock and indie kids gathered to smoke cigarettes and wallow in/savor our boredom and Marcel went to climb trees and statues like a monkey.

That year I was dating Greg, an emotionally abusive dickhead who wouldn’t let me be friends with any of his friends—except Marcel, because no one, not even abusive dickheads, could come up with a good reason not to be friends with Marcel. One day I came to geometry class wearing a silver ring on a chain around my neck. Greg had given it to me, saying he’d found it in his basement. As it turned out Marcel had left it there, which shouldn’t have surprised me since the ring was so big it wouldn’t even stay on my thumb. When Marcel explained that the ring was a gift from his mother, I started to take it off even though I knew I’d catch hell from Greg for giving away something he’d given me. Marcel, who had a knack for reading people like no one I’ve ever known, must have seen all of this in my eyes, because he told me I could keep it. Several months later, after Greg and I had broken up, I tried to give the ring back, but Marcel said, “You still need it, and you should keep it as long as you do. ”

As soon as he said that, the ring was no longer an ill-gotten gift from a despicable person; it contained the strength and wisdom of the boy who acted as my therapist whenever we were alone in my car.

I held on to that ring through my turbulent late teens and early 20s. Then I went to visit Marcel at his new place in St. Louis. We stayed up until five in the morning talking about books, the ones we’d read and the ones I was writing—a path he told me he was proud of me for pursuing. He also gave me advice about patching things up with my old friends, like Elizabeth. When I gave him his ring that morning, he accepted it.

Even though we lived busy lives in different cities, I was certain we would cross paths again, because we always did. Marcel would always be there. He was my compass. He was sewn into the fabric of the universe, permanent as the constellations I’d spent all my life gazing upon.

So what do you do when the biggest tree in your world is felled and takes the sky down with it?
I walked for three miles, shielding my fresh tattoo from the summer sun that still had nerve to shine, listening to Automatic for the People by R.E.M. over and over again because I had such a vivid picture in my mind of Marcel in that T-shirt. I cried as I walked, especially when “Try Not to Breathe” came on, because I couldn’t breathe. There was this gaping hole in my chest, and even though I hadn’t smoked in six years, I bought cigarettes because I needed something to fill it.

Without planning it, Acacia and I met at Scoville Park under the tree where Marcel had talked the two of us out of running away when we were 16 and broken and angry. No one else could

talk sense into us, but of course Marcel did, using some cryptic metaphor about ducks. We sat and smoked until she had to go back to work and I had to go to a book event that I felt like I couldn’t cancel.

I nearly broke down while reading at that event, because I realized that my main character’s father—a soft-spoken, intuitive, kindest-soul-in-the-world character who is tall with wavy brown hair—was subconsciously inspired by Marcel. I was comforted for a moment that a piece of his spirit lived in my book, but the absence of him in my life was still too fresh to appreciate that.

I went home to my boyfriend and he held me because he didn’t know what to say. Because there was nothing to say. Even though I’d been trying to quit using sleeping pills, I had to take them that night, because the world felt too wrong to sleep in, and when I did drift off, I’d wake up an hour later because the emptiness seized up inside of me and it hurt. It really, really hurt. When Acacia and I went to the wake, I was scared because I didn’t want to see Marcel’s body, but I thought I needed to, for closure. I was also nervous because I’d yet to mend things with everyone like Marcel encouraged me to do. I was walking into a situation where I needed his guidance, and he wasn’t there to give it.

Acacia couldn’t handle seeing the body, so I had to go up to the casket alone. What I found inside was shaped like Marcel and had his bushy brown hair, but it looked like a wax figure. I whispered, “This isn’t you. You aren’t here. You’re gone.” I tested out a tiny bit of hope by adding, “You’re everywhere,” but, not ready for that yet, I repeated, “You’re gone.”

I didn’t realize how hard I was crying until I walked away from the casket. Then I could barely see and I didn’t know where Acacia was, but someone stepped up with Kleenex and open arms —Isabel, my other friend from high school with whom I hadn’t fixed things yet. Our love for Marcel superseded any problems we had at the time.

After the funeral, we celebrated Marcel’s life at a local music venue. His friends and family read poems and letters and played songs. I crowded on the stage with almost everyone in the place to sing “The House of the Rising Sun.” I cried until I was out of tears, but I managed to smile, too.

Afterward, it was hard to get back to real life. I was smoking a lot, usually to keep from crying like crazy, and I felt like I was watching my life like a movie. Acacia and I decided what we really needed to do was drive. It’s what we’ve always done when we feel lost and we hoped that a Marcel-like adventure would help us heal.

A week after the wake, we tucked Marcel’s memorial card into the sun visor of Acacia’s car and set off. Acacia wanted to visit the World’s Largest Truckstop, which was three hours away in Iowa, so we made that our destination, but I secretly wondered if we would drive all the way to the ocean, maybe even into the ocean. The World’s Largest Truckstop was disappointingly corporate, so we exited the highway and aimlessly drove the back roads with Marcel’s picture as our compass. We ended up heading back east, and right before reaching the Mississippi River, we spotted a restaurant/bar called Sneaky Pete’s. We took the motorcycle out front as a sign to investigate it. What we found inside delighted us and would have delighted Marcel. If a man wears a tie into Sneaky Pete’s it is cut off and hung from the ceiling. Additionally, the salad bar is fashioned out of a claw-foot bathtub. After we ate, we went out behind the restaurant and sat on the rocky riverbank—the river that flows down to the city Marcel called home. I smoked my last cigarette and started to feel like myself again.

***
As much as my trip with Acacia helped, it was only the beginning of the road out of grief. The first few months were the worst. Out of nowhere, I’d find myself so overwhelmed by sorrow that I couldn’t breathe. Once I ran six blocks home from the train because I’d convinced myself I was going to find my boyfriend dead. Why? No reason, except that I now knew that horrible things happen for no reason.

And there was anger, too, because my friend had been killed. Yes, it was unintentional—like happens far too often, the driver of the truck wasn’t paying close enough attention and hadn’t seen Marcel’s motorcycle. But accident or not, she killed him and she lived. It turned out she was a teenage girl, which complicated my anger.

The thing that kept me going through all of these painful feelings was that surprising sentence I’d mumbled to Marcel while standing over his casket at the wake: “You’re everywhere.” I’m not a religious person, but Marcel was a person who lived so largely and was loved by so many that I couldn’t help thinking that he hadn’t been torn out our universe, he’d been woven into every square inch of it. He was in his friends and family, so I took comfort in them. My friendships with Elizabeth and Isabel grew strong again, and I also got to know the two incredible people who’d made Marcel who he was: his parents. A month after the funeral, I sent them a letter, telling them the story of Marcel’s ring to illustrate what he meant to me. Marcel’s mother emailed me to say that he’d actually told her a bit about the ring the last time he was home and had left it there, so she’d worn it to the funeral. She said that she, Marcel’s father, and his brother had decided that I should have it. I wear it on a chain or a ribbon every day.

The grief that Marcel’s family and friends felt was, over time, transformed into honor, love, and celebration. Isabel took a paper towel that Marcel had written his “Instructions for Life” on—18 points including things like “Take into account that great love and great achievements involve great risk,” and “Don’t let a little dispute spoil a great friendship”—and had them printed on paper towels for his friends and family. Acacia, Elizabeth, and I got tattoos on our forearms to memorialize him—Elizabeth and I made sketches he’d done permanent; Acacia got lilacs because the time of year that they bloomed reminded her of him. Isabel and I joined Marcel’s family at the cemetery on his birthday. We distributed pinwheels to all the surrounding graves so they could “join the party,” and then we accidentally-on-purpose flew a Spider-Man kite into a nearby tree since Spiderman balloons weren’t welcomed by Catholic cemetery, and our party had to include Marcel’s favorite superhero—a character who scales tall things and rescues people, like Marcel did. We took pictures for a blog Elizabeth updates every year on his birthday called Celebrate Marcel. His loved ones across the country send her shots of themselves climbing trees, reading in the sun, or otherwise enjoying life as Marcel had.

On the first anniversary of his death, his parents rented out the music venue from his memorial service. We all went back to read aloud and sing. There was more laughter than tears that day, but this summer, just three days before the fourth anniversary of Marcel’s death, I found myself sobbing at his grave. I had all these doubts about how to continue on the path I’d taken shortly after his death. Not willing to waste more time at a job I hated now that I knew that life could be cut so short, I’d taken one of those great risks Marcel encouraged and quit so I’d have more time to write and be with loved ones. But sometimes I’m filled with self-doubt and pain and I don’t feel like I have the strength to live as fully and bravely as he lived, especially not in the unjust world that stole him from us. Fortunately, in those moments, because Marcel is still my compass, I am always able to find my way to him