I was no longer spending much time on Facebook. It didn’t help that I had forgotten my password, and that my successive attempts to change it had failed. Rather than persist, I took it as encouragement to limit my screen time. I could still access the social network on my phone, but while it’s true that I used the messaging system, I rarely scrolled. Rarely, that is, by certain standards. We are still talking about a stretch of roughly twenty minutes a day.
However, when my friend Reshell experienced a reversal of fortune, I began visiting her profile more regularly in an effort to better surround her. Granted, the expression usually refers to financial hardship, but it is the image that comes to mind. Moreover, by consulting the Centre National de Ressources Textuelles et Lexicales, my online dictionary, I learn that Fortune was the name of a deity who presided over the vagaries of human destiny, distributing goods and evils according to her whim. Even if that is not necessarily how I see things, the expression works.
Reshell is a woman who conducts her life with consideration. Retired from a career in healthcare, she manages her income intelligently, contenting herself with a small but sufficient home and devoting herself to her two passions. In alphabetical order: creative writing, and her son.
Oh yes, Reshell takes writing seriously, and more in the manner of Stephen King (“your main job is to tell a story”) than Marguerite Duras (“To write is to attempt to know what one would write if one were writing”). She composes works brimming with twists and turns, featuring emotional, vividly drawn characters. Her paragraphs, studded with flavors and textures like scoops of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, give the sensation of spending time among friends. Eight times a week, Reshell volunteers to lead our small writers’ group—which tells you the kind of person she is.
Reshell’s other passion is her son, Kaiden. Between them unfolded a reciprocal relationship, built year after year upon the genuine complicity that binds two beings animated by the same values of generosity, energy, and creativity. All of this was sprinkled with a shared enthusiasm for rock music, the Marvel universe, and professional wrestling galas in all their bubbling, theatrical splendor. Mother and son saw each other often, and it feels strange to say “mother and son,” so strong is my sense that they had chosen one another independently of blood ties. This sustained closeness prevented neither of them from working full time (in writing now, in Reshell’s case) or from forging other strong relationships. Kaiden and his partner Adriana married, and even after they had their child, remarks my friend dropped here and there between writing sessions revealed that she made it a point of honor to respect their privacy.
The reversal of fortune Reshell experienced was that her only child died.
At the age of forty-three.
A goddamn fucking reversal of fortune, if you ask me.
And so, to return to Facebook, I began commenting regularly on Reshell’s posts when they inspired me, as it seemed to me that this constituted an additional way of being present—alongside the messages we exchanged from time to time and the more private conversations we occasionally shared during writing meetups. It was almost certainly because of these more frequent interventions that Ilan noticed me and sent me a friend request through the platform. I knew exactly who he was: not only was Reshell’s brother active on her profile, he had also spoken at the funeral.
The funeral.
At first, the thought of attending had not even crossed my mind. For one thing, family members lived in New York and Bucharest, and I believed the ceremony would be held virtually. Yes, I am a bit scatterbrained. I latch onto an idea and don’t think any further. It can be restful, at times.
For another, I had never taken the opportunity to meet Kaiden, which did not prevent me from knowing several things about him—such as the fact that he always invited Reshell to his concerts (except when he anticipated rumpus), regardless of the fact that his mother was not, a priori, the target audience for punk fastcore.
Then, on the morning of the funeral, I told myself that if the information was posted on Reshell’s Facebook profile, I could go too. At worst, I would be turned away; no problem. At least I would have done that for her, since I had been so little present over the past year that I had failed to grasp the gravity of the situation.
Unlike the Christian services I was accustomed to, where the speaking time allotted to loved ones is limited to a few minutes within a mass lasting an hour or an hour and a half, this Jewish funeral home reversed the proportions. The three tributes, offered, among others, by Ilan and by Kaiden’s best friend, portrayed a warm, welcoming man of immense kindness. It was unmistakable: in the full, hushed room, their gratitude for having known Kaiden, their admiration for who he was—with his colossal qualities of the heart, beneficent and contagiously so—burst from the sturdy armor of their pain like laser beams. It was so powerful, so simple, and so evident that this light reached deep within me and altered something inside—I want to say, in my DNA. I longed to, and I decided to, resemble Kaiden.
Death implies a separation that is often brutal and often devastating, but not necessarily definitive, according to my research and my experience on the matter. Thanks to this belief, I find it easy to express the feelings of compassion that rise within me, without bitterness. I thought it was probably the specific content of one of my comments beneath a post that had given Ilan the idea to send his friend request. I imagined he had said to himself, I don’t recognize this person who seems to know Reshell and Kaiden. As if he had wanted to gather everything he could of his nephew, perhaps to learn a new anecdote about him, a kind of posthumous treasure. And the fact that someone believed I had been close to Kaiden filled me with pride.
Picasso, La Lecture de la lettre