The day Steele died, my laptop died. I brought it to the hospital to play some music for him; it booted up and then died. The motherboard short circuited. That evening, my friend’s grandfather died. My other friend’s aunt died. My other friend’s mother’s pastor’s daughter died. Shortly after, my good family friend had a heart attack (thankfully he’s still alive); my cousin had to have a major surgery and could have died, and a family friend’s 15-year old son burst a blood vessel and died. That always seems to happen. When someone close to you dies, you know a friend of a friend who also died, and as the days pass, the circle expands. When we die, we are all a part of a web of death. I wonder whose web I’ll be a part of. I wonder who else I know is in Steele’s web.
Unknowingly, all those people share an ascension day, just as some of us share a birthday. That would suck if death was like getting out of prison after a number of years with no one at the gates to greet you. I don’t think that’s what death is like though. Death is probably like eating a bag of mangos on the beach on a Sunday afternoon; mangos splashed with a dash of saltwater from the ocean.
Steele probably wouldn’t want us to do anything, or spend any money to commemorate his ascension day. He hated to celebrate his birthday; worse if you were thinking of a big surprise. That was the forbidden sin. I wanted to plan a surprise for him this year. I spoke to a select few people about it. I didn’t really want it to be a surprise, but I knew he would never approve of a party. He got wind of it and one day I got this text message from him: “Don’t think about planning a surprise for me.” When I saw him, I was like, ‘what are you talking about’. He said, you know. I just played dumb.
I hope he wasn’t surprised by anything his family and I planned for him. Some people say the funeral is the final farewell. I say there is no end and no beginning. There is only the space in between now and then. This is only the next step.
I keep resisting that notion when I think about moving back to my home in The Bahamas. That seems very final. In the Bahamas, most people don’t know Steele outside of me. They don’t have a stake. I am the leading authority on his life and they love to learn about him. As far as they are concerned, he was my fiancé and they don’t have any reservations about saying that.
There are so many interests to contend with in Jamaica; it’s makes it so much harder. Like his other friends and family, I want to protect his legacy. I want to honour his memory. Sometimes I feel as protective as a mother trying to protect her child from an external threat and I wonder if I’m going to wake up one day and discover he had this other life that I didn’t know about or didn’t include me; if others have a different story to tell that is inconsistent with the one I know. We talked about the past, our families, our other lives, but we tried to live like we weren’t bound by our past and that the future was ours to create. But now, he’s gone and the past is all there is.
His best friend told me, if you measure an engagement by a ring, then we weren’t engaged, but if you measure it by everything else, then I should know we were engaged, for too long I suppose. That is sort of how I have always felt in my head, like we were family, but that’s not how the real world works. If I were to say we were engaged that would be like revisionist history, the same way writing me out of his life would be. A girlfriend is such a stateless position. It’s just a ‘special’ friend as they called me in church during his baptism. I keep wondering if I’m still his girlfriend and for how long I’ll still be that. Family is blood, and you can’t separate from your DNA. Will I be his family forever too?