Lately I've been thinking a lot about my friend Alex Berman. You see, both the anniversary of his death and his birthday are coming up now in January.
I met Alex during one of the most intense musical and personal experiences of my life, the Eastern Music Festival 2013. He was one of the many Floridians in my dorm, and we all immediately bonded given our provenance from that insane but beautiful state. We went on a fro-yo run that night, and that was when I began to get to know him. I admit that initially I found him to be kind of annoying, given his constant "thirstiness" and we had a bit of a falling-out the first week, because of an incident involving a group of boys in our dorm and their comments regarding me. However, as time went by, he grew on me, and I began to care about him a lot. He was a generous and kind person, and although I wasn't always around the dorm, whenever I spent time with him, I enjoyed the stories he told and the pranks he'd pull. Once, Alex and my friend Gabe found a friend's silk Victoria's Secret robe and dressed up like male strippers and forcefully entered one of the girls' rooms, declaring to the six or seven girls that they had "the right to remain silent" and that they were under arrest for "being too sexy" and then proceeded to dance. It was one of the funniest moments I remember at EMF.
Some of my friends still get angry when they think about what happened to Alex. I understand that having someone that young and good being taken from this earth so violently is senseless and beyond understanding. I understand being angry at God (or the universe or whatever you believe). I was angry at God when my cousin died. In a weird way, I was mad at my cousin too. I couldn't believe that he would leave me when he was the person I always thought would be sitting next to me when I imagined myself as an old woman, sitting on my porch and sipping teréré while watching the sunset. I don't have any brothers or sisters, and he was pretty much my surrogate brother, so losing him was one of the most difficult events I've gone through in my life. For a long time I would stay awake at night and talk to him, hoping somehow he would hear me. I did that again almost five years later when Alex died. However, losing Alex was different than losing Rodri, for some obvious and not-so-obvious reasons. Of course, I had known Rodri my entire life and spent a lot of time with him and he was family. I had only spent time with Alex for five weeks, and I considered him to be a good friend but our relationship didn't have the history and depth as that between Rodri and I (which is understandable). Although Rodri wasn't the first loved one to die in my lifetime, he died at a time when I actually understood what death was and the seeming finality of it. While Rodri's death was sudden for me, he had been sick for most of his life so the shock wasn't as great. Alex's death came out of nowhere, and the brutality and awful absurdity of it was difficult to comprehend.
Once I got to the point where I could think more clearly about the whole situation, however, I came to a certain way of thinking about death.
Sometimes we feel that the time we had with our departed loved ones is too short, that we deserved more time with them, that THEY deserved more time here on Earth. For me, it's not a matter of what we or they deserve, it's more of a matter of thinking about how lucky, how blessed we have been to have had the pleasure to have someone like that in our lives. God, the universe, or that great flying spaghetti monster, whatever you want to call it, has connected us in infinite ways, and the fact that, out of seven billion people on this Earth we found that one person, astounds me. Their presence in our lives, in the lives of others as well, has set in motion chains of events that we would never fully comprehend.
A conversation, an adventure, a loving moment, even a fight has the power to change people's actions, and we will never completely understand how big an impact someone else has had on us. So basically, I try to be grateful for having had the great blessing of having found the people I love and of having been able to spend time with them, and although I would've loved to been able to spend more... my dad always tells me, "Sometimes you only get a little." Sometimes though, a little can be a lot. And no matter what you believe about the afterlife (or the lack of one), I think that as long as you keep someone in your heart and mind, and remember them often, with tears or laughter or maybe even both, they still live on.
I'm sorry if this seems simplistic. I haven't lost a spouse, a child, or a parent. I haven't had that experience, and therefore my writing is limited to what I know. I know that death is an incredibly complex and difficult matter to discuss and that we can never fully understand its workings. I can only understand the way I feel about it at the moment.
In any case, I miss my friend. I miss my cousin. I miss my grandpa. Death may be an unavoidable part of life but it is hard to deal with, even when you try to think of it in a more positive way (to save your sanity).
I hope this post doesn't ruin anyone's day due to the subject matter, and if you have any thoughts on it, please comment or let me know. I'd love to hear another opinion. Peace out.
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