42. 1 year
written 11 months and 29 days after
… I wrote a book.
In early 2024 you will be able to read HERE AFTER — a book about him, our life, my grief.
It is still surreal that HERE AFTER will be a physical thing in the world. I am so honoured to share the book with you all.
If you’d like to receive updates about the book and these occasional letter-missives (which I don’t write regularly, just when I feel like I want to), please feel free to stay subscribed or to subscribe.
As a child, if it was the winter holidays and we were playing board games, I would keep saying, “one more, can we please play one more?” until everyone around me would finally say, “No, no more.”
Or, if I’d finished off my cookies at snack time, I would ask my parents, “can I have one more? …. Or four?”
If I was basking in the sun, I’d stay out in it until I was sick. If I enjoyed going over to a friend’s house, I’d ask to go over every day.
None of these behaviours have really changed with time.
Last year, in May 2020, Kurtis and I had a semi-comic, semi-tragic fight where I accused him of breaking our television.
No sound was playing and I had an, admittedly, overly reactive fit to the idea of our television not working with a lockdown stretching before us.
It turned out that nothing was broken, Kurtis had simply leaned on the remote and turned the sound all the way down to zero. I apologized, of course, while he laughed.
“You get so attached,” he said.
I rolled my eyes and told him to press Play but he said that he needed to get some work done. So, because he now worked where we lived, I popped my AirPods into my ears and tried to find a show to watch that he wouldn’t mind missing out on.
I settled on one about a teenage detective who solves crimes, at times, literally, between classes. It had good, nineties outfits, along with a healthy dose of high-school drama. I liked it.
Over the course of the next few weeks, I watched the entirety of the first four seasons — which seems like a lot at first. But, you have to understand, somewhere around the second season, I began to feel a familiar but not entirely welcome feeling. I’d felt it before, notably, but not limited to, when I watched Gossip Girl for the first time, years ago.
The feeling is always one of both hyper-interest and extreme disinterest, braided together. By the time I feel it, I can’t stop its inevitable effects.
What has happened, when I get this way, is I have become way too invested in one story arc, and the strength of this obsession ends up divesting me of interest in all the other arcs present in the show.
With Gossip Girl, for example, I reached a point where all I cared about was everyone’s favourite toxic couple, the will-they-or-won’t-they, he-bought-a-building-and-pimped-her-out-to-his-uncle, Chuck Bass and Blair Waldorf.
As a result of only caring about what happened to Chuck and Blair, I ended up fast-forwarding through any other part of the show that didn’t have to do with them.
To this day, I still haven’t watched a full episode of Gossip Girl past season 4. I even, deep in the pandemic hole, tried to re-watch Gossip Girl and the same thing happened. By season 5, I was fast-forwarding to the parts I wanted to see.
This has happened to me in other shows too, such as the teen girl-detective show. The first time Kurtis saw me fast-forwarding, he was confused. He’d never witnessed this particular phenomenon of mine, and he asked what was going on. I explained the tunnel vision that I got, the way I couldn’t ever seem to regulate the feeling, how everything else in the show became boring to me besides one particular thread.
“I actually hate when I feel the obsession starting,” I said. “Because I know it’s going to ruin the show for me and I won’t watch the whole thing properly.”
Kurtis laughed, his big one, that kind that came unhinged at the top because he was really going for it.
It is a testament to how loved I felt by him that this laugh didn’t hurt my feelings. Usually, I avoid telling people idiosyncratic things like this about me, because I know it’s weird and when people laugh I feel like they’re laughing at me. But with Kurtis, I knew these were exactly the kinds of things that delighted him.
“Remember when you tried to tell me you weren’t obsessive?” he said.
I did remember. We had been cooking at the time and I must have meditated for two minutes or something earlier because I clearly felt not myself, and in this state, I mentioned to Kurtis that maybe he and I weren’t so dissimilar, maybe I was actually not as obsessive as I thought.
Kurtis had stopped unloading the dishwasher to put his hands on his knees while he laughed.
“Amy,” he said, looking up at me, his eyes especially huge. “Come on.”
“What?” I said, but I was laughing too.
“You listened to the same song on repeat for over 3000 minutes last year,” he said.
This was true. I had gotten hooked, emotionally, on one song, and listened to it (with headphones on! while I was writing! I protested, feebly) on repeat for roughly 50 hours until I switched.
Kurtis had other examples of why I was dreaming if I didn’t see myself as at “least a bit” obsessive but he didn’t need to say them. I had already given up, having realized the hopeful absurdity of even entertaining the notion of being otherwise.
Once I love something, I don’t want it to end. I don’t know how to make myself stop.
I was and am this way about Kurtis, too. From the moment I saw him crossing the street, before our first date, a moment when I did not yet know it was him, I was so interested in him.
I thought so much about him, all the time, put my mind to him so often that it became an unconscious habit. I still wake up thinking about how I can help him or make him laugh or get him what he wants before I remember. These are deadly mornings.
It’s the way my mind is whirring to create more ways of loving him, but there isn’t a place to put any of it. I don’t know where to put any of it. He’s not here. He’s still not here.
After Kurtis died, I began an iPhone note in which I tried to store anything that I remembered about him.
I never included things I have written about in the letters; and even so, the note is incredibly long. I scrolled through it earlier this week and felt a tightening in my chest. There was so much to him. I don’t know how to get all of him across. I know I can’t. I also know I didn’t know everything. There was so much of him still to discover.
He was so made for more, after all.
I will always be here for you, he wrote to me in a card from 2020, but when I said his name out loud, when I called for him, there was only the silence of the apartment. The silence that never fell over the apartment until he wasn’t there. I’ve never heard a silence like that of his absence.
I sat in it and thought as seriously about dying as I did in the first days. I held my breath until black points began to bloom in my vision but it wasn’t long enough. A sob broke through and I finally inhaled. In the mirrored doors of our closet, I could see my swollen eyes, my red, splotchy skin.
He was always the ballast. He always knew when to just sit with a tissue and when to say we needed to eat out instead of cook in, or even when we needed to get away. Without him, I would just cry, or eat a frozen waffle, or put off travel because of money worries or loneliness or inertia. Without him, I always hydrated at parties and left with enough time to get a good sleep. Without him, I searched up the endings of movies because I wanted to be prepared. Without him, I wouldn’t sleep with the windows of my bedroom open because I was alone and afraid.
Once, I surprised him with a weekend trip out of the city because I knew he would love it. Before I met him, I never felt comfortable doing weekends away. I didn’t know who to go with or if it was silly to drive an hour out of the city to simply see the mountains closer up. He showed me that all of this was not only possible but right to do because it was fun, because we were together.
It was December and I had chosen for us to stay a few days at a hotel in the Rocky Mountains, which are visible from just about everywhere in the city on a clear day and accessible within an hour’s drive.
It was a decently fancy hotel with a view of the snow-capped peaks. I flopped in the King size bed, exclaiming with glee at the multiplicity of down pillows and he emerged from the bathroom swathed in the white, hotel robe. This was the first time I would encounter his delicious insistence that the hotel not just be inhabited, but experienced. A pane of sunlight lit his chest and his head and I took a photograph. He told me that he had something for me.
“What?” I said, genuinely surprised.
He pulled a small white box out from behind his back. It was tied with a thin, black ribbon. When I opened it, I shrieked. Inside, was a beautiful, silver cuff, made of many strands twined together. I had complimented this same cuff on a friend and he had remembered.
It was one of the only gifts that he would entirely surprise me with — others would be ruined, his words, because I’d buy the same gift for him, or accidentally see the confirmation receipt in his email, or just flat out guess what it might be.
“Kurtis,” I said, slipping the cuff on my wrist and lifting it up to show him.
I would wear that cuff for ages; refusing to take it off. I couldn’t imagine what could be ahead for us. What was right in front of us seemed so, incredibly, lucky.
What’s beyond the now that I am in, only he knows.
This is the last official letter in this project. I might sneak a few extra letters in throughout the year, so feel free to stay subscribed if you like.
For your readership, support, and witness, I am so grateful. Thank you for being here with me.
Amy, our thoughts have been on you this week as you approach this particularly painful milestone. It is strange to think that one year ago we didn't know who you were. From the very first post, we were drawn deep into your story and over the course of this year have grown familiar with your journey, your pain, your life and love. Thank you for sharing yourself with us at such a deep and vulnerable level. It has been a gift we have cherished. Our hearts continue to hold you in care as you journey onward. May you be sustained by the compassionate care of your family and friends. You are a precious person and we wish you a future that finds light, love and hope. Never stop writing. - Russ & Yanna Conway, Halifax, NS
It’s a weird thing to say, but it’s been wonderful reading these newsletters because I felt like you’ve really expressed the grief, pain, isolation and the impact it has on the life of the person left behind. At times, I’ve felt my grief seen by your words in ways my friends and family cannot, and it has helped me to know that I’m not alone in the trenches. I wish you well, Amy. Thank you for writing this newsletter.