GRIEVER's EXCHANGE // Friends Forever
A recommendation filed under friendship, the permanence we sometimes imbue it with, and the space it takes in our lives—both before and after the physical people who occupy those spaces are no longer physical.
My mom is at a stage in her life when lots of her friends are dying. Many of those who are not dead yet are notable for not being dead yet. “Bernice is still 103,” she told me yesterday. Of course, we can lose our loved ones at any age or at any time in our lives. That’s why most of you are here right now reading this. But there is also a distinct part of our lives—provided we hang in long enough to make it there—when our friends, peers, and literal and figurative siblings all meet their end in what probably feels like a 20-car pile-up on the interstate.
Hua Hsu was no where near that time in his life when his friend Ken died. No where near. Hua, a New Yorker writer and the author of a new memoir of growing up and grief called Stay True, was a senior at UC Berkeley. It was the mid-90s; he and Ken and the rest of their friends were going to unironic strip malls and industrial loft raves and making mixtapes and eating cereal for dinner and watching MTV and indie films.
Most memoirs of grief get death out of the way early on, and then focus on the desperate search for ground under one’s feet and whatever eventual lessons come from looking for and/or finding it. But Stay True isn’t most memoirs of grief. First, we take a long, slow quietly rambling time getting to know young Hua and the friendship-like connection he has with his father, which is frequently played out by way of homework advice and band recommendations transmitted via fax machine after his father moves back to Taiwan. Then, Hua mixes reportage with self-reflection and a little nostalgia as he narrates his first college years: a stretching out of and into old and new sensibilities. Discovering and uncovering through zines, internships, dorm rooms, and lit class reading lists.
And then—about halfway in—an unlikely friendship begins to develop between Hua, an indie rock outsider/insider in thrift store shirts and Ken, the San Diego mall dude who likes the Dave Matthews Band. They make a weird pair, a fact that’s both the defining quality of their friendship and completely incidental to it. Sometimes there’s no making sense of the people we connect with, maybe especially in our college and young adult years, and Hua doesn’t really try. He just remembers: the colors, the songs, the styles, the the moments. Gently, fondly, rhythmically.
By the time Ken dies—suddenly, shockingly (this is not a spoiler)—you are more than two-thirds of the way through Stay True. By that point, you’re waiting for it. There’s a foreboding—maybe something like what my mom feels on the average Tuesday, where nothing and no one is certain or taken for granted. Where the absence of those who have shown us who we are is not an absence at all but a presence. A palpable feeling in the middle space of every room we enter.
And, also, by the time Ken dies there is a sharp awareness that all of this is happening (or has happened—although with great writing the past falls away and all is present) way too soon.
“Friends forever,” we wrote on notebook covers, envelope backs, in yearbook pages. One of the privileges of being young is the naïveté of death. We take risks and do dumb shit not because we believe we’ll never die but because we just don’t think about dying at all. Ever. Until something terrible happens, and then we do.
But friends really are forever. So are brothers and sisters and moms and dads and grandparents. One of the first things I learned about death and everything that comes after it came after losing a staunch and gentle soul in 2006 or so to an accidental overdose. “Your relationship with her doesn’t have to end, it just has to change,” another friend told me and he would know, being a great thinker and feeler who had lost his mom years prior.
I think the same is true of friends we lose to disagreements, to lifestyle changes, to cross-country moves. The depth of pain and aloneness in these losses can seem to be in a class of its own. But/and, the capacity to continue on in some way—to honor and preserve what was there—is deep, too.
I still talk to Elena, I still think about the sandwich she ordered when I drive past a certain restaurant in Georgetown, I still wear a shirt she gave me to sleep in. I’m still mad that I don’t have a cassette tape of the time we tried to write and record a few songs in her boyfriend’s practice space. My ongoing relationship with Elena connects me to a time and place when friendship mattered most. When friendships didn’t always make sense or even make life any easier, but they told me about who I was and who I could be. Remembering that era helps me remember myself, helps me remember that I still want and need that kind of mirror in my life now, even though or especially because life in general is more complicated and cramped and challenged.
I imagine it’s that way for Hua. I’m curious if it’s that way for you. I’m going to start writing “friends forever” on envelopes again.