Nov. 3

If my cousin Jeremy were still around—if he hadn’t died suddenly 10 years ago today at age 20—my guess is that he’d be a lot like a lot of the young entrepreneurs I meet all the time in Philly, the ones who own the new bars that become neighborhood staples or the water ice stands that morph into local chains or the home-improvement businesses that go from one employee to a dozen in a matter of months.  Jeremy could sell you the ink for a pen; he actually did it once in grade school, after he sold the ink-less pen to a less-enterprising student.

Of course, he’s not here, and he’s never going to get to open a bar or start a water ice stand or run a home-improvement business—or meet the nephew who will have to settle for a middle name in place of a lifetime of memories.

I’ve spent a lot of time over the last decade trying to make sense of Jeremy’s death, which has gone about as well as you might expect.  I’m not an everything-happens-for-a-reason person or a we’re-all-going-to-a-better-place-after-we-die person, either, which pretty much leaves drinking and crying and listening to Bruce Springsteen and drawing inspiration from how his parents and sister have kept living and fighting and honoring his memory.  Because frankly, if it happened to my kid or my sister, I don’t think there’d be enough alcohol or tears or Bruce to keep me functional. 

But sometimes, when I can stand to think about it a little more, my mind turns to Jeremy’s life and not just his death and the what-ifs.  J was a “cool” kid, both in the sense that he was fun to be around, and in the sense that he made lots of friends.  And as a kid who wasn’t so cool (in any sense), I was both awed and jealous of him.  Particularly as I entered my teen years, I assumed his life was better than mine, that he must be happy because he was so good with people. 

That sounds so absurd now that I can barely write it, but having a limited sense of how the world works is pretty much the definition of adolescence.   What makes it so painful all these years later, though, is that, as someone who loved J, I didn’t get how he suffered.

For as good as J was with people, he struggled in school.  A lot.  He had a learning disability, which made it hard for him to read and slowed his academic progress. 

To be sure, J was smart, but that only made it worse.  For one thing, it made it easier for him to mask his struggles.  I didn’t realize for a long time how hard it was for him to read because he could repeat books from memory.  But on a deeper level, it must have been hard for him to understand so well exactly what he couldn’t do and why it mattered—but to have so much difficulty doing anything about it.

I didn’t get this when I was 16 because I didn’t get much when I was 16.  But I can’t imagine how much J’s struggles must have weighed on him.  I can’t imagine how hard it must have been for him just to graduate from high school—which he did—or get into college—which he did—knowing all the while that, no matter how hard he worked, every step along the way was going to be so much harder for him than for others.

I wish I could go back in time and tell him that it’s OK, that we all struggle at some things, that I love him and admire him for who he is—a loving son, a protective brother, the only person I know who committed all of “Shawshank Redemption” to memory—and not to worry about all the rest of it because, by the time he’s 25, he’s going to be the wealthiest and most successful of all his cousins.  I wish I could tell him that who you are when you’re 15 or 20 is not who you are when you’re 30, and thank God for that.  I wish I could give him a hug.

But I don’t have a time machine, and I don’t have any way to make any of it less senseless or painful or heartbreaking.  All I’m left with is pictures and memories and alcohol and tears and Bruce.

And that horrible phone call I got at work when my dad told me that J’s mom had just called him and said, “Jeremy’s not alive anymore.”