Loss

My cousin Randall was killed in a car accident yesterday. He was 27 years old.

It hurts to write that. Writing it makes it real, and I don’t want for it to be real. My brain cannot make sense of it. My brain cannot make this jump; it doesn’t want to. And I don’t want to either.

I don’t want to have to come to terms with the fact that my cousin is gone. And that he’s not coming back.

I didn’t know it was possible to feel so much loss for someone who, in many ways, I barely knew. I can probably count on one hand the number of times that I’d even seen him in the last 5 years. But despite that, I’d known for years that on some level we had connected; I’d recognized him as a kindred soul a long time ago, and I knew it was just a matter of time before we developed the friendship we were clearly meant to have.

When we were kids, I thought he was a brat: the annoying, mean “brother for a week” I had to put up with when we went to visit the relatives. My cousin Julie was the one I hung out with—Randall was just the older brother who spied on us and made fun and did all the things that older brothers do.

Then, for a number of years, I didn’t really see my cousins. We took vacations to Disneyland, New Orleans, San Francisco. We didn’t go to South Carolina.

When we finally did, I was a sophomore in college and was shocked to discover that we had all grown up. The mean older brother was now a grown man: smart, kind, funny. A bit of a smart-ass, just like me. Randall had become the kind of person that I wanted my friends to eventually marry. He had become the kind of person that I wanted—desperately—to be friends with.

Even though there were a million things that I didn’t know about him—or him about me—I knew that we were supposed to be friends, that he was supposed to play a role in my life, and I in his. Ever so slowly, we began taking baby steps towards building that friendship.

We wrote e-mails. Sometimes we’d shoot them back and forth in a flurry of thoughts. Other times months would go by without a reply. We were busy, but always, eventually, the thread got picked back up and we continued.

He talked about coming to San Francisco to visit. He never did; my crazy work schedule meant I wouldn’t have any time to spend with him. I talked about coming to hang out with him at the beach house at Easter. I never did; he changed his mind about coming home, staying in Lansing, at school, instead. It made me sad not to see him, but I didn’t worry. “All in good time,” I’d tell myself.

Randall was family, and I expected he’d be in my life for a long, long time. It never occurred to me that in one moment, an 18-wheeler could change all of that.

Tomorrow I’ll fly to South Carolina for the funeral. I die a little inside every time I think about it. If words on paper can hurt this badly, then what kind of pain will tomorrow bring—when I have to really let go of someone who had come to mean so much to me?