Dear John

Well, they say the beauty  of the Internet is that everyone has a printing press — and I say the shame of it is that everyone doesn’t have an editor. I usually say that, but since no editor picked up this piece I submitted  (even though I admit in the article for feeling a bit guilty for profiting — not in dollars, but in byline points– by having it published), I’m just bypassing all that and posting it here — the long, rough first draft that I first spilled out, with no thought of column inch requirements or need to slow down and explain the context. I know the context all too well, and if you’re reading this, so do you.

Dear John

I don’t want to write about my dead best friend.

Would you? You try finding the topic sentence when the theme is “dead best friend.” We had just got used to using the term “best friend” without feeling like turf-claiming 10^th graders or MySpace nerds. We were no longer worried about what people at work would think, but still I felt a little squirmy saying it, like I was trying too hard to convince everyone and myself that you, the social hummingbird, had slowed down long enough to declare me best friend and make room in your crowded life for a housewife from Bailey’s Crossroads. But you had, on a hot summer day that was perfect for such adolescent pronouncements. It was a Thursday, early afternoon, and like two seniors skipping school, we were speeding down the highway in your ex-boyriend’s Lexus (the ex-Lex) with the Scissors Sisters blaring and the windows down to accommodate your cigarette and my wild- armed dancing. That’s when we decided that just because we rarely saw one another after 7 p.m. or out of work attire, our shared manic neediness, twisted sense of humor and soft, soft wounded hearts trumped any clubbing or happy hours. We joked about making a blood pact on the spot, but worried the pricked fingers might look weird at the publisher’s pool party to which we were already late. It was a thrilling tiny thing. At 33 and married, you really don’t expect to find another best friend so quickly and easily, especially when he starts as your annoyed boss. You most certainly don’t expect to lose one just as fast.

It’s been two years since you died two months before your (first) 39^th birthday and two months after your first marathon. The words of encouragement and votes of confidence keep coming: “You really should write about John.” “Just get it down on paper.” “You have such a way with making memories so real, so alive.” “Whatever you write will be good.”

Good? I want to scream, “How could writing about John’s death at 38 be good?” And while I know they mean well, they’re a bunch of liars: No matter how many newsroom dance-a-thons I describe in Britney-pelvic-thrust-level detail or CSI-like descriptions I give of calling the medical examiner’s office for autopsy results on what would have been your birthday, it still doesn’t seem real. I could recount every last second of that terrible weekend when your voicemail filled up and stopped taking messages and I, in a cruel irony, found a parking spot right in front of your building and yet those memories will be as dead as you were when I banged on your door that Sunday night, recoiling at the sight of two untouched Washington Posts piled up in the hallway.

It’s not as if I’m uneasy about pawning off my intimate, difficult truths for publication. My dad’s death when I was 6, my mom’s belligerent, violent and heartbreaking redneck boyfriend, arrests and addictions in my family, marrying my boss, my obsessive working out, delirious adventures in Skinnyland and dysfunctional family outings to Chuckie Cheese – they’ve all been coughed up for public consumption in just about anything with a masthead.

And it’s not as if I struggle with introducing you as the dead best friend. I’ve made plenty of those introductions. It usually goes like this: Casual work acquaintance: “Oh, is that your husband in the pictures with you and your mom? You look so cute together.” Me: “No, that’s my dead best friend, John.” That usually leaves them speechless. I know how they feel.

But the biggest obstacle? You. You were my toughest critic. You would have called me on the shameless, too-easy “Dear John” headline. “Not another father figure/men-leaving me-too soon memoir from Amanda,” you’d have thought – and said as much with one bored exhale. Stop using high school metaphors and get a new gimmick, you would have told me. You always said that’s all we needed to get a book deal. That kid who published all his junior high notes – a gimmick. All those nanny tell-alls and year without shopping/sex/TV tomes, gimmicks all of them. We had just seized on ours — a children’s guide to growing up redneck and were going to flesh it out over Twizzlers and the “Facts of Life” DVD you’d bought me for Christmas on the Saturday night of that weekend. But instead of deciding if “Buying cigarettes for mommy” was still a viable chapter, I was trying to ignore the thought that ran like a ticker around my brain as I did aimless laps around Target: Something is wrong. Something is wrong. Something is wrong.

I was right. But your death as my gimmick? That has to be wrong.

And another thing: I’ve written plenty about your death, starting with the at-first glib and increasingly frantic e-mails I sent you Saturday and Sunday, already sensing you’d never answer. The note I left on your door, scrawled in Wet and Wild lip gloss because I’d optimistically forgotten a pen, thinking you’d answer the door, sheepishly apologize for ditching me for a last-minute trip to New York. I wonder if the police have that now or the condo supe grabbed it when he opened your door when we finally called the cops Monday morning. All the e-mails that day – to your boyfriend in India on business, your sister, your exes, your accountant, therapist, trainer, former editors and fans, two obit writers (with your hot, but serious Miami picture attached). And the follow-ups were the worst: No, we don’t know if it was suicide. No, I don’t think it was. Then the next night, when, in a coincidence you’d think “Six Feet Under” worthy, my husband told me he’d heard about an online memorial site at work (the benefits of being an AARP wife) and could help me set up a site. It seemed so maudlin and I joked about it being the online equivalent of those roadside crosses with their tragic teddy bears fading in the rain. But I loaded it with content and invited your disparate worlds to light candles, pay tributes and gush without worrying about me editing their exclamation points or bad poetry. That page also opened me up to what I think of as scab-picker e-mails, the ones that would come months and years later from people just learning you’d died. They’d been blissfully still orbiting Planet John, confident they’d run into you again at P-town bar, on a Brazilian beach or in a writers’ workshop. And then someone would tell them about the site and they’d come hurtling into my world, reminding me how I felt when I came crashing to earth.

I’ve started this letter three times now. I’m full of emotional specificity and apt metaphors at the beginning and then I get to here. And nothing. There’s no closing to tie it all up nicely or lesson learned. You’re still dead and I still don’t have the ending I want.

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