I Found My Own Elegy in His Drafts
My friend had written my mourning in advance; I read it alive.
There is no etiquette for finding your own funeral in a dead man's notebook... I checked.
The grief books cover everything else, the casseroles, the paperwork, the first birthday without them, but nobody tells you what to do when you turn a page in your best friend's drafts and see your own name under the word Elegy.
Dev died in February, pancreatic, four months from diagnosis to the phone call I took standing in my socks in the hallway because sitting down felt like agreeing to it. He was fifty-two. We had been friends for thirty years, since a university poetry society that met above a chip shop and smelled permanently of vinegar and ambition. He became the real thing, two collections, small but serious press. I became a man who wrote on holidays and told people at parties that I used to write, in the tone you'd use for I used to smoke.
His wife, Priya, asked me to go through his study. You're the only one who can read his handwriting, she said, which was true, and also, I think, a kindness dressed up as a chore. She knew I needed a job to do inside that house or I would just stand in his doorway breathing in the smell of him, instant coffee and old paper and the cigarettes he swore he'd quit in 2019.
The study was chaos in his usual filing system, which was archaeology. Drafts on the desk, drafts on the floor, a plate with fossilized toast. On the narrow bed in the corner, where he napped and claimed he was composing, there was one notebook lying open with a pen resting in the gutter of the spine, as if he had just stepped out and meant to come back to it.
I sat on the bed and picked it up, and that is where I found myself.
Elegy for M.
Except he had crossed out the initial, in the final draft further down the page, and written my whole name.
I want to be honest about the order of feelings, because the order matters. First: confusion, flipping to the cover to check it was his notebook. Second: cold. An actual temperature change, reading line after line about my own laugh, described in the past tense.
He had my father's stubbornness in it, my terrible parallel parking, the way I hum when I am pretending not to be upset. He had me dead and buried in nineteen lines and the craft was immaculate and I sat there alive on his bed... being mourned.
Third, and I am not proud of this one: fury. I drove home without the boxes I'd promised Priya and did not answer her call. It felt like theft. It felt like he had rehearsed the worst thing that could happen to me, starring me, without asking.
You do not get to grieve a living man. You especially do not get to do it beautifully.
The Date in the Corner
It took me three days to look at the photograph I'd taken of the page, and when I finally did, at two in the morning, phone brightness all the way down like I was doing something illicit, I saw what I had missed. Dev dated everything, a tic from his archivist mother.
In the corner, in his cramped hand: 14 November 2011.
November 2011 I was in a cardiac ward with a heart infection the doctors kept using the word aggressive about. I was thirty-seven. There was a week, they told me afterwards, when it could have gone either way. Dev drove up every weekend, four hours each way, and sat by my bed doing the crossword out loud and complaining about the coffee machine, and never once... not once... looked frightened. I remember being grateful for that. I remember thinking, at least someone in this room believes I am not dying.
He believed no such thing.
He had gone home from that ward and written my elegy, all the way to the end, every terrified thing he could not say across a hospital blanket, and then he had folded it into a notebook and come back on Saturday with the crossword and his steady face. He grieved me in advance, in private, in pencil, so that in the room where I needed him he could be calm.
The poem was not a rehearsal of my death. It was the price of his composure, paid where I could not see it.
He had already grieved me once, quietly, in pencil, so that when my turn came to be afraid he could stand beside my bed and not shake.
I called Priya at eight the next morning and apologized for the boxes. Then I told her what I'd found. She was quiet for a moment... and then said, He read a poem at his father's funeral that he wrote two years before his father died. I thought you knew. That's just what he was. He kept his fear in drafts.
That's just what he was. I have thought about that sentence more than any poem this year.
Here is the part I did not expect.
Reading your own elegy is supposed to be morbid, and for three days it was, and then it became the most useful document I own. Because Dev was precise. He did not mourn a generic friend. He mourned my specific ridiculous humming, my parking, my stubbornness, which means that in 2011 he sat down and made an inventory of what he would miss about me, and I got to read it while I can still do something with the information. Most people get their reckoning read over a box.
I got mine early... with time left on the clock.
So I did something with it. I finished the study for Priya, every drawer. We sent the strongest unpublished poems to his press, and a few of the stranger, tender ones I posted to a community wall for poets, where strangers who never met him started leaving lines back, which he would have pretended to hate. I spent a while reading profiles of writers nobody had heard yet and thinking how close his early work came to staying in a drawer above a chip shop. And I started writing again myself, actually writing, not party-anecdote writing, because it turns out that reading a good man's account of your death is a powerful argument against wasting your life. Most of what I write now circles grief one way or another, and I have stopped apologizing for that.
Last month I finished the only elegy I will ever write for Dev. It took me eleven drafts and none of them are beautiful the way his were, but the last one is true, which he always said was the harder trick. I dated it in the corner, the way he would have. Then I did the thing I had been circling for weeks: I copied out his elegy for me, and everywhere he had written my name, I wrote his.
It fit almost perfectly. The humming, the stubbornness, the refusal to look frightened. I had to change so little that I sat on my own bed with the notebook and the pen and understood that he had known that too. Thirty years of friendship and the drafts were always about both of us.
He wrote my mourning in advance. I read it alive.
I intend to stay that way a while, out of spite, which is the tribute he would have liked best.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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