The Long Night of the Soul

“Alright, I’ll talk to you later. I love you. Bye.”

The last words my brother ever said to me.

I keep replaying them over in my mind, searching for something. I’m not sure what. Maybe I’m trying to convince myself that goodbye was the real goodbye and somehow he knew it. That conversation happened about 2 hours before a car crash took Ryan’s life. I was on my way home from my best friend Peter’s house and I wanted to play video games with him, of all things. He told me he was busy, but that later tonight he would love to play, and that he would talk to me later. And that he loved me. And goodbye. It all felt so…normal. And then, it wasn’t.

Today marks 2 months since we lost Ryan. The words still feel surreal to type. 

Actually, everything in life has felt surreal in the past few weeks, like a terrible nightmare. 

I have to fight to keep that conversation in the forefront of my mind. “Alright, I’ll talk to you later. I love you. Bye.” If I’m not careful, the words of his girlfriend from 2 hours later infiltrate my mind. “Ryan was in an accident,” “He didn’t make it.” I end up dwelling on the conversation that I had to have with my brother and sister and my dad and my mom and my wife telling them what happened. I think about calling Ryan’s best friend Gelb, unable to convey the loss of a person’s chosen family. On those nights, the entire experience of loss has felt like a battle between memories; Between the light and the darkness.

It’s the long night of the soul.

Recently, a writer that I really admire named Jonathan Tjarks was diagnosed with cancer. You can find his CaringBridge page here and donate to help his family with medical bills @mktjarks on Venmo. Jonathan writes about the NBA mostly, which if you know me at all is a thing I am extremely passionate about. After a few months of struggling with illness, cancer was finally the diagnosis that made sense. He writes eloquently in a piece from a few months ago about the idea of facing death entitled The Long Night of the Soul. In it, he says this about death:

“The five-year survival rate for people with osteosarcoma whose tumors had spread to distant parts of their bodies is 27 percent. The same number for people with Ewing’s is 39 percent. It wasn’t just that I could die. It’s that I probably would…It’s different when it’s right in front of you. You think about your life. About all the things you still want to do. About the people you could be leaving behind. And you ask why. You ask why a lot…I don’t know when the long night of the soul will come for me again. I just know that I will turn to my faith in that moment. It won’t let you face death without fear. But it’s the only thing I’ve found that helps.”

I gave the eulogy at Ryan’s funeral a few weeks ago, and in it I talked a lot about this idea of faith. I talked about how faith is just synonym for trust, and how the question that Jesus has always been asking you and me is simply “Do you trust me?” I’ve had so many conversations with so many of Ryan’s friends and family about faith - about trust - as people wade into the waters that are life without him.

On those nights where the darkness wins, where I cannot close my eyes and hear my brother tell me that he loves me, and the loudest thing in life seems to be “He didn’t make it,” there is also another voice. It is described in the Bible as a “still, small voice.” A whisper. The voice of my Jesus, asking a simple question: “Do you trust me?”

Boy is it hard to trust.

I know that the topic of this blog is typically movies… we’re getting there.

Ryan was the quintessential little brother: floating through life unscathed by the mistakes of his brothers before him, endlessly talented, and such a pest. But he was only a pest because in reality he just wanted connection with Austin and I. He craved it. 

Ryan and I had always been able to bond over sports early in life, but in the recent months before his death, Ryan and I really began to bond over movies. He asked me for a list of movies that he needed to watch, and I gave him this list of 30. He started watching them incessantly. He would text my other best friend Logan and me every night to tell us what he thought of this movie or that movie. He LOVED Knives Out. He was mesmerized and haunted by Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men. He thought Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid were the two coolest dudes to ever walk the planet, probably because they are. It makes me laugh that the last movie that boy ever watched was Green Room, an indie horror movie about Neo-Nazis that I recommended because I knew it would trip him out.

The day after the accident, I found myself just sitting at my house with Logan with nothing to do. So we decided to watch something. I didn’t recall it at the time, but the movie we picked was actually one of the ones that I had put on Ryan’s list, and I’ve recommended it here on this blog before. The movie is called Kubo and the Two Strings. It’s the story of a young boy who goes on an epic quest to find a mythical armor and challenge an evil moon god. At least that’s the plot summary. The movie’s lesson is actually about love and loss and what we do with love that we have nowhere to place anymore… grief. I cried a lot watching Kubo that day, probably because Logan and I had both completely forgotten what the point of the movie was. Logan even admitted that he thought about turning it off at one point. But we sat, and watched, and cried, and it was cathartic. It was so cathartic, in fact, that I sat my mom and my brother and my stepdad down the next day to watch it again. I’ve watched it twice more since then. I think I keep watching it because at the end Kubo learns about “the most powerful kind of magic”, that is, our memories of the ones we’ve lost.

I so badly want those memories to be complete; like a Criterion Collection of times Ryan and I had together. But so much of it is just fuzzy. I look at pictures of us hiking in Alaska and I wonder what we talked about. I watch videos just to hear his voice, and I want desperately to know what happened in the seconds immediately following the end of the clip. A lot of the time, I just can’t remember. 

But I remember how Ryan made me feel. Like I mattered. Like I was a good big brother, even when I wasn’t. Like none of life’s details were too small for a phone call. Like I was worth fighting for.

Yes, in the long night of the soul, I can still remember exactly how Ryan made me feel.

That truly is the most powerful kind of magic.

Me (Left), Ryan (Top), Gelb (Right) and my wife, Lydia (Bottom) at Harry Potter World