Elliot B. Quick

Elliot died the evening of Wednesday, February 19th. He texted me in the afternoon saying he couldn’t come to dinner that night. He had a stomachache, and said I could cook a mushroom dish in his absence. Elliot hated mushrooms. 

Later that evening, while walking his dog, he fell down in the street, and died. 

On Thursday, February 20th, at 5:02pm Charlotte called me. I thought she was responding to my earlier text about misplacing my keys. She was sobbing. Elliot is dead.

Elliot is my friend from college. We met performing in a student written musical where Elliot played the villainous director of NASA, and I played a mutant secretary with a tail.

I lived with Elliot after college. He would hang frozen crabs outside my window when I was behaving “crabby.” Elliot was terrible at brushing his teeth. Elliot let me sleep in his bed when I had a rat in my apartment. Elliot would sometimes ghost for days on text messages. Elliot once came over and inspected my apartment for ghosts when I discovered my stovetop burner was on for 6 hours while we were at the Guggenheim. He didn’t leave me till we solved the mystery of the burner. Reality: I bumped into my stove while looking for my keys that morning and my butt turned the burner knob on. Elliot brought me to the doctor when I had food poisoning and stocked my kitchen with soup broth and gatorade. Elliot preferred a soggy bottom pie. Elliot was a dance enthusiast and very sweaty. My second to last conversation with Elliot was about breaking up with my boyfriend. Elliot told me he was proud of me, loved me, and that he wasn’t going anywhere. He died two weeks later.

’Friend’ is not the correct word to define/qualify our relationship. I don’t think the proper language exists. He is also a love, a brother, a parent, a collaborator, my proofreader, and on many various medical forms that I filled out in the last 4 years, my ICE contact.

The theater company that Elliot was a founding member of, Piehole, published a beautiful article attempting to define Elliot’s work as a dramaturg. A belief held by everyone he worked with was how undefinable his work was. He was one thing, and everything. 

Two weeks after Elliot died, I locked myself out of my apartment while doing laundry. Elliot had my set of spare keys. I had just showered. I stood outside in the the rain with my wet hair wrapped in a towel wearing my LL Bean slippers. I think this made him laugh.

I want (and still crave) instructions/guidebook on how to grieve his death. The seven stages of grief aren’t doing it for me. It’s not linear. I still would like to know where in the process I am, and how I am doing. Does a yearly evaluation exist? 

My Mom told me I would have a weird year. She said I would start to see Elliot around. I’ve often felt his presence, but I’ve only seen him once. He was walking down Fulton Street across from my apartment. I trailed him for a few blocks before I turned away. He’s only appeared in one dream. 

I consulted the internet on how to process my grief. Google kept recommending two books, When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chödrön, and Joan Didion’s, A Year of Magical Thinking. Didion’s book is about the year her husband and daughter died. She started writing it a year after his death.The clerk who helped me find these books at the bookstore was also a stand up comedian. Her best friend died a year ago. When people ask her why she died her hair pink, she replies, “It’s grief!”

Most of the literature on grief is written from the perspective of family members, or romantic partners. I struggled finding “how to grieve” guidebooks/memoirs about friendships. There is a wikihow article. I did not find it helpful. I also watched The Big Chill. Great soundtrack. Weird movie. They barely talk about their dead friend (Alex – a young Kevin Costner) in the movie.

Elliot’s memorial was supposed to be on Saturday, March 14, 2020. It was cancelled due to stay at home orders. The call to cancel the memorial was made on Thursday morning, March 12th. 

Every article about grieving talks about the importance of spending time with loved ones. In Joan Didion’s A Year of Magical Thinking, she talks about how grief can be made more complicated and a “pathological bereavement” can occur when the grieving process is interrupted by “circumstantial factors” such as a delay in the funeral or second illness in the family. I imagine a world wide pandemic also fits into this category. Didion wrote Magical Thinking in 2005. She specifically references the moment after the 1918 pandemic as a time when grief and death were taken out of the home. Overcoming, rather than experiencing grief, became lauded. She notes English Social Anthropologist, Geoffrey Gorer’s essay Death, Grief, and Mourning,

“To treat mourning as morbid self-indulgence, and to give social admiration to the bereaved who hide their grief so fully that no one would guess anything had happened.” (p.60)

We don’t, as a society, talk a lot about grief. Perhaps because grief is awful. And isolating. It is not a universal experience. I’m not sure if anything is. I expected sadness, not anger. Elliot once told me reading certain author’s descriptions of love made him feel alien because it was not how he experienced love. 

I’ve heard that grief is love with no where to go. I also believe it is a deranged party. You usually know everyone invited, and think/desire everyone to be enjoying the same experience. However someone is puking in the corner, two people are making out on top of a person who passed out, one person is having a delicious manhattan in the kitchen, your best friend never showed up, and someone is snorting cocaine in the bathroom. You are having incongruous experiences while sharing the same space. It’s isolating and maddening.  (#clubgrief #rsvp#exclusive)

In the weeks after Elliot’s death, I was angry with everyone at the grief party. Friends who I love deeply. I felt jolts of rage throughout my body accompanied by tears, screaming, and crying. I was terrified. I needed help and wanted everyone to be having the same experience to help process Elliot’s death. I sought refuge in people who did not know Elliot because I had no expectations of their grief, they could not disappoint me.

Pema Chödrön sat by the ocean and wrote When Things Fall Apart during a year long sabbatical. When I started reading the book last February I thought, “Who the fuck has a year to sit by the sea and do nothing?” 

I left Brooklyn on March 15th to take a week vacation in the finger lakes. The two books I took with me were Chödrön’s and Didion’s. The pandemic continued to rage in NYC and my job became low key illegal. I ended up staring at a lake for three months. Life has a sense of humor.

Death and grief in a tech age are weird and complicated. People can feel less dead because they are still “live” on the internet. The night I found out Elliot died my instinct was to call his cell phone to hear his voicemail and scream “I love you, I love you, I love you.” I half thought he might pick up. Elliot’s instagram and Facebook page are still “live.” Sometimes I visit them. There are videos of him teaching on youtube. I sometimes watch those. It took three months for gmail to stop suggesting that I add his name to various emails. In July I received a WhatsAp notification, “Elliot B. Quick has left the conversation.” My iPhone holds each text thread for a year. Today is my last day with Elliot.

For most of the world it felt like everything stopped in March. For me, it stopped on February 20th. Friends/Family/Loves of Elliot had a three week head start on time stopping.

In October, I got out of the shower and I started to cry. I missed Elliot. I looked up, and asked him if he wanted to come back. I could feel him look down, survey the political, cultural, and climate landscape, chuckle, and say, “Nope!” I started laughing. Apparently you can make jokes with each other in grief. I still hear his voice. And know his response. I’m afraid of losing his voice in my head. His guidance, love, and wisdom. I will grow old, and he will stay 35. Much like a vampire. I look forward to having Elliot as my advice giving vampire best friend.

Didion writes, 

“People who have recently lost someone have a certain look, recognizable maybe only to those who have see that look on their own faces. I have noticed it on my face and I notice it now on others. The look is one of extreme vulnerability, nakedness, openness…These people who have lost someone look naked because they think themselves invisible.” (p.75)

Paul Simon writes, 

“Losing love is like a window in your heart. Everybody sees you’re blown apart. Everybody sees the wind blow”  (Graceland)

In the last year there have been 493,000 deaths in the U.S due to the corona virus. It’s an enormous weight of grief. We are going to be at a deranged party for a long time full of naked/invisible people morphed with holes that the wind is whipping through. I think we need to be gentle with ourselves, and each other.

It’s been a year. I’ve reached no revelatory conclusion or relief. I walked past Elliot’s apartment a few weeks ago and discovered a new tenant living in his space. I feel stuck in February 2020, but physical changes remind me that time is passing. Many things we’ve lost or been unable to do in this past year will come back. Elliot won’t. And this has been the hardest thing to reckon with.

Elliot was often my proofreader. (Less, Fewer). I’m throwing this into the world without his eyes and preemptively apologize for the offensive grammatical errors that I am certain exist. I love you EBQ. I miss you always.