The Brightest Light in My Young Life

Amir at 16

A few days ago, I was notified that someone had left a comment on this blog. I opened it to review, not expecting to see the words of a childhood friend who had only just learned Amir had died. Adam, thank you so much for reaching out and sharing stories about Amir! After 10 intensely painful years without him, it fills my heart to know people loved him and still think of him and remember him, just as I do every single day of my life.

From Adam:

"I learned today that my childhood friend Amir passed away more than a decade ago. I have done many online searches for him over the years, and figured he was just not someone who wanted to be found. Maybe he chose not to be on social media. Maybe he was living abroad. I had no idea.

Since the recent LA fires, I have been going through old family photos and preserving everything as digital records. I came across a photo of Amir... in my bedroom, in Granada Hills, CA, around 1984, and it brought back so many memories.

I may have met Amir at a summer camp one year, but I don’t really know where we met. We became great friends. Amir was always my creative friend. I did things with Amir that I would never have done with anyone else.

For example, we worked for weeks on a digital newsletter of sorts. We used my mom’s Apple II era computer and the original Print Shop software and wrote the “ALAP Times, Fun with Adam and Amir” (Adam Lieberthal & Amir Prizant). We did a number of these and then watched as the dot matrix printer slowly published our greatest works, recounting our fun times together.

Amir was all about creation in one form or another. Over at his place in Chatsworth, we would make puppet shows with his dolls. Amir had what I remember as being a legit, Jim Henson issued Kermit The Frog. We would get into those shows as if those puppets were our good friends and we would make them talk and laugh and we had so much fun in that creative space.

Amir introduced me to an entire world of recorded music. We would listen to his records for hours. King Crimson, Gentle Giant, The Outlaws, Yes, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, and early Genesis were just some of the bands that I listen to a lot, and every time, I think about Amir and his passion for music and the fact that he was the one who introduced me to them.

For better or worse, I had my first positive recreational drug experiences with Amir. We would get high in his bedroom and laugh our asses off. We were on the same page. We shared the same experiences. We were really in sync. We laughed and laughed and didn’t even think about it. 

After eventually crashing out, I fondly remember waking up to a giant breakfast! Amir’s mom would make this spread that I had never seen! My family never did anything like this. We had eggs and toast and all the fun stuff for breakfast! Amir had a special affinity for muenster cheese. I had never even heard of muster cheese, and I thought it was so funny, just the name alone! Amir would fold his muenster cheese carefully over and it would break apart and he would relish in the flavor of each little broken piece. I still love muenster cheese and I will buy packs of slices and break one off, bit by bit, bite by small bite, and watch the cheese crease eventually break apart at the seam, just like Amir did and I think of him every time. Muenster cheese on an egg scramble? Yes please. Oh, you have Muenster cheese for my sandwich? Yes please! And every time through my entire life since probably age 8, it’s Amir who is in my mind.

Amir was one of those friends that I didn’t hold onto long enough. For whatever reason, we drifted apart. I saw him twice since the golden years, I don’t know which event came first. Once was at Tower Records in Northridge. I worked there for a few summers during college. I worked in the classical room. I went there one day, a year later after my stint as an employee, and there was my friend Amir, with his name badge and everything, working where else, in the classical room! 

We really were soul brothers. I wish that I had nourished our relationship more. Maybe I felt threatened by his other close friendships. He was so personable and easy to get along with. Maybe I didn’t feel like I could compete. That’s my own racket. But after reading all these beautiful comments, I really wish more than ever that I didn't let was turned out to be much too much time go by.

This one goes out to the one I love. This one goes out to the one I left behind.

This one goes out to my friend Amir. Rest in Peace, my brother. You were the brightest light in my young life. Thank you for your kindness and creativity. And I love you. Always have. Always will."

Ten Years Gone*

10 years today. I've written so much about Amir over the years, yet today I can't find the right words. Marking 10 years is no different from 9 years or 11 years or 50 years - my heart aches as profoundly today as it did from the first day we were forced to live without you and it will never not ache. Grief does NOT get easier. My brain may have become accustomed to not seeing you, not talking to you, not making plans with you, not sharing our day-to-day lives. But your absence never gets easier to accept. Days go by with no tears, but they are always just underneath the surface, waiting for the simplest trigger to coax them out. (Usually a random song playing in a supermarket, or a '70s-model car rolling by, or the merest mention of Sesame Street or Star Wars, or the enlightenment gained from a music podcast or documentary that I'd give my left arm to be able to share with you.)

Listening this morning to music you loved that recalls so many memories of how we'd listen together, on the floor in front of the stereo, in the car on road trips, in the backyard, at parties with childhood friends and cousins. Recalling you dancing around the living room as a kid, mistaking lyrics, calling me into the den in MTV's infancy, sitting rapt on the couch as we embraced the exciting new frontier of music videos and waited impatiently for our favorites to air.

If I could lock away all my memories of you in a safe place that I would always be able to access without any fear of them fading as time moves forward, I would pay any money to do so.

I've aged 10 years without you here, visible and mental signs of which have been accelerated by your loss and the giant hole it has left in our lives. And yet somehow we go on without you and will continue to do so, diminished at times but also grateful and emboldened to make the most of this life.

*one of many Led Zeppelin songs Amir loved (as do I)

Crumbs of Peace

Isn't that a lovely term? "Crumbs of peace." A fellow member of my bereaved siblings group uses this term to describe little signs and winks she receives from her dead sister. Those of us who have lost someone so precious to us find comfort in our own "signs" that they are near - a particular bird, a song on the radio, a feather drifting past, a flicker of lights, a penny or other coin found on the street. For me, the first of these signs came on New Year's Eve, 2015 - one year after Amir's death and only 5 months after Jason's - when a framed photo I have of the two of them that rested on a bookcase in my old apartment suddenly hurled itself from the shelf and landed at my feet as I glanced it while walking past. No joke. I don't believe in an afterlife or anything like that, but in that moment, I felt like the two of them were either (a) fucking with me for a laugh, or (b) letting me know they loved me and were still with me. That is a crumb of peace, which I cherish.

It's April again, a month that should include celebrating Amir's birthday WITH HIM and not just sadly imagining who he would have been. I don't need a birthday to celebrate him - I do this in my own way every fucking day. He should have been 48 this year. I'm sure I'll want to write on the 7th, but for now, it's Monday and work beckons.

Still, I awoke feeling mournful, the "Aprilness" setting in - that familiar sadness that creeps in at the start of a season so ripe with blooming and rebirth. Grieving feels infinitely heavier when life is blossoming all around. It's a heaviness that's hard to express to anyone who's not experienced it.

Since Amir's death, one of my most treasured possessions has been his blue/green hoodie, which I have worn only at home but nearly every day in the chill of the fall-winter-spring months. (I think it’s the one he’s wearing in the photo.) It no longer smelled like him or even like his cigarettes; still, washing it for the first time was painful, as if I was erasing him in some way. Sadly, my precious piece of Amir has become so worn out that I decided to retire it before it lost its former shape completely. 

Amir's hoodie is now carefully folded and resting in a box filled with letters, cards and other trinkets from Amir – the box that means more to me than anything else in my home. My own crumb of peace.

If We Love, We Grieve

My beautiful brother would be, should be, 47 years old today. I have not written here in two years, partly because it’s not easy to find new ways to express my endless sadness at living without Amir all this time. 99 months without him. How could I even attempt to describe the enormous void in my life where my brother, my precious second sibling, should be? 

Amir's birthday is a day to celebrate his life, not his death, and to imagine who he would have been as he aged - a reality we have been sadly denied.

For over 8 years, I have struggled to put my feelings into words that would do justice to how deeply I miss him every single day. So, as I’ve done countless times when my own words fail me (an instance that is happening with more frequency as I inch ever closer to my golden years), I will turn to the words of others that perfectly describe my ongoing sorrow over my brother’s absence and what I've learned and continue to learn from it:

Dr. Edith Eger: 

“We grieve over not what happened but what didn’t happen.”

This is what I think of as “the grief double-whammy”: it’s our own grief over losing them and missing them, plus the grief we feel for them and for everything they are missing out on. This is something I did not understand in the slightest until I experienced profound loss. And I never could have imagined that it gets more pronounced with the passing of time.

Marc Maron (talking with Stanley Tucci):

“It's interesting that you bring up absence, because that's what becomes really hard to understand, is that somebody was here. And now you live with their absence for the rest of your life. And it's almost active and it's always there – that absence. You grieve, you move through things, your heart heals, your mind heals, maybe you move on, but that absence is so profound because all possibilities are gone.”

When I heard Marc Maron say "all possibilities are gone" during this interview on his podcast, I absolutely felt it in my chest. It is one of the heaviest parts of grief to grapple with: there are no possibilities for Amir to become what he wanted to be, no possibilities for him to be part of our lives, no possibilities for us to spend time with him again.

Nick Cave:

“It seems to me that if we love, we grieve. That's the deal. That's the pact. Grief and love are forever intertwined. Grief is the terrible reminder of the depths of our love and, like love, grief is non-negotiable. There is a vastness to grief that overwhelms our minuscule selves. We are tiny, trembling clusters of atoms subsumed within grief's awesome presence. It occupies the core of our being and extends through our fingers to the limits of the universe. Within that whirling gyre, all manner of madnesses exist; ghosts and spirits and dream visitations, and everything else that we, in our anguish, will into existence. These are precious gifts that are as valid and as real as we need them to be. They are the spirit guides that lead us out of the darkness.”

Michelle Obama:

“It hurts to live after someone has died. It just does. It can hurt to walk down a hallway or open the fridge. It hurts to put on a pair of socks, to brush your teeth. Food tastes like nothing. Colors go flat. Music hurts, and so do memories. You look at something you'd otherwise find beautiful… and it only somehow deepens the loss. Grief is so lonely this way.”

Grief is so lonely, indeed. And surprisingly, it only deepens over time, as we get farther and farther away from the time he was here with us. The road ahead without him seems impossibly long and empty, but we push forward as best we can, missing him every step of the way and left to only imagine who he would be.

Rotisserie

Our beautiful Amir should have reached age 45 today. I'm still in disbelief as I type that sentence. He will always be 38. Losing Amir and living without him never gets easier, the hole in our hearts never gets smaller and the enormous void in our family never goes away. Who would he be at 45? Would he be happier? Healthier? Thriving? Surviving? Where would he be? His absence is felt every single day of our lives, in countless, unimaginable, indescribable ways.

When I think of all the visits and conversations we'd have had and the memories we'd have made over these past 6 years, I am physically shaken by the thought of how much we have missed. This is torture. I don't advise anyone deeply grieving to explore those thoughts. It hurts too much.

I read this quote in the NY Times a few months ago, about a man who lost his wife and children in a plane crash in the '70s: "His life was utterly bifurcated by the accident. There was Act I and Act II."

I know this sad truth so well. The profoundly different second act of our lives began on that horrific Saturday, November 22, 2014. The first act is a sublime, vivid, essential catalog of memories. But there are no more memories to be made with Amir. That heartbreaking fact will never be acceptable or understandable.

That said, I am ever grateful to have those vivid memories. Here's one that makes me smile often: Amir was 6 or 7, we were in a restaurant with our parents and we were studying our menus when Amir declared he wanted the "RAW-di-serry" chicken. I doubt he'd ever seen the word "rotisserie" nor did he know what it meant, but he was eager to show off his advanced reading skills and his grasp of multi-syllable words. To this day, whenever I see the word "rotisserie," I can only hear it in my mind as "RAW-di-serry" -- the result of a proud attempt by a whip-smart kid to impress his family with his growing vocabulary.

Amir, we miss you more than any words could express. Friends, please conjure your own memories of Amir today - remember a funny moment, something brilliant he wrote or said, the warmth of his smile, his silliness, his wit, his unmatched Amir-ness. There is no one on this earth like him, nor will there ever be.

Incomplete

Recently, a fellow bereaved sibling told our group that he felt he'd lost the "one true witness" to his childhood. This statement has stayed with me, lingering in my brain for weeks. Yes, I still have my sister and we share infinite memories of childhood. But Amir was a vital witness, a third keeper of our childhood memories. Without him, so many memories are fuzzier, so many incidents and events are lost to our minds. We will forever be lacking his voice speaking truth to the lives we've lived. Losing a sibling closes the window to so many memories and certainties. Yael and I have lost a witness.

On that note, I was recently thinking about the line "You complete me" from the movie Jerry Maguire. Even seeing it (with Yael) in our 20s, I found that line ridiculous, thinking even then that no partner or lover would ever make me "complete." My siblings completed me. I believed that from a young age. Much as I adored my late husband Jason and the huge role he played in making my life fuller, he did not make me "complete."

My siblings made me complete. And, without both of them, I am simply... incomplete. Like a jigsaw puzzle missing a piece. I am incomplete and I will be until my last day.

That leads me to a podcast I relate to hugely: Last Day, created by Stephanie Wittels Wachs, who lost her beloved younger brother and only sibling. Her wonderful podcast delves deeply into the painful subjects of addiction, mental illness and suicide. In a recent episode, she said of herself and her parents, "We used to measure time in weeks and months and years. Now, there were two categories: before he died and after. And everything that came before suddenly felt futile."

This resonates with me every single day of my life since November 22, 2014. The before and after is stark, drastic and profound. I look at photos of Yael and my parents and I from before Amir died and we look like different people, people untouched by the immeasurable pain and relentless grief that would mark the rest of our lives after that unimaginable November day six years ago. I miss those people and those full lives more than I can possibly express.