![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Dec. 27th, 2012 10:31 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eleanor_lavish(I originally posted this on Saturday morning, but my LJ is flocked and has been for years, and I thought this should go here instead.)
I have to admit, I'm still processing this. I'm heading to my dad's today - I have to tell him about Jason too, since they spent an Easter together back on JJ's Couch Surfing tour in 2007. I'm sure the waterworks will start soon, but right now I'm just numb.
My comfort through this will be that Jason himself always firmly believed that the ones we love never leave us. He talked about spirits and ghosts and past lives in a way that sometimes made me uncomfortable - I was raised a good Methodist! We didn't think these things! But his own spirit was always so full of life and joy and love, and he talked about these things with such conviction that I believed. I believed that, for Jason, spirits were always with him. As my own religious ideas shaped and formed over the past decade, I came to a place where I believe that God isn't an entity separate from us, that God is the light, the joy, the love that binds us to one another, that binds us to the natural world, to the past and the future. The more connected you are to people, the more love you put out into the world, the more God is present in you. And when you die, that spirit of love and joy and hope that lived inside you moves into alllll the spaces and hearts and minds you were connected to, so that you DO live forever, in those people, and in the people they love and bring joy to.
If that's how God works, then Jason was one of the most holy people I ever met, and he will be missed and loved and carried in the hearts of more people than I can ever count.
Aaaaand, there are the tears. I knew they were in there.
Again, I'm sorry if you're hearing this from me, and I'm sorry to James and Ri and Z and Mitch and all those who were closest to Jason who, I'm sure, are reading what I just wrote and wondering when the good remembering will outweigh the heartache. I'm wondering that too. But I'm also thinking that the burst of love I have for all of you (and my family and my RL friends) that is telling me to hug each and every one of you and tell you I love you and thank you for being part of me is Jason, working through me to say "I'm still here, don't be ridiculous."
This week, I shall watch the AAR documentary and the LOTR films, and I will eat a banana and pet my cat, and think of J. I will miss him something fierce, but I'll also think that, just maybe, when my cat sits on my hands while I try to type on my laptop, that will actually be Jason saying "See? Now I can snuggle with you up close and personal any time I want," and I will smile.
ETA: It's Thursday now, almost a week, and I'm still not okay with this. LJ helpfully informed me today that JJ's birthday is coming up - he would have been 29 on Saturday. This was too soon to lose someone so bright and shiny, but maybe I'm thinking about this wrong. Maybe JJ spent the holiday with his mom, and with all of us, in a way that would have been too hard for him in life - too exhausting, too painful, too much.
I have a lot of little memories of JJ that I will keep in my heart - the most exciting was the night of the fire in my apartment, when tiny JJ (who hadn't slept at all, nightowl that he was) and Sky and I huddled outside my apartment while the fire department put out a massive fire in my building. We, and all of our stuff, were miraculously unharmed, and JJ praised me for my cool under pressure, even though I was a mess later that day. The little ones, though, are better memories - the train ride we took to my dad's for Easter (he was so excited to travel through Jesse Lacey territory!), snuggling on my bed telling stories, freaking out over LJ about AAR, laughing in a fangirl (and boy - though he wasn't through that journey yet) pile in my living room.
I feel so, so lucky to have known him, and will miss him for a long time.
(I am actively terrible about taking pictures of important things, so I'm asking - if people who were at my house for that Oxford Weekend back in the summer of '07 have any pictures, can you pass them my way? I never think I'll need them - I like to live in the moment, damn it! - but then things like this happen and I do.)
I have to admit, I'm still processing this. I'm heading to my dad's today - I have to tell him about Jason too, since they spent an Easter together back on JJ's Couch Surfing tour in 2007. I'm sure the waterworks will start soon, but right now I'm just numb.
My comfort through this will be that Jason himself always firmly believed that the ones we love never leave us. He talked about spirits and ghosts and past lives in a way that sometimes made me uncomfortable - I was raised a good Methodist! We didn't think these things! But his own spirit was always so full of life and joy and love, and he talked about these things with such conviction that I believed. I believed that, for Jason, spirits were always with him. As my own religious ideas shaped and formed over the past decade, I came to a place where I believe that God isn't an entity separate from us, that God is the light, the joy, the love that binds us to one another, that binds us to the natural world, to the past and the future. The more connected you are to people, the more love you put out into the world, the more God is present in you. And when you die, that spirit of love and joy and hope that lived inside you moves into alllll the spaces and hearts and minds you were connected to, so that you DO live forever, in those people, and in the people they love and bring joy to.
If that's how God works, then Jason was one of the most holy people I ever met, and he will be missed and loved and carried in the hearts of more people than I can ever count.
Aaaaand, there are the tears. I knew they were in there.
Again, I'm sorry if you're hearing this from me, and I'm sorry to James and Ri and Z and Mitch and all those who were closest to Jason who, I'm sure, are reading what I just wrote and wondering when the good remembering will outweigh the heartache. I'm wondering that too. But I'm also thinking that the burst of love I have for all of you (and my family and my RL friends) that is telling me to hug each and every one of you and tell you I love you and thank you for being part of me is Jason, working through me to say "I'm still here, don't be ridiculous."
This week, I shall watch the AAR documentary and the LOTR films, and I will eat a banana and pet my cat, and think of J. I will miss him something fierce, but I'll also think that, just maybe, when my cat sits on my hands while I try to type on my laptop, that will actually be Jason saying "See? Now I can snuggle with you up close and personal any time I want," and I will smile.
ETA: It's Thursday now, almost a week, and I'm still not okay with this. LJ helpfully informed me today that JJ's birthday is coming up - he would have been 29 on Saturday. This was too soon to lose someone so bright and shiny, but maybe I'm thinking about this wrong. Maybe JJ spent the holiday with his mom, and with all of us, in a way that would have been too hard for him in life - too exhausting, too painful, too much.
I have a lot of little memories of JJ that I will keep in my heart - the most exciting was the night of the fire in my apartment, when tiny JJ (who hadn't slept at all, nightowl that he was) and Sky and I huddled outside my apartment while the fire department put out a massive fire in my building. We, and all of our stuff, were miraculously unharmed, and JJ praised me for my cool under pressure, even though I was a mess later that day. The little ones, though, are better memories - the train ride we took to my dad's for Easter (he was so excited to travel through Jesse Lacey territory!), snuggling on my bed telling stories, freaking out over LJ about AAR, laughing in a fangirl (and boy - though he wasn't through that journey yet) pile in my living room.
I feel so, so lucky to have known him, and will miss him for a long time.
(I am actively terrible about taking pictures of important things, so I'm asking - if people who were at my house for that Oxford Weekend back in the summer of '07 have any pictures, can you pass them my way? I never think I'll need them - I like to live in the moment, damn it! - but then things like this happen and I do.)
