I can’t think of a title for this post so I’m going with – shit, how can it be eleven years since Matt died?

I’ve been thinking about Matt a lot recently and I feel so lucky that I have a whole bunch of his words to read. His writing was as precise, smart and funny as he was in person, so it’s a conjuring trick of sorts – I can magic him back for a while. I have the worst memory, so to read through our joint LiveJournal (I had forgotten we ever did that – what a curious thing that we did) is to visit a place in time where for a couple of years Matt and I entertained each other online. His posts were a mixture of words and pictures, someone cancelled his Photobucket account so the drawings are lost forever, but the words remain. His replies to me were witty and wise. His advice still feels relevant today and it’s a bittersweet pleasure to revisit a world where he was very much alive.

i see everyone as holding a sealed envelope with a date on it…….the good thing is to see the inevitable conclusion as a call to be as much alive as possible, which i think is the best possible use of death phobia. It would be, and is, so easy to give up and see it as the ultimate in wet blanket and never bother doing anything else again…. but surely then every minute and every second should be made to count and have the fullest meaning wrung out of it………. Not everyone can handle an awareness of death, and actually gravitating towards it as a disposition, as perhaps i do, is wholly off the menu for most people..too scary…too debilitating….too deathy. All the work is being done one way or another..Some think of death, some of beer, still others of pupae and fauna..and what stories we’ll have to tell on the other side…
I was greatly struck by this conversation with my dentist:
DENTIST: “You might well die of cancer……..and you know why that will be?”
ME: “No.”
DENTIST: “Because you didn’t die of something else.”

Matt Kinnison 7/12/2005

The older I become the more I feel like there’s this clatter of dead people in my heart/mind and sometimes it’s fine and sometimes it’s distracting and sometimes it makes me feel lonely. Perhaps not lonely, maybe nostalgic for lost relationships. I imagine there’s a word for that feeling, but I don’t know what it is. True connections in life are rare and I’m so pissed that I don’t get to speak with Matt any more but remain truly grateful for the words we had, the words I still have.

I send love to all who knew Matt and all who navigate lives with loss.

(Picture of Matt by Matt – on the front on an envelope containing a letter that he delivered to me “by hand”.)