#kiah

Kiah was one of the kindest, funniest, intellectually curious, loving, and fiercely protective people I have ever met. I loved that we could talk about anything, including the terror of living in a failing body or how to come to terms with being disabled when you were always an overcommitted overachiever who defined yourself on external metrics of success, analyze media together during watch parties, and laugh together about literally anything (including during our last conversation, where we were both bawling our eyes out, but also somehow laughing about how absurd it is that you can’t really cry hard and talk at the same time and how that seems like a real design flaw). We didn’t share any fandoms, but we still had fun sharing details about our blorbos and fandom activities: I loved hearing about their cosplay adventures, and they always wanted to keep up to date on the metas I was writing. Even once they went blind and couldn’t read my metas on tumblr anymore because it wouldn’t work with their screenreader, they had me send them Google doc versions so their computer could read my posts to them because they didn’t want to miss any of my analyses. And when they were too sick to listen to the full posts, they asked for summaries because they still wanted to keep up as much as they could. 

They were always so caring and compassionate: when they first called to tell me in January that they were going to do medical assistance in dying, and after I had told them I understood and supported them and we’d talked about how they felt about it, they asked me how I was. I had told them that while I was heartbroken, I would handle it, because I didn’t want to make them feel responsible for comforting me when they had their hands full with processing everything and feeling their own grief. They said that while they appreciated my not wanting to make it harder on them, they didn’t want me to feel like I had to be ok in front of them, because they wanted to comfort me and support me even in this if they could, since they didn’t have that much time left to be there for me and they wanted to make it count. (yeah, I’m sobbing right now.)

None of those descriptions could even begin to do justice to how much they meant to me, but I hope this anecdote will:

I couldn’t be with them at the end because I’m a country and an opposite coast away, but I hated the idea of not being able to say goodbye in person or hold their hand if they were scared during the injection. So I played piano and imagined they could hear it.

Most of you probably won’t know what that means or why it would be a big deal. Here’s why:

I used to be a musician. Music was my life and my most important means of self-expression, and was absolutely going to be my career. But in high school and college, an extensive series of very traumatic things happened that made me essentially have to give up performing. For the better part of the last 18 years, literally up until I sat down to play for Kiah, even just the idea of performing for someone or a neighbor overhearing me play was triggering enough that I would have a full-blown panic attack and dissociate so badly I would literally go from concert pianist level ability to mostly forgetting how to read music and having to count ledger lines. But my desire to do something so that maybe, just maybe, I could make Kiah’s final moments better apparently trumped my trauma, because I was able to do it. I had wanted to play some Rachmaninoff, Brahms, or Chopin, but apparently those are still too closely tied to Events and I started to have skill loss issues again (fucking dissociative amnesia), so I switched to a piece I had played long ago enough that it was reliably in my mind and fingers (and that I could sight-read if I forgot it partway through). 

And I played it.

I hope, somehow, they were able to hear it.

I also recorded it.

And I’m going to share it here.

It kind of feels like serving my heart up on a platter, but that feels kind of appropriate for this tribute to them. 

I think they’d be happy, knowing that I’m “doing it scared,” as Tumblr recommends, and that my attempt to give them the biggest gift of love and support I could think of, somehow, even if just temporarily, gave music back to me.

Also, I think they’d get a kick out of the fact that you can hear me giggle a little at one point in the recording when the sheet music falls on my hands, both because it’s a great middle finger to perfectionism, but also because laughing through the tears (and yeah, I was crying while playing this) is very much a chronic illness and disability thing, and feels like a good metaphor for much of the last few months.

So. All that to say:

Kiah, I love you. I miss you so much already.

Here’s Robert D. Vandall’s “Lakeside Retreat.”