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Christopher

Noxon

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Dear Charlie (on your 22nd birthday)

Dear Charlie,

Hey kiddo! Dad here, writing to you at 3 am on a Wednesday, up with my fuzzy emotional support dog snoozing against my leg and a big mug of ginger tea and the feeling that I’ve spent way too much time ruminating over this TRIBUTE I need to deliver to you in my Grief Group tomorrow.

It’s freaking me out. What I’ve been stuck on is HOW. I don’t want to do a speech or PERFORM anything. I don’t want to pick out emotional songs for a memorial playlist, or make anything that turns you into some kind of mythical figure.

Point is, there’s simply no way to get across all the ways you’re important to me, or the ways you were unique, or what your passing has meant to your brother and sister and friends and so many people beyond.

It’s all too much.

Our hearts are shattered. They always will be. That’s just what we get, After Charlie (AC).

But you don’t need to hear about all that SADNESS. We’ve had enough of that in the last 500 days. 502 to be precise. That’s a lot of days, and God Charlie so much has HAPPENED - a global pandemic, civil unrest, attacks on democracy, fires and floods and ever more evidence that the world is spinning closer and closer to some kind of Great Unraveling.

I said it a lot in the months after your death but it’s still true: your passing seemed to kick off a cascading chain - things got knocked off their foundations when you went. The normal order is out of whack, all over.

Thank God the family is mostly OK. Not that everyone’s not damaged and fucked up, obviously. Grandpam died back in March and that was as painful and drawn-out as your death was shocking and sudden. But as we approach what would’ve been your 22nd birthday, it feels like everyone’s fine, knock wood. No one got COVID - and Bubbie beat her pancreatic cancer and will probably outlive us all.

You should see Oscar - he grew like two feet and started WORKING OUT - he’s now almost as tall as you and looks like some kind of soulful Tim Riggins jock. Plus he’s getting all-As and just got his driver’s license and has an actual girlfriend, a nice Jewish girl from the Valley who plays guitar in an inde rock band and does KARATE. He still gives the best hugs ever and is free with his feelings about losing you, but basically, yeah - he’s killing it at being a teenager… in a way both you and your sister never quite managed. You’d be proud, and prolly a little jealous.

Eliza spent the year of lockdown holed up in New York, doing a Zoom job for the Jewish Book Council, then went back to Brown over the summer and seems to have hit her stride. Just like you seemed to take every course that sounded hard and impressive-sounding, she’s taking everything weird and wonderful. She’s designing her own major: “interdisciplinary artistic practice,” which sounds impressive but will hopefully allow her to keep on using her Ivy League education to do things like build wooden boats, make fires with electronic instruments and decorate a porta-potty on campus with streamers and pom poms for an immersive theater project called “Porta-Party.”

Also she’s been dating a little - she doesn’t share much, but I take it she’s worked her way through two guys in her Dungeons and Dragons campaign - one of whom is a THEY. So that’s very intriguing, tho I guess just how it goes these days? You’re always on her mind.

Now this is sounding like one of those braggy Christmas letters. And why am I bothering: don’t you KNOW all this already? Aren’t you following along? Who am I trying to IMPRESS?

I guess I’m doing what I do when I visit your grave. Telling you the latest family news keeps you in the mix. And something tells me you ARE still aware of us, still keeping tabs, still PRESENT somehow. I picture you at camp or maybe on a fellowship in some remote spot in China. I can feel you smiling, hearing all this. And that makes me feel a little better.

But this is not a Christmas letter and you are not in China - this is meant to be a TRIBUTE to you, Charlie, the Remarkable Human. I know I’m your dad, plus you’re dead, so there’s every reason for me to overstate and lionize and romanticize. But come on - You really were EXCEPTIONAL. You spoke Latin and Mandarin and a fair helping of Hebrew, you worked in a university robotics lab at 16, you read everything from trashy fantasy novels to St. Augustine, you loved babies and dogs and your mother.

You were also clinically depressed, deeply contrary, painfully argumentative and seemed entirely unsure and anxious about what to do in the world. I’ve been reading over some of your schoolwork, and from those essays in philosophy it’s clear you KNEW you possessed a brilliant mind - but it’s also clear that beyond getting everyone around you to ALSO recognize your brilliance you had NO IDEA AT ALL what to DO with that mind.

But hey: that’s what being 20 is all about. You were figuring it out. (And for what it’s worth I’m 52 and still don’t know what I’m going to do when I grow up.)

No matter what you ultimately decided, there was never any doubt about who you WERE. Through all your stages and phases, from the soft curly-haired boy slurping noodles… to the weird tween practicing violin in his pajamas and Ninja mask… to the tall gracious man wandering the streets of New York puffing a Dunhill… you always had the same basic Charlie essence - thoughtful, warm, cordial, goofy, a little troubled. You came into the world apologizing and asking permission and ruminating on how things worked.

And mostly, that big brilliant brain of yours led you to rational, scientific conclusions. No one would have described you as mystical or woo-woo. I remember the day we stopped off at that place in Oregon, the VORTEX HOUSE OF MYSTERY, where the normal rules of reality supposedly go haywire - balls roll uphill and short people appear tall, like that. Eliza and I were all in, excited at the spectacle and open to the weirdness. Not you, no way. You arched that eyebrow, crossed your arms and answered every mystery with a rational, probably quite correct, explanation.

But whether or not you believed in it, you had magic in you. You possessed powers. I know it.

You were a sucker for fantasy and world-building and the supremacy of imagination over so-called reality. As a kid, it was all about trains - so many hours spent splayed on the carpet, connecting tracks, rolling those bright wooden models around. Then it was LEGOS and BIONICLES, robots and vehicles and structures you built and displayed and swooped around the room. You moved on to that crazy complicated card game Magic: The Gathering and then the irritatingly addictive World of Warcraft video game and then all those other games and anime worlds.

But I have a special place in my heart for the summer you got into closeup magic - remember that tutor we found you, who came to the house to teach you how to palm cards? Somewhere in your room there’s a stack of business cards your aunt Blair gave you for a birthday printed with the words: CHARLIE NOXON: MAGICIAN.

And it’s true.

The real proof is these stories that turned up a few months after you died. I first heard about one in particular in a taped conversation between your classmates at Columbia - your girlfriend Izzy sent over a few. The one about Jesus returning to the earth is amazing, and did you hear the college literary magazine published it a few months ago?

But the one I keep thinking about is called “Again.” It’s set in the afterlife. It begins: “The first time Elmer lived again, he stuck mostly to the way things had been.”

So this guy Elmer is a regular schmo who dies and is given the choice to run through his life again, moment by moment, from birth to death, as fast or slow as he likes, until he dies and comes back to a stucco, fluorescent-lit room, facing a desk with figure known as the capital-R Receptionist. The Receptionist welcomes him back and asks whether he’s “ready to proceed.” He can either go through a door to the unknown, or return through the door from which he came and run through his life again, as an observer, unable to alter any of his experiences.

The story follows Elmer as he recaps again and again, lingering on favorite moments and learning to speed through painful or boring portions. He learns to fast-forward through childbirth and the toddler years - “you only ever want to do that once,” he says - “the crying, the fighting, the near constant smell of your own shit” - and then to slow down and savor the best parts. He spends a month in an orgasm.

The story is written from a distance, describing how Elmer comes to operate in this newexistence. There’s just one fleshed-out, dramatized scene. It comes right at the end of the story. Elmer is seven years old and on a skiing vacation with his grandpa. The story goes:

“Coming down a slope, grandpa weaving a path behind him, Elmer closed his eyes. Everything was passing too quickly. The trees were blurs. The snow was shiny and fresh, scattering shafts of sunlight over the scenery. It’s too much. Little Elmer closes his eyes, because the darkness makes sense.”

The first time I read that scene I stopped cold.

It’s CRAZY you wrote that a year or so before your own fatal skiing accident. I wondered: is it a clue? Maybe you were up there on that mountain and you felt the same way Elmer did - maybe you shut your eyes because it was all too much and ONLY THE DARKNESS MAKES SENSE?

But I don’t think so, honestly. There’s no part of me that thinks you were that foolish or that you wanted to die. We’d just spent a solid week together and you were in such a good place, happy and confident and full of promise and joy. You were shushing down a sunlit mountain on a clear beautiful day. Your lovely and amazing girlfriend was texting you cute memes and sweet messages. It was New Year’s Eve. We had massages booked.

You were not Elmer.

But what you were was a really good writer, and a builder of worlds, and somehow in writing that story I think you folded the field of time and space and foresaw some of the circumstances of your own passage. You made a story out of it.

And that gives me hope. Hope that there is more than the raw emptiness of your absence, that the past and present and future are not as fixed and inescapable as they seem, that maybe there really is a world in which you are not gone at all.

It also offers an answer to my never ending, nagging question: WHAT DO I DO? By which I mean, how do I turn the loss and shock and incomprehension and self pity into something REAL going forward? How do I keep that precious Charlie essence alive in the world?

Some things seem obvious. I’ll keep talking about you and sharing memories. I’ll resist the urge to treat you as a Thing Too Painful to Mention and keep your pictures and stories around. I’ll keep saying kaddish and showing up for others experiencing loss. I’ll treasure Eliza and Oscar and do everything I can to be there for them in their grief and growth, never putting your absence ahead of their presence, feeling your love for them in our times together.

I can also keep your essence alive by simply doing the things you did, learning from your example. Like how you used to buy strangers cups of coffee. Or take long aimless walks in the city. Or seek out old people and little kids at parties. Or take care to share little pleasures with those around me, whether that means sending giddy texts when it snows or preparing fancy expressos for visitors or gifting friends with bags of exotic Yuzu gummi candies.

And I won’t forget that story. How you reached into the future with your imagination. In the story, Elmer crashes and breaks a leg - he doesn’t die. But from that scene, you flashed to the Receptionist, who asks whether he wants to go over it all again, relive and recapitulate his life, or if he’s ready to proceed to Whatever Happens Next.

“I think I’m ready,” says Elmer, at last. “Here goes nothing.”

It’s a great ending, kid.

I love you.

Always,
Dad.