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Christopher

Noxon

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Yahrzeit

A year has passed. It feels like 20. For everyone, sure - but for us especially. That makes it sadder, somehow. I want the time when he was here to not be so far away. I want him closer, always.

A friend told me the other day he was sorry our tragedy was so rudely preempted by a worldwide pandemic. I told him it’s fine, really. Yes, our loss has now become that awful thing that happened just before the epic year of uncertainty and upset and grief. But I see all that and I think: yes, exactly. The outsides match the insides. Loss is loss. There’s plenty to go around.

I’m less OK with the anniversary falling on this day. All our future New Years, all our Winter Wonderdays are now shot through with his absence. Then again, it’s not like there’s a better day. Every day is now overlaid with this dark filter. That’s just the way it is now. It’s like how when people apologize for bringing up Charlie. I explain it’s not like I’m NOT thinking about him. It’s better to mention him often, keep him in the world, have the outsides match the insides.

We had a lot of back-and-forth about the epitaph. We agreed to include a quote from Talmud that Charlie liked - he talked about maybe getting it as a tattoo. “The world was made for me” on one arm, “I am but dust and ashes” on the other, quoting the Talmudic teaching about carrying those messages on slips of paper as a constant reminder of one’s simultaneous importance and irrelevance. That feels very Charlie. If it was good enough for skin it’s good enough for stone.

We had a harder time with the other message. We wanted something personal, something that summed up Charlie specifically. Oscar, bless his 15-year-old heart, suggested the following:

Charlie Noxon: Extraordinary Human. Mediocre Skier.

Oof, right? Solid joke - but I was really not looking forward to seeing that joke every time I went to visit. Thankfully, he was kidding - in the same way he and his siblings constantly razz one another, and us—about how Charlie mispronounced words (ORGY!), or how he licked his lips in that weird way or how I wish I was Black, apparently.

“That’s what love looks like,” says Eliza.

The epitaph we went with is not a razz but a callback. Credit to Jenji for coming up with it. To explain: when Charlie was 11 or 12 we took a family trip to Ireland - he was in his full chubby-pubescent, newsie-cap phase. One rainy day on the Ring of Kerry we drove out to a nature preserve. Charlie wanted to stay in the car and read his book, but we insisted - this wasn’t optional, and we’d brought a bunch of exotic Irish candies as bribes. Charlie wasn’t having it. As we trudged up a grassy ridge he got madder and madder, hollering at us red-faced about the unfairness of it all. Near the top, I turned around and looked and the clouds had parted and you could see shafts of light coming down on these impossibly green fields, with flocks of fluffy sheep and glittering lakes and, no kidding, TWO full rainbows.

“CHARLIE, LOOK!” I said, triumphantly. “It’s BEAUTIFUL!”

He turned his head, gave the scene a quick look and announced:

“Beauty only lasts ten seconds. Then it’s just familiar.”

That became a favorite story, part of our family lore - Charlie’s Hike Rage. It was partly funny because he wasn’t really wrong—beauty does have a way of becoming ordinary. Also, we’d apparently forgotten the lesson from that Alaskan cruise when the kids were little: children could give two shits about scenery.

So sure, yes Charlie: beauty is brief. Yours was full of insight and humor and sweetness and soulfulness. And yes, it was all-too-brief. Unfairly, cruelly so. But your mom is right to use this epitaph to correct you on one thing—your beauty did not last ten seconds. We never got sick of it. It grew and expanded and deepened in your life, as you went from soulful child with fabulous Jew-fro to stupendously smart man who could do anything you put your mind to. You had some of my childlike wonder and some of your mom’s courage to call bullshit, and a whole lot ELSE that was all yours, all Charlie, forever beautiful. And we will miss you for the rest of our lives.