By Casey Lawrence
Content advisory: death, suicide, grief
Dear Jordan,
If I ever write a memoir, there will be a scene in it where I find out about your death. It was my dad’s custody weekend. The whole ride home was tense. Mom sat us down on the couch Sunday afternoon and told us about the stray bullet that killed you in your sleep.
Schoolmates aren’t supposed to die when you’re ten years old. They just aren’t. Not anywhere, but especially not here, where most people have never even seen a handgun up close. That’s American stuff. That’s movie stuff. That isn’t real.
I’m still messed up about it twenty years later. Caskets aren’t meant to be covered in Spiderman stickers, is all I’m saying. And once you’ve seen that, a part of you is different forever. That’s not your fault, but sometimes I think your death opened a crack in me that never really closed.
2005
Dear Clayton,
I can’t go to Crystal Beach without thinking about the accident. Both my brothers have your name tattooed on their backs in a paintball splatter. It looks like blood and I can’t stand it. Red ink was a bad idea.
Teenagers get drunk all the time. They kiss their brothers’ friends in the basement. They climb flagpoles. They are reckless and stupid and confusing and angry and cry during their German final when they can’t keep a lid on their grief anymore.
I really wish you could’ve gotten to grow up.
2012
Dear Tim,
In my memory, you’ll always be the empty seat at the table, which feels like a messed-up thing to say. You’re a panic attack during my big presentation. A disconnected phone call. The spot beside the vending machine where I pressed my hands to my eyes so hard I saw stars.
I do feel bad that I turned you down for that drink. I have to believe that wasn’t one of your 13 reasons, or else I might throw myself off a bridge. Oh fuck. That’s a bad joke. I just forgot, for a second.
You’re the sort of person who would have laughed, though. And then asked me to cheat on my partner with you. Because you were down for everything. I hope you’d be okay with me fictionalizing my reaction to your death in a novel I wrote, because I did do that. Except you’re a girl the main character loves and also sort of her shitty boyfriend. Sorry.
2017
Dear Sheena,
We lost touch after high school, so I never got to tell you about the crush I had on you in grade nine. Your friends were the sort of mean girls who would have made my life hell if they knew. But you would have let me down gently.
It’s hard to wrap your head around a healthy 26-year-old dying. Not as hard as an eight-year-old kid getting shot, I guess. But hard. Strange, like a gear clicking out of place, or a bone. A Facebook obituary. Instagram montages. A photo of me in the background and you lighting up the sky.
2022
Dear John,
Your mom texted me to say that you had gone peacefully in your sleep. I suspect it was one of many texts she sent to your contacts, not singled out specifically. I wasn’t that important.
I watched a video of you spinning. Just spinning to get dizzy. A big group of us, arms out, spinning in the sand at Lakeside Park. I watched it over and over. Just to get dizzy. To feel 14 again and remember the sound of your laugh.
You wearing those bright red stiletto heels at the mall. And Alix coming out, and you hugging him. And when I came out to you, Emmaline and I holding hands at your birthday party. The way you brightened. I’ll miss that smile forever.
2024
Dear Tobias,
A world away. Oceans of distance. Another one of those text messages, the kind that makes your heart drop into your shoes. “By his own hand.” Nothing we could have done from here. But still, the guilt. The “what if’s.”
In my memory, you have flour smudged on your nose from rolling dough for pizzas. We were eating raw basil leaves while we waited for them to rise, too impatient. A snapshot.
There’s a hole a life leaves, no matter how briefly your worlds collided. Eighteen months. Slipping into the used bookstore in Haga. Fika Wednesdays. Thrifting. A party or two. Brief, in comparison. Yet I’ve lost hours of sleep, days of work. I walk to the park and turn my face to the sun, wishing.
What if, what if, what if.
2026
Casey Lawrence (she/they) has a PhD from Trinity College Dublin. After taking a five-year hiatus from creative writing to pursue her doctorate, Casey published her third Young Adult novel with JMS Books in 2023. She is from Ontario, Canada and is happily married to her partner, Rhys. Her fiction and poetry have recently appeared in Polar Borealis, Polar Starlight, THEMA, and SuperCanucks. Find her on Bluesky @myexplodingpen.bsky.social.