The sobriety chips and the copies of AA and NA in your backpack.
The drugs and the needles still in your bathroom drawer.
The things I wish I’d known, the things I knew but didn’t say, the things I knew and said but should have said more.
The couch in the living room where you died that no one will sit on but me.
We gather in there one afternoon as Iris eats her afternoon snack. It’s the time of day when sunlight pours through the curtains and paints everything in warmth. Surrounded by boxes, giant trash bags, and piles of things to Give, Donate, or Keep, I sit on the couch, while Mike and Mom sit on the floor. Iris wears a T-shirt that says Oh Happy Day and stands facing the couch, using it as a table for her crackers—a mix of water crackers and graham crackers. She has arranged them in a straight line. A few tiny bites in, she realizes that she has a round cracker in each hand but wants one of the square crackers in front of her. Instead of setting one of the crackers down and picking up another, she opts to bend at the waist and grab the cracker with her mouth like a little baby bird so now she has a cracker in each hand and one in her mouth.
“Oh, my god!” Mom cries.
All of us are immediately engulfed in laughter. Because she shares your comedic DNA, our positive feedback motivates her to do the bit again, and it lands even harder the second time. We quickly hit can’t breathe, tears pouring out of our eyes, falling on the floor levels of laughter because here she is, this totally oblivious baby, eating graham crackers off a couch that a person died on a week before, which isn’t at all funny but simultaneously so funny and exactly what we need.
It’s the first of many times that Iris will save us from ourselves.
• • •
We spend one full week in LA, staying at your house with you not in it. Mike and I are literally sleeping in your bed. All I want is to go home and sleep in my own bed. Forever. But there’s a baby, and the baby is sick with a cold, and I’m nervous for her to fly. If her ears get too clogged from the pressure, her eardrums could burst, which would be catastrophic for a baby who already has permanent hearing loss.
Armen was your best friend, favorite writing partner, and most prolific collaborator. He is having a tremendously hard time with all of this. His mom, who lives here in LA and came down to Houston for the funeral, has been endlessly helpful this week, so in the midst of the chaos, we ask her to arrange for an appointment with a local pediatrician. His office is cluttered with signed sports memorabilia. He writes Iris a prescription and gives us the green light to fly. Thank God. I can’t deal with another fucking thing.
Packing up a person’s life and clearing out someone else’s fully lived-in house is no small feat. There are so many drawers to clean out and papers to shred. It’s also physically painful.
My lower back aches.
My neck is locked into one position.
My jaw is tense.
My head is permanently migrained.
My ankle may be sprained. I keep walking into furniture. At one point, I run full speed into your bedpost and literally hit the ground, writhing in pain, unable to breathe.
Hitting the ground is a repeated theme of the grieving process.
• • •
The morning before we fly back home, the movers arrive to load up the truck and take your belongings back to Houston, where I will lock them in a storage facility down the street from our house until I have the mental capacity to figure out what to do with them. After the movers set out on their voyage, Mom and I embark on ours, driving the narrow, winding road into The Hills to meet with your therapist from sober living, where you’d been since the end of December. Once we finally reach the gate, we have to drive up another steep hill to get to the facility. It’s so steep, I feel as though the car might roll backwards and we might fall off the mountainside to our deaths. As we make it to the top, I wonder if you ever made this drive while high. If so, man, were you functional.
Your therapist greets us warmly. He is a short, bald, rather slight and soft-spoken Indian gentleman with a melodic British accent and an unending supply of patience. I’m able to identify him immediately: a recovering heroin addict, nineteen years clean. You always talked about him as if he were a deity. This is exactly how I imagined him.
Once introductions are made, he and the owner of the facility escort us into one of the nearby cottages. It’s a large, sun-drenched meeting room with giant windows and a wraparound porch with a view of lush hills and trees perched beside sprawling, expensive homes. There are plenty of comfortable couches and chairs scattered around the room. It feels cozy. The fireplace mantle is crowded with live plants. A modest flat-screen TV hangs on the wall in the corner. I wonder how many times you sat where I’m sitting now, staring at this tiny TV, wrestling with your choices, trying to figure out why the fuck you do what you do. And, now, here we are, trying to figure out why the fuck you did what you did.
Your therapist kindly and softly explains that the primary thing that kills addicts is the “just one more time” mentality. He’s so gentle in his delivery. It’s a tragic accident that no one intends. It’s a waste. He explains that they had made special allowances for you to work off-site on Aziz Ansari’s Netflix show, Master of None, while you were living here.
