As a mother, I cannot find the words to sum up my son's life, so Joe's best friend Emily has given him a final gift by capturing his spirit far better than I ever could.
“It is 2 am on a balcony on the Basque Coast, and my best friend Joe is talking about death. Our room is expensive enough that we can hear the waves, but cheap enough that we cannot see them. Instead our balcony looks onto another rental across the alleyway, which has been booked by a group of college kids, teenagers who slouch around in self-consciously elegant poses, smoke endless cigarettes, strum guitars, and indulge in complex love triangles that Joe, who can speak French, translates for me, who cannot. Joe loves spying on these kids, the texture of their wealth and their easy vitality layering on top of our own—we too are as young and as rich and as alive as we will ever be, and we halfway know it.
That his death was able to truly and concretely bring more and richer life to others does a great deal to balance the pain of his absence.
So our discussion of death begins as a discussion of life. Over the course of the night, our speculations about our neighbors turns metaphysical. Joe is interested in the kids next door because he is interested in everything. He is insatiable for life, for every kind of experience—it gets him in trouble, but it is his magic as well; he charms millionaires and he sits down on the street with addicts, and he is the same person with them both, sees the goodness and the weakness in both. And what is death, he says, but another kind of experience? I get to live, he tells me, gesturing out over the nighttime street, glossed with a little rain but not enough to drive us indoors, and then I get to die. I tell him that if he dies before me, I will miss him, but I will not mourn for him: because I know he is not afraid, because I know that he approaches death with curiosity and openness, because he is as alive to death as he is to everything else.
It is a promise I am making him, and it is a promise I will break. Joe will live for just five years after that night, and since his death I have mourned for him, and so have many, many others. I believe he said what he did then in order to comfort me, and I said what I said to comfort him in return. He did not want to cause pain to those who survived him, though of course he knew he would, and he would have seen right through my lie to the contrary. But that conversation has been one of my great comforts in the two years since Joe’s death. The other has been his donation. That his death was able to truly and concretely bring more and richer life to others does a great deal to balance the pain of his absence. More than a long life, Joe wanted a full one, wanted a world that was always a little brighter, quicker, and deeper. Ultimately, I think he gave that to others more than he ever got it for himself.”
