David.

On the Stories We Leave Behind.

When I was little, I once asked my cousin David what his favorite color was.

“Clear,” he told me.

It was such an absurd answer to such an innocent question that I have remembered it for most of my life. I suppose I had expected something ordinary, like blue or green, although knowing David, I should have known better. He had a remarkable ability to take the simplest conversation and turn it into something completely ridiculous, often without giving the slightest indication that he was trying to be funny.

Another time, he told me the story of how he had come to America. David was born in the Philippines, but according to his version of events, he had somehow ended up in Africa, where he was mistaken for elephant poop. Through a series of circumstances that made absolutely no sense, my uncle eventually found him, and that was apparently how David ended up in the United States.

I couldn’t tell you how the story went from one place to another, or how he managed to make something so outrageously stupid sound like a perfectly reasonable explanation of his childhood. I only remember that he told it, and that it was exactly the sort of thing David would say.

He was an extraordinary storyteller. He could invent the most outlandish situations imaginable and deliver them with such confidence that you found yourself listening intently, even when the story had become so ridiculous that there was no possibility of it being true. He had a way of adding one absurd detail after another until everyone around him was practically rolling on the floor laughing.

I don't think I've ever heard a laugh quite like his.

I wish I had recorded more of his stories. I wish I had written down the things he said, or at least understood how much I would someday treasure the sound of his laughter. But I was a little girl, and David was simply David. I had no reason to imagine a world without him.

David was biologically my cousin, although I have never felt that the word adequately described our relationship. He was something between an older brother and an uncle, a constant presence throughout my childhood who occupied a place in my life that I have never quite known how to explain.

Growing up, he was always at our house. He played with me, talked to me, and made himself part of the ordinary rhythm of our family. His presence was so familiar that I never thought to question whether it might someday disappear. As far as I was concerned, David belonged there.

He had more nicknames than I could probably remember, one of them being “Bling,” which was rather appropriate considering the amount of jewelry he liked to wear. He had an enormous personality, an unforgettable sense of humor, and a particular talent for getting under people’s skin.

Of course, David also had an extraordinary talent for driving people crazy.

I say that with all the affection in the world, because anyone who knew David would understand exactly what I mean. He loved making fun of people, and he had absolutely no problem saying something that might have offended anyone coming from a different person. People would laugh, assuming he was joking, but the funny thing about David was that sometimes he meant every word.

He could poke at someone relentlessly, make an observation that was entirely too honest, and somehow leave everyone in the room laughing. I don’t think he was particularly concerned with whether people appreciated his commentary. He had his own way of looking at the world, and he certainly wasn’t afraid to share it.

He and one of our neighbors even referred to themselves as the “Asian Sensation,” which should give you some indication of the ridiculousness that surrounded him.

But beneath all the teasing, the jewelry, and the completely outrageous stories was someone I knew to be extraordinarily sweet.

He was kind to me in ways that I didn’t fully appreciate until I was older. He played with me when I was little, talked to me as though I had something worth saying, and made me feel included in a world that I was still trying to understand. I never felt as though I had to compete for his attention. He simply made room for me.

I think children recognize love long before they understand how to describe it. They remember who was there, who made them laugh, and who treated them as though their presence mattered. David did all of those things for me, and for much of my childhood, I assumed he always would.

When I was ten years old, David became a father.

At the time, I don’t think I fully appreciated what an extraordinary transition that was. I was still a little girl myself, watching someone who had been such an enormous part of my own childhood begin an entirely different chapter of his life.

Suddenly, there was another little girl who would know him in a way that I never could, someone who would grow up calling him Dad and looking to him for the same comfort and reassurance that I had found in him.

I wonder what David imagined his future would look like when his daughter was born. Whether he pictured himself growing older alongside her, embarrassing her with his jokes, and watching her become the person she was meant to be.

David was suffering from kidney failure, and although I knew he was sick, I don’t think I understood the seriousness of his condition in the way I do now.

When you’re young, illness can feel like something temporary, even when it isn’t. You become accustomed to hearing about treatments, hospitals, and difficult days, but you continue believing that eventually things will improve. You assume that if someone is fighting hard enough, there must be a way for them to win.

Looking back, I don’t know whether the odds were ever truly in David’s favor. I think we were all holding on to the possibility of a future that became increasingly uncertain, hoping that the next treatment or the next bit of good news might finally change the direction things were going. Perhaps we were simply trying to buy more time.

I think about that now when I remember something David once told me.

“I’ll always be here for you.”

I don’t remember every conversation we ever had, but I remember those words. I remember believing them, too, because I had absolutely no reason not to. David had always been there. He was part of my childhood, part of my family, and part of the future I imagined without ever having to think about it.

Now, I think about the fact that he made that promise while he was suffering. I cannot know what he understood about his own future, but I know that he wanted me to feel safe in the knowledge that I could count on him.

There is something heartbreaking about remembering a promise that was made with love but could not be kept.

On January 1, 2019, David died. He was twenty-nine years old, and I was there when he took his final breath.

I remember running through the hallways to find his friends, trying to gather everyone who needed to be there. I don’t think there is any way to adequately explain the urgency of a moment like that, when you know something terrible is happening and your body seems to move faster than your mind can process it.

I wanted his friends there. I wanted the people who had spent years laughing with him, listening to his stories, and loving him through all the complications of life to have the opportunity to be beside him. We crowded into his room, a collection of people who had known David in different ways but who had all arrived at the same devastating moment.

I watched him take his last breath.

I watched his heart stop.

I have thought about that day more times than I could possibly count, and I still struggle to understand how a moment can be so brief and yet remain with someone for the rest of their life. I was sixteen years old, and I was watching someone I had loved for as long as I could remember die in front of me.

The same person who had once told me his favorite color was clear, who had invented a story about being mistaken for elephant poop in Africa, and who could make an entire room laugh until their stomachs hurt was now lying in a room surrounded by the people who loved him.

There was so much love in that room, so many people who would have done anything to give David another year, another month, or even another afternoon, and yet none of it could make his heart continue beating.

I had spent my childhood believing that David would always be around. Then, at sixteen years old, I watched the exact moment that belief became impossible. Somewhere in the middle of my own grief, there was another realization that I have never been able to forget. His daughter had lost her father.

I had watched David become a dad when I was ten years old, and six years later, I watched him take his final breath. There is something almost impossible to comprehend about those two memories existing within the same childhood.

I had been given years of knowing David as the cousin who felt more like a brother, but his daughter deserved an entire lifetime of knowing him as her father.

She deserved birthdays with him, conversations about school, arguments over things that wouldn’t matter a week later, and the opportunity to grow old enough to understand the complicated, hilarious, sometimes infuriating person her father was.

I wish she could have known his stories the way I did. I wish she could have heard that laugh for years and years, rolled her eyes when he made fun of someone, and discovered for herself how someone with such a sharp tongue could also possess such a tender heart.

More than anything, I wish David had been given the opportunity to watch her grow up.

His death devastated our family, but the grief extended far beyond the people who shared his last name. David had friends who loved him deeply, people who had grown up alongside him and become part of the life he built in his twenty-nine years.

I think about all the people who stood in that room on January 1, and how each of us walked away carrying a different version of the same loss. His friends had lost someone who could make them laugh until they could hardly breathe. His daughter had lost her father. And I had lost someone who had occupied a place somewhere between a brother and an uncle for nearly my entire childhood.

We were all grieving the same person, but none of us had lost him in quite the same way.

Nearly eight years have passed since David died, and I still miss him like crazy.

I miss his ridiculous stories, his jewelry, and his complete lack of concern for whether someone appreciated his teasing. I miss the person who could be so unbelievably irritating to everyone else and yet so extraordinarily sweet to me.

And, God, I miss his laugh.

There is something especially cruel about losing the sound of someone you love. Photographs can preserve their faces, and recordings might allow us to revisit a particular moment, but neither can reproduce the experience of having that person sitting beside you.

A photograph cannot interrupt you halfway through a sentence. A memory cannot invent another outrageous story or make everyone around the table laugh until they can hardly breathe.

I can still remember what David’s laugh sounded like, but I cannot make him laugh again.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve also come to understand that grief doesn’t follow the tidy progression I once imagined. Life continues, and you learn to participate in it again, but certain absences remain woven into the way you experience the world. Sometimes I can think about David and laugh at the things he used to say. Other times, the same memories make me ache for another ordinary afternoon with him.

I have spent a great deal of time thinking about what makes a life meaningful. We are taught to measure our existence through accomplishments, careers, possessions, and the number of years we are fortunate enough to spend on this earth.

But David was only twenty-nine when he died, and the amount of love that remains for him is extraordinary.

I have always believed that part of David’s purpose was to make people laugh. That doesn’t mean he was perfect, or that every joke he made was particularly kind. He could be insensitive, inappropriate, and an absolute pain in the ass. I refuse to turn him into some flawless version of himself simply because he died young, because the person I loved was far more interesting than that.

David was complicated, as most people are. He could make someone the subject of a joke without the slightest hesitation, then turn around and show a tenderness that might have surprised anyone who knew only his more abrasive side.

I loved him as he was, and I want to remember him that way.

Sometimes I wish I could return to an ordinary afternoon at our house, long before kidney failure became something I understood and before January 1 became a date I would forever associate with losing him.

I wouldn’t need to ask him anything profound. I think I would simply sit with him and listen.

I would ask him another ridiculous question, just to see what answer he would come up with. Perhaps I would ask him to tell me again how he supposedly ended up in Africa, or why, of all the colors in the world, he had decided his favorite was clear.

I would let him tell the story however he pleased, knowing perfectly well that most of it was probably made up. I would laugh when he laughed, roll my eyes when he said something inappropriate, and appreciate the extraordinary privilege of spending another unremarkable afternoon with someone I loved.

I didn’t know, when I was little, that those ordinary conversations would become some of my most precious memories. I didn’t know that one day I would be trying to reconstruct them from the fragments I had managed to keep. I certainly didn’t know that the person who once promised to always be there for me would be gone before I was old enough to understand what losing him would mean.

There is a temptation, when writing about someone who has died, to find a beautiful conclusion that makes their absence easier to accept. We tell ourselves that they live on through us, that love never truly disappears, and that the people we lose remain present in the memories we carry.

I believe there is truth in those things, although I have never found them quite as comforting as I wish I did.

David is still spoken about. His friends still remember him, our family still carries his stories, and his daughter has people who can tell her about the man her father was. But remembering someone is not the same as having them.

I wish he had grown older. I wish his daughter had been given more time with him. I wish our family had been spared the experience of burying someone so young, and I wish the people who loved him could have watched him become the person he might have been at thirty, forty, or fifty.

David was my cousin, my uncle, and my brother in all the ways that mattered to me. He was a father to a little girl who deserved more years with him, and a friend whose absence continues to be felt by the people who knew him.

He was funny, imperfect, occasionally a complete dick, and one of the sweetest people I have ever known.

He spent twenty-nine years telling stories, many of them so outrageous that you could hardly get through them without laughing. I never imagined that one day, I would be the one telling his.

For a long time, I have struggled with the fact that I witnessed his final moments. I have wondered whether the memory of watching his heart stop would eventually become the thing I remembered most clearly about him, whether that one terrible afternoon would somehow eclipse all the ordinary ones that came before it.

But when I sit down to write about David, the first thing that comes to mind isn’t the room where he died. It’s the little girl asking him what his favorite color was.

It’s his completely ridiculous answer. It’s the stories that made no sense and the laughter that followed them. It’s the person who made room for me in his life, who loved me in the uncomplicated way children deserve to be loved, and who once told me, “I’ll always be here for you.”

I know now that he couldn’t keep that promise in the way either of us had imagined. I watched his last breath leave his body. I know, perhaps more intimately than I would ever have wanted to, that there are things love cannot prevent.

Still, I find myself wanting to tell him things. I want to tell him about the person I’ve become, about everything that has happened since he left, and about how much I wish he had been here to see it. I want to tell him that his daughter is growing older, that his friends and family still remember him, and that nearly eight years later, I am still laughing at a story about elephant poop.

Most of all, I want to tell him that I remember his laugh.

David spent his life telling stories, and now the people who loved him are the ones telling his. I suppose I will spend the rest of mine doing the same, trying to preserve the ridiculous things he said and the wonderful, infuriating person he was.

But there is one part of every story about David that I can never quite get right.

I can remember the words. I can tell you how he wore too much jewelry, how he made fun of people, and how he could turn the most ordinary question into something absurd. I can tell you that he was sweet to me, that he became a father, and that twenty-nine years was nowhere near enough time.

What I cannot give you is the sound of him laughing and I think that is why, when I imagine having one more afternoon with David, I don’t picture asking him all the questions I never got to ask. I picture him telling me some ridiculous story, laughing at his own joke, and me sitting there, listening.

I would let him talk for as long as he wanted.

I would let him tell the whole thing wrong, exaggerate every detail, and make absolutely no sense.

And when he finished, I would ask him to tell it again.