I miss my friend. RIP Steve.

My grief wakes me up in the early morning in tears. How does your grief present itself?

I have derived a few truths in my lifetime that I share with others for their completely factual nature: Strong Looks Different On Everyone and Grief Has No Time Limit.

My friend Steve died two years ago and with him went a friend who knew me, the real me, the skinny bony girl who loved her sport as much as his skinny self loved his, a support for the deep conversations that would never end that only a brain that worked well enough to keep up could have. The real me who loved academics and all things science and my happiness on the robotics team alongside the calculus 3 class nerd he met. The countless discussions about life and the vastness of the universe and the neuropsych courses I told him to take. Endless days wherever he was working, hours at the cafe off-campus until it burned down. It never stopped. The topics never stopped flowing.

I lost my friend two years ago, yet this week I lost faith in the integrity of this life and I needed someone who knew me, the real me, the whole me, one of the incredibly few who would understand what it meant to think the way we did.

I wanted to talk to Steve. I wanted to talk to my friend. The same friend I sat with at his hospital bed, happily figuring out differentials for hours when no one knew what was wrong. The same friend who was there for my first modeling photos and work.

The same friend who got it.

I know that if he was here, he would have been so excited to see me go back to school. I know that I probably would have had a lot of fresh insight for the problems that we began to foresee during this ongoing pandemic, and I know he would have pushed for me to do better, would have given me some of the best perspectives that I get to derive on my own now.

He was so proud when I started to race again, because we both knew it has always been about the love of the sport. From the very first days when we would support each other at practices in school. He’d show up to mine and I’d go to his. Just because that’s what friends did.

And I wish I read aloud the Aaron Freeman passage we both said countless times was perfect upon our deaths. As science nerds, we both loved it. I wish I had gotten up at your funeral to read it aloud. I didn’t, because no matter how strong I am, it hurt too much to admit it – I was scared to have to admit you were truly gone. I’m so sorry I didn’t.

It still hurts. Especially on days when I want to discuss quantum mechanics with my friend, and our purpose in this world. To talk about whatever insane situation one of us has managed to get ourselves into. The confidence to keep going.

I have many friends, all of whom are important. But I wanted to talk to my friend who got it. I wanted to talk to you.

My soul was hurting this past week and I couldn’t put my finger on it. I have many friends, but you are, indeed, energy that has not died, you’re just a bit less orderly.

I miss you.

A Physicist’s Eulogy

You want a physicist to speak at your funeral. You want the physicist to talk to your grieving family about the conservation of energy, so they will understand that your energy has not died. You want the physicist to remind your sobbing mother about the first law of thermodynamics; that no energy gets created in the universe, and none is destroyed. You want your mother to know that all your energy, every vibration, every Btu of heat, every wave of every particle that was her beloved child remains with her in this world. You want the physicist to tell your weeping father that amid energies of the cosmos, you gave as good as you got.

And at one point you’d hope that the physicist would step down from the pulpit and walk to your brokenhearted spouse there in the pew and tell him that all the photons that ever bounced off your face, all the particles whose paths were interrupted by your smile, by the touch of your hair, hundreds of trillions of particles, have raced off like children, their ways forever changed by you. And as your widow rocks in the arms of a loving family, may the physicist let her know that all the photons that bounced from you were gathered in the particle detectors that are her eyes, that those photons created within her constellations of electromagnetically charged neurons whose energy will go on forever.

And the physicist will remind the congregation of how much of all our energy is given off as heat. There may be a few fanning themselves with their programs as he says it. And he will tell them that the warmth that flowed through you in life is still here, still part of all that we are, even as we who mourn continue the heat of our own lives.

And you’ll want the physicist to explain to those who loved you that they need not have faith; indeed, they should not have faith. Let them know that they can measure, that scientists have measured precisely the conservation of energy and found it accurate, verifiable and consistent across space and time. You can hope your family will examine the evidence and satisfy themselves that the science is sound and that they’ll be comforted to know your energy’s still around. According to the law of the conservation of energy, not a bit of you is gone; you’re just less orderly. Amen.

-Aaron Freeman.