Jen had been the lead performer in a high school play the night we met, so she showed up to the party in full stage-makeup. I remember how she, at one point, gifted us a ukulele solo, there on the very same dance floor where, just that night, people had shared a first kiss, spilled drinks, danced with abandon. We were teenagers, and she sang Stand By Me.
Jen named her newborn Adison.
Adison was born at 30 weeks and was immediately put on a CPAP. Three days after giving birth, Jen was able to hold her for the first time. I know what it is like to be in the room when Jen feels utter despair. But I can’t imagine how she felt in those first couple of days after Adison came into the world. A few weeks later, I made the drive down to Iowa City for the occasion of a lifetime.
“I don’t know why I didn’t call you when I first had her,” she said. “I think it was all so traumatic, so unexpected, I just wasn’t thinking. I know we don’t talk as much as we used to, and I know she’s my baby so it’s kind of up to me, but I still should have called you. I want you to be here on Thursday, if you can make it. They’re finally taking her off the CPAP.”
It seemed that my feet were now on a stage, hundreds of eyes soon to see if I perform how an invited old friend ought to during a life’s most important moment. I thought about Patrick, the father, who I could only ever imagine in his ridiculous football gear from high school, now studying law in Seattle, living the miserable and easy existence one lives when unable to feel any life changing besides one’s own.
“Yes, a million times, Jen. I can be there by tomorrow.”
A memory then came before me: Jen and I at 19 years old, laying on our backs in the basement of a church, looking up at the ceiling as Chrissie, our vocal coach, said, “I don’t know how you’ve gone so long never doing diaphragm training!”
She smoked cigarettes, and we both thought that was ironic.
I can hear the memory: deep breaths taken in funny ways, a smile exhaled into the air—so audible—when Jen had finally found her diaphragm. We lay on the floor of the church, just breathing, for half an hour. Air flowed through us like light flows through the eyes of one seeing color for the first time.
And so, when I was on the drive down, playing a live recording of Harry Styles we used to listen to in college, I could hear Jen in the passenger seat saying, “Oh, he should have taken a breath there.”
I’d say, “He knows.”
She’d say, “If he knew he would’ve.”
When I saw her in the lobby of the hospital, it seemed that we were still kids—our hug forming a ravine that exposes layers of the earth’s life to the air, layers of gossiping, inside jokes, names that these days we only talked about with one another, the friendship of teenagers unearthed under all that soil. Jen would stay at the hospital from sunup to sundown.
“I feel like a kid at Christmas, which doesn’t make sense to me,” she said, ravenously drinking water at the hospital cafeteria. She had been spending her days orbiting around the NICU, a moon and Adison the world.
“That’s so wonderful,” I said. “You seem so happy.”
“And it doesn’t make sense,” she said. “Everything you do, everything you’ve ever been anxious about, was important because you’ve wanted to live a good life. Now, I’ve created a life and it’s my responsibility to make it good. Everything has been doubled for me. It doesn’t make sense why I’m not miserable.”
I said, “Are you worried?”
“It’s awful. But it’s in the background. I didn’t know this feeling, all my life. It makes you feel very religious. I think I’ve felt love, but I’ve never felt something like this. I didn’t know someone could feel this.”
In college, we were both theater majors before we were both English majors. I was always so refreshed by the conversations we had with one another. In all the rest of the world to some degree I was always trying to talk, but for as long as I knew her, Jen and I merely talked. No one was afraid to say anything, to emote, to think.
“I’ve thrown up before giving a presentation,” Jen said. She laughed at herself.
I said, “What do you mean?”
“I’ve been so nervous about so much. And now I just feel excited—and anxious. Awfully anxious. I can’t describe it but the fact that I’m not throwing up right now is testament to how strong I feel. I should feel awful. And I feel wonderful.”
Around the time we graduated, Jen used to struggle with panic attacks. She once wrote a poem where she described how, afterwards, she felt as if she was living inside a body made of something fungal and wet, a disgusting thing which you’d revulse at—something which would unlock an instinct millenia old which screams, “disease. Run.” But she could not separate.
I read it and I felt awful. I asked her if she wanted to go to yoga classes with me. I was at an age where I was convinced that things like meditation or supplements might transform us into beings finally adaptive enough to endure it all, and I was half-right, I like to think.
Twice a week, in a room with pale wooden floors and a mirror-wall, Jen and I would try to bend ourselves into being our bodies again. We’d take deep breaths with each movement. We first focused on staying balanced and flexible. Then the practice became routine and thoughtless.
And then, in time, we’re closing our eyes and breathing in the air of so many workouts, when suddenly we’re not trying to bend or breath—but instead, we try to imagine our bodies are beach sand which moves, heats, burns, becomes dry and damp, all to no consequence, all a neutral bending and shifting. We’d fall. We’d get distracted. But every so often I’d see Jen’s face find an expressionlessness, a neutrality, sensations waxing and waning like the waves, as she’d inhale and exhale a deep breath of clean, body-filling ocean air.
Dr. Ester comes to meet us in the waiting room and says that they should be ready in a couple hours to take Adison off the CPAP. When I got the call from Jen to come down to Iowa City, something in me said I couldn’t come empty handed. We hadn’t talked in about a month—and that was both of our faults—but for 6 or 7 years, we spoke to one another every day. I went to the music store to get her a gift.
“I don’t know if you still play,” I say, handing her a new ukulele that was the color of a leaf. “But I wanted to get something for Adison and you. Do you still have one?”
She takes it in her hands, which are paler than I remember, and strums. She plays a couple of broken notes there in the waiting room. There are things you can only understand about a friend by watching them make music.
The moment was beautiful for the same reason it was awful. It called back to a younger version of us, a version of us who were less stable, less wise, but who had not yet bid farewell to the ghosts of so many potential selves. As she looked for a melody I found familiar, I wanted to once again be in her car as she introduced me to songs I now call nostalgic, not because I was happier then—I don’t think either of us were—but because I could once again meet all the versions of all the selves I could have been, all the years I could have had.
When we were 19 Jen’s older sister had a miscarriage. We were both living in our hometown that summer, and I went over to Jen’s parent’s house. We sat in Jen’s bedroom with the window open, our arms dangling outside, touching that mid-summer wind. Her parents were at work and her sister was with her boyfriend in Des Moines. Jen explained how they were going to make the trip down to be with her the next day.
Her room was all-white with a high ceiling, white sheets on her bed, a yellow light from a lamp in the corner and a speaker resting by Jen’s socked foot on the windowsill.
As I sat with her there, she weakly slid a pack of cigarettes towards me with the guilt of a confession.
“I don’t know,” she said. “They feel nice. You still have never tried?”

It was her first time trying them too. We went back and forth, saying there were songs we wanted to play on the speaker. We played gentle ones that let us be quiet with one another. We took long, puncturing breaths of smoke.
We spent the evening quietly, the sky seemingly paused in that light between daytime and dusk, the two of us not realizing the profound fact that both our eyes were affixed to something up there near the dimly emerging stars.
She took a deep breath of smoke, before she started to cough with a violence. When it didn’t subside, my hand found itself on her shoulder. Something with guitar strings was playing on the speaker.
Her eyes were watery, before teary. Then she closed them and pulled away, resting the back of her head on the window frame.
“I feel like I shouldn’t be allowed to say this to anyone else but you,” she said. “But I feel awful. I just feel awful.”
She’s in a t-shirt two sizes too big, and sweatpants she’s owned since she was 15. She cleared her strained throat, gathering strength, every atom of the two of us at risk of crumbling apart. She said, “I wanted a niece.”
Jen grinded the end of her cigarette onto a dinner plate, angrily. Crushed ash, smoke—the grayness floating into the room seemed to be the air of something painful breathing in her heart.
She said, “I’d be too guilty to act like this in front of anyone else in my family right now.”
When Jen and I met when we were 17, we quickly became a part of one another’s routines: like swelling stage lights signal the start of a play, our days would begin with groggy meetings with one another at 7 A.M. in the Benington Cafeteria at Newfield West High School. In college we’d end our days in the shared frizzly energy of two students studying, or fading away from the day while clumsily drinking in my dorm room—sharing the treasured connection born of crude, unabashed, unafraid gossiping. And looking back, I realize that when we intertwined our routines like this, we were inadvertently telling one another: we are necessary enough to structure our lives around.
Jobs are terrible things when you’ve only ever had the privilege of knowing a life that could neatly hold the structures of friendship—spending all day with one another in classes or cafeterias. After graduation I spent three years in a gray room with a landline phone on my desk in Minnesota because I thought it would help my career, a job which was most painful in its loneliness—no bonds could cross the cubicle line. We all did this: dispersing around the world with degrees in hand, discovering that few friendships survive the intrusion of dreams, distance, and rent.
But Jen and I learned the template for building a friendship alongside one another, so whenever we called, first several times a week, then several times a year, that baseline did not fade easily. But it nevertheless is amazing how, for the both of us, we might write these words about one another and yet fail to pick up the phone.
But she said to me in the waiting room, “I’m so excited for Adison to meet Uncle Matthew.”
And despite the days when we could have called or visited but did not, nothing could ever stop me from being that. All I needed to be was that.
I didn’t have a car when I was 17, and when Jen and I spent time together, once the sun set, she would act in a way which I can only describe as the behavior of one battling whatever demon in hell curses people with utter sleepiness. We would be studying, seemingly with enough fuel to remain awake for hours, before I left the room to grab water only to return to find Jen face down on the couch in a bewitchingly deep sleep. Jen had a car, so she would drive me to and from my house, but when the curse would befall her I thought it dangerous and annoying to wake her for the drive home.
Sometimes at 8pm and sometimes at midnight, I’d walk across the street to her Uncle Seb’s house, who had a night shift as a USPS driver that began at 2 A.M. He’d wake up at around 5 P.M. each day so that he could have a few hours with his wife and Jen’s little cousin Kam, serendipitously leaving him open—and honestly, best I could always tell, happy—to drive me home when his wife and daughter would be asleep around 10 P.M.
Jen would ask me about our rides, the scene of the two of us in her head like a comedy skit.
He’d say, Well, hello there, Matty! in the same way every night when I called him from his doorsteps on the phone, his midwestern accent stronger than any I’ve ever known.
He’d say, How are things on the homefront? and This winter wouldn’t be so bad without the wind! and Guess we’re gonna hit every red at the stand and go lights tonight.
The dim blue light coming from the glowing knobs and buttons on his dashboard, the quiet darkness of Iowa’s winter nights—we’d have simple and easy 10-minute conversations. I didn’t register it at the time, but looking back, in his mind, he was driving a child around and letting his niece sleep—and I hope he felt good about those simple kindnesses.
It was just after Patrick and her had broken up for the third time about a year ago that the family decided they needed—against every fiber of every instinct a heart has—to allow Uncle Seb to pass on after a series of strokes left him in the ICU for several months. It was the last time I saw Jen in person prior to my invitation to meet Adison.
“Director Erica used to say that tragedies come in threes,” she said when she called me in tears. She laughed, in a familiar and heartbreaking way, as she said, “I’m on the lookout for number three now, I guess.”
Jen’s father asked me if I could write down some of my favorite memories of Uncle Seb prior to my arrival, so he could catalog some aspects of Seb’s life he never saw with his own eyes before time might make us all forget the nuances. I wrote a few stories, and he hugged me when I gave them to him.
Jen and I were sitting in two off-white chairs outside of the hospital room while her parents talked to the doctor. She was fidgeting, bobbing her legs up and down, her entire body signaling an utter flush of whatever thorny chemicals fill us with anxiety and ache.
“I need to be in the room when it happens,” she said. “I just need to be.”
I said, “I’ll be right out here, the entire time.”
She said, “Please come with me inside when it happens. You can say no.”
She then said something in a tone of voice I always wished we felt more comfortable utilizing with one another.
“No, I’m sorry, I’m sorry Matthew, you can’t say no,” she said. “I just need this. You have to come with me inside. I just need this, Matthew.”
With one hand, she gripped mine, with the other her mother’s, while her father gently held on to his brother’s hand. The three of us stood in a line on the other side of the hospital room while the doctors made preparations. Jen’s father Rob was on his knees next to the bed.
When the machines are turned off, and the ingredients of life cease to flow throughout a person, they still breathe—for just a moment. Steady rhythms fill the room, a melody of slow and hollow breaths, staccato signals from the electrocardiogram, the drum line of hallway footsteps and hospital rumblings, a song sung in the quiet corners at the edge of this universe. We’re audience to something far away, out there, as he breathes. He breathes. Music swells; and then stops.
Life shouldn’t have to move on after such a song. It is strange and confusing to be present during a person’s last breath—and it’s a feeling I imagine is not too dissimilar to what it is like to be present during someone’s first. The tides cease to churn, the moon and the earth freeze still, as suddenly you can feel the texture of eternity emanating from each movement of the air. Life shouldn’t have to resume, crude and unfamiliar, in the face of such a moment. But here Jen and I are, a year later, as we once again meet in a hospital. Dr. Ester shakes my hand. I explain I’m not the father.
And Adison is alive.
Jen wants to hold her when she’s finally able to take her first independent breaths in this world. She wants to feed her, show her that the ingredients of life can be soft and loving, not the brittleness of glass and plastic tubes and lukewarm clear liquid.
Jen thanks the doctors and nurses and every scrub-clad person she comes across that day. In time, we enter the room, the fluorescent light on the ceiling dimmer than I’d imagined, shadows decorating this space like those cast by the subtle shine of fairy lights. I sit in the corner of the room as Adison is lifted into Jen’s arms; as I see my niece for the first time.
From underneath a plastic mask smaller than my fist, she cries—a call which none of us ever truly stop signaling. Sound bounces off the walls, off her infinitesimally small mask. It’s beautiful.
Whatever feeling Jen was first experiencing, whatever human bliss she didn’t know could ever exist, could be touched in the air of the room—a feeling more real and tangible than any atom. I see her smile—breaths taken on the floor of a church basement, poetry with a dried tear on its page, stage-makeup, soft singing.
As she takes Adison in her arms she answers in a whisper to the calling infant, “Hey, baby. Hey, baby.”
One by one the doctors disconnect the bits and bobs that had sustained Adison’s life just yesterday.
“Ready?” Dr. Ester says to Jen, hand on the mask.
“Okay,” says Jen, eyes affixed to Addison’s.
When the machines are turned off, and the ingredients of life cease to flow throughout Adison’s body, she stops crying. She is quiet. I can’t tell if she is breathing. The doctor’s stood at the ready, listening to the language of their instruments, anticipating that they had made a horrific misjudgment.
Holding her, somehow, despite it all, despite everything, in the face of every promise of hopeless causes, Jen is able to whisper—sounding more like my best friend than she ever had—in Adison’s red, delicate ear, “Don’t be afraid, little one. The earth is not such a terrible place.”
She holds her. It’s an orchestra, a symphony, as I hear Adison take a deep breath in.