January 3rd, 2016 was the last day of Christmas break, so I thought it in rather poor taste that anyone would make a joke about Aidan Fowler dying. The text I had received from my good friend Kelly was a screenshot of Facebook messages saying “RIP Aidan” with no other context. What a terrible thing to say. That could really upset his parents, don’t they know that? I did not reply and went about my Sunday like every other: going to church, doing chores, and relaxing with YouTube. Yet, the prospect that he could actually be gone lingered in my mind all day. At dinner, a knot formed in my stomach and I knew, suddenly and certainly, that it was never a joke. My mom drove up the road to check on his family. While I waited for her, I excused myself to the bathroom and screamed into the emptiness. She came back in the door five minutes later, sobbing hysterically. Yes, the cancer won, with enough mercy to kill him quietly in his sleep. Even now I do not know the reason, but that night, I did not cry.
I already knew he was going to die. He had been sick since the beginning of sixth grade, and we were halfway through seventh grade. My parents told me three weeks before Christmas that his parents were taking him off the treatment plan, because nothing, no matter how expensive it was, no matter how hard the doctors tried, was working. He experienced pain worse than I could fathom every day. I sobbed that night, more out of frustration than grief. I didn’t understand. They had to try harder to save him. Hope couldn’t be gone. Humanity always found hope and fought, no matter the odds—one of our finest traits. Didn’t his parents love him? Why weren’t they trying? My parents told me to keep praying, which I hadn’t been doing as often. I had begun to doubt my faith. God would never let a child die, a child that loved Him so much. God loves His children. God loved Aidan, so he would save him. Right?
They did not cancel school the next day. I now know that they couldn’t. Us kids had to be distracted, and truthfully, Aidan was one out of about 900. My best friend at the time, Jordan, did not speak to me on the way to school. Our silences echoed back at each other over the low rumble of the engine and the whispers in the back among high schoolers who did not know who he was. My homeroom was quiet, unnaturally so for seventh graders. Over the announcements the principal’s robotic voice took the stage, saying that extra counselors would be available for the next few weeks. We understand how hard this will be on some of you. Aidan was a loved member of Central Mountain Middle School. Please reach out to the counselors if you need them. English class was hell. No one would talk, not even me, the Hermione of every class I was ever in. My teacher had the most awful chipper attitude to compensate for the lack of noise. She refused to acknowledge that anything happened, which infuriated me. She pretended he never existed. We moved on in our lesson about grammar, but all I could focus on was her: her curly dyed blond hair and perfectly made-up face, her stupid shiny shoes and huge dangling earrings, and of course that smile that seemed almost dystopian in its forced fakeness.
Two of my other friends, Haley and Maggie, went to counseling during lunch. I went with them for emotional support—ironic, given that I needed it more than they did. I had not yet cried, which I supposed made me strong enough to handle things for other people as well as myself. Jordan did not go. She didn’t know him well enough, she reasoned. Fair enough, I thought. She would have hated it anyway. The counselors were saccharine in their words, so gentle and condescending. It was good for my friends, but I sat in silence at the table, rubbing Maggie’s back occasionally. One of them asked me if I knew him.
“I lived on the same street as him,” I said. “We grew up together. But I’m here for them.”
The counselor was surprised, and I felt a faint satisfaction, a Band-Aid over a gaping hole, that I was strong enough to not cry when my friends needed me.
“Are you okay?” the counselor asked me. “You can talk too, if you want.”
I was about to laugh at the stupidity of that question. Are you okay? It was like asking someone who’s been shot, “Where does it hurt?” I wanted desperately to laugh, but it seemed to get stuck in my throat. Everywhere. Everywhere hurts. I nodded and avoided talking for the rest of the period. ‘My throat hurts’, I wrote down on a sticky note, and it was true, it hurt terribly from the lump in it that would not go away.
The following day, Tuesday, does not exist in my memory. (In truth, I don’t really remember much of that month. I think I tried to block most of it out.) Wednesday, however, is cemented in my mind as “funeral day,” the first funeral that I was old enough to really understand. Aidan’s family held an open-casket ceremony in the middle school auditorium. I sat at the front with Haley and Maggie. Jordan did not come. I searched and searched but she was not there. I realized in that moment that she did not care about me as I cared about her, and I began to cry. The
service had not even started yet. I had just lost one friend, and it seemed I was already losing another. I cried three days’ worth of tears during the hour-long ceremony, only stopping to scowl when the choir sang out of key.
His body looked…off. He was too pale. Even with cancer he had never lost his rosy cheeks. I missed his nearly white hair that always stuck straight out from his head. He was not wearing his treasured red Phillies baseball cap in the coffin, which seemed abhorrent to me. My parents wept openly next to me, holding his folded hands. I could not bring myself to touch him. I did not want to feel death on my skin; I did not want my body to know what my mind did. I have regretted that choice from the moment I walked away from the coffin. Fairly recently, another classmate of mine died, and I astonished myself with my own weakness, for I was again unable to touch the hands of the dead.
I was almost fifteen when he would have turned fourteen. Exactly 11 months separated us in age. He relished that catch-up time with me when we were little. On August 19th, 2017, I visited his grave to wish him a happy birthday. I sat in the sun at his slate gray stone, telling him about everything that had happened in the time he was gone. I stayed for an hour. I confessed my secrets, I told him that things had changed for me, and that I was excited for high school, though it wouldn’t be the same without him. As I talked, I could feel the sun burning the back of my neck and the tips of my ears to a crisp. The symbol of my shame that I attempted to ignore was almost comical in its physical effects. I wanted to make up for lost time, but of course it did not work. Eventually guilt and sunburn consumed me, and I went home. For the first time ever, I wanted to die, perhaps thinking I could trade his soul for mine. I cried as I never had before, almost an hour of heaving tears on the couch, wishing I had been a better friend. My mom told me not to hold the tears in—
I had been holding them inside for long enough. It had been a year and nine months since he died. I finally, finally, found myself moving forward.
My favorite memory with him takes place on a snowy morning half a lifetime ago. 2012—the year we thought the world would end. School had been canceled, a blessed day for us kids. His mom had to work, so she dropped him and his sister off knowing my mother would take excellent care of them. She had already dressed him up in his green and black snow gear, with black mittens and a matching beanie, so we were ready to go out in the perfect and pure snow when he arrived. They were the kind of flakes that stuck together, clumping into spheres the perfect size for our tiny hands. I do not remember which of us started our snowball revolution, but I won. I sat on top of his chest, smashing a snowball into his reddened face, smug and victorious. My mother has the pictures to prove it. That perfect snow lasted a day and melted into obscurity. No winter has matched it since.
I am twenty years old now. I try to talk to his mom as often as I can, especially since I have started college. She once confided in me her deepest fear—that people would forget about Aidan. She doesn’t have to worry about that. I think about him every day. I remember how he wanted to be the Phillie Phanatic for at least six years. I remember playing Super Mario 64 with him in homeroom and handing him my DS for the difficult parts. I remember his birthday parties, how we would mess around in his swimming pool since my family didn’t have one. I remember his favorite color was green, complementary to my favorite color red. I remember how he was an excellent writer, reading his essay at our fifth-grade graduation. I remember how he laughed, how he was so energetic, how he always took care of his sister. I often wonder who he would have become, had he lived. I wonder who I would have become, too. We were only children, after all: he was only twelve, and I, thirteen.
The Tributary 