You are not just a person.
Four years ago today I lost one of the most important people in my life. It was sudden, unexpected, and way too soon.
He has just graduated college with an art degree and a math degree. He had all sorts of plans to tutor math students, start a screenprinting business, and take our fire performance troupe to Burning Man.
The death of someone close to you is a trauma, but that’s not the worst part.
The worst part is the eternal emptiness that is left behind, for years to come. That feeling when you want to call someone, or invite them over, or go on a spontaneous roadtrip with them…and then you remember that you can’t. Ever.
It was this feeling that led me to believe that when a person died, that is quite simply the end of their personhood. A person begins when they are born and a person ends when they are dead.
But over the next couple of years, right up to this current moment, curious things started happening to me — that began to challenge that belief.
I meet people. All the time. People who knew Steve Danger. People I never knew until after he passed.
I have had countless conversations with complete strangers about the memories of his adventurous spirit, his “make stuff happen” energy, his warmth and generosity.
I have heard stories from people who remembered Steve Danger and I talking about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles from the other side of the campfire we were sitting at.
I have heard stories from people in Texas of all places, a long way from Baltimore where he lived, about his fire breathing and hula hooping skills.
I have found people who have shown me artifacts of his, things they have held onto — handmade whips and dreamcatchers and screenprints.
And every so often, Steve will make guest star appearances in my dreams. In one distinctive dream, we were adventuring around the playa at Burning Man together — a festival he had always wanted to go to, a festival I went to in 2015, almost a year exactly after his death — where I had left letters for him to be burned at the Temple.
In this dream, there was no knowledge of his passing or understanding of time — he was simply there, like he had always been, and we were laughing and talking like nothing had ever happened.
It was only after many hours into the night, that I realized where I was…and who I was with. I turned to him, not understanding.
“I thought you had died,” I said to him, crying.
“I’m not dead,” he said, with his characteristic smirk — almost laughing at the absurdity of what I had said.
“I’m right here.”
I looked at him. He was right there.
When I woke up, he was gone again — but I woke up with the understanding of what he had meant.
A person is not just a person.
You are not simply your physical self.
You do not end when you die.
You are a collection of the memories that people have of you — and your essence is extended by the love that people have for you, even after you are gone. Left behind are the dreams, the stories, and the artifacts that people like me keep sacred, warm, and shared. The mythos of Steve Danger is sustained by conversations that I have with the folks who knew and loved him, the meditations on the experiences we enjoyed with him, and the gratitude we have for the ways he touched our lives.
We are quite literally, the love we make in this world.
