*please listen to the song while you read the below story*
This is a song I’ve had in my iTunes for years. Probably 10-12 years. Never a song i listened to much. And then one day, about 10 years ago, I learned a friend had passed away. I was maybe 22-23, so she had to be 21, maybe. So I drive from Columbus to North Ohio and this song comes on during the drive. And I couldn’t turn it off. I listened to the song on repeat for most of the 3 hour drive to her funeral.
Her name was Alex Morris. We were more acquaintances than friends in college, but we’re always cool. But when she passed, I felt this intense urge to be where she was. So I drove. It’s weird. I’ve always hated funerals. I was 6 when my grandma passed and I refused, adamantly, going to her funeral. And I didn’t go. But for Alex, this was the first funeral I voluntarily went to. And there was something about this song, “The Good Fight,” by Teenager, that was emotionally gripping to me. The first half of the song is about regret, which wasn’t appropriate for me, at the time, but the second half of the song repeats, over and over, “just fighting, just fight the good fight”. And that’s what Alex did. All the time. She had cancer when she was a child, and took a lot of her mobility. But she was always positive. Always fucking positive. And she was good for a while, but it came back in her early twenties, took her leg, became metastatic, and spread to her lungs. It was a fairly rapid thing.
I remember listening to this song on the drive and crying the whole way. I think it was because I was contrasting my fast and reckless life, with no serious physical consequences, to the experiences she went through, and I think that’s when i first really realized that all this shit can’t end instantaneously. Regardless of what you personally do. Everything felt real and unavoidable during those three hours.
When I get there, the wake was before the funeral. And I remember sitting in the parking lot, unable to get out of the car. I think it was about 30 minutes before I went inside. So I go in, and I wait in line to pay my respects to Alex. I finally get there, and I look at her laying in the casket, no more than 22 years old, and I break down, sobbing. I think to this day, this is the most I’ve cried, the most emotionally vulnerable and uncontrolled I’ve ever been. I walk over to her mother and all I can do is cry and apologize as if I was somehow responsible, or if somehow my future happiness depends on her mother’s forgiveness. Grief and sadness is weird like that.
We all get in our cars with the flags on our hoods and do the funeral drive all the way to the cemetery. Instead of burying Alex, I think they put her casket in one of the buildings with the plaque that you can walk inside to, though I could be wrong. I don’t really remember. But every time I hear this song, I remember how I felt during that drive. I don’t cry anymore when the song comes on, and that makes me sad because I wonder if I’ve hardened, if I’ve become more emotionally unavailable, or if I’ve forgotten Alex. But today, I write this on a flight to my celebrate my birthday, and when this song came on on shuffle, I had to play it on repeat and write out how I felt.
Alex’s birthday is about a week after mine, so I always think about her around this time. Happy Birthday, Alex. I love you and I miss you.
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