Remembering Jimmy On New Year's Day
For the past few years, I’ve shared a particular Facebook memory on New Year’s Day and added a yearly remembrance to it. It has now gotten so long that I’ve decided to make a blog post for it.
*Trigger Warning* This is a very sad, true story about a friend who committed suicide on New Year’s Day, and my grieving process. It might be upsetting for some people. If you or someone you know has been experiencing suicidal thoughts or ideations, please reach out to someone who can help. Here is a link with resources located around the world: http://www.iasp.info/resources/Crisis_Centres/
2013
On New Year's Day, 2013, before sunrise, my friend Jimmy and I took a walk. At the time, I had no way of knowing that in just two years, he would bid the world goodbye. I’ve often returned to the memory of this night/morning as if I’m someone rewatching an old movie and searching for hidden symbolism.
The memory of this walk, in particular, seems like something from a past life—perhaps because I’ve returned to it so often, and have tried so desperately to remember as much of it as I could.
What I can recall is this: Jimmy walked me from a party at his house (called “The Bro-Thel”) to our friends’ house where I was crashing (called “Downtown Coolsville”).
I had shoulder-length platinum blonde hair at the time. I wore a silver dress and a tiny celebratory tophat, along with a pair of thick-framed hipster glasses. Jimmy was wearing my Indiana Jones-esque hat and a biker jacket.
As we walked, he told me all about the play he was writing, called “Diary of a Dead Man,” and I told him about the script I was working on, which he urged me to finish. He loved the idea, and the premise, and even had an idea for the ending.
For years, I struggled to remember which unfinished script of mine we talked about that night. But whatever it was, he got very excited about it indeed, to the point where he was inspired to loudly exclaim that we would both be famous writers one day.
He stopped at one point, in the middle of the street, and shouted it out to the heavens. “We’re gonna be famous!” he bellowed. (“Happy New Year!” somebody yelled back.)
As we neared Downtown Coolsville, he continued, saying that we would change the world. I distinctly remember walking up the exterior metal stairway and hearing him yell out from the parking lot “You’ll see, Mig! It’s going to happen!”
I turned to see him standing in the middle of the parking lot, dancing to whatever song the neighbors were playing. His moves involved lots of side-to-side head movements and finger-guns. It ended in a flourish, with him scooping the hat off of his head and holding it up to the sky in a very Mary Tyler Moore-inspired moment.
“We're destined for greatness,” Jimmy said, “and you can't fight Destiny!"
And with that, he either flung my hat toward me like a frisbee and I caught it perfectly with a clever response, OR I jokingly told him to go home and went inside. I don’t remember which thing actually happened, but I like to think it was the first one.
There were many things I didn’t know at the time. I didn’t know about his fascination with death. I didn’t know about his dark past or how it would come to haunt my future.
2014
By New Year's Day, 2014, a lot had transpired. Jimmy had left Ashland and returned to his hometown in Washington, and I had moved into his old room at The Bro-Thel. I was not speaking to him.
The story of why I wasn’t speaking to him is deeply personal, and I don’t feel right talking about it here. But an important component of the story was that he had told me and several of our friends, over the summer, that he was dying of a medical condition, only to later tell us that he had told us this because he had been planning to take his own life.
At the time, there was a part of me that really felt like this was the universe punishing me. I’d always been an overly imaginative child who told elaborate tall tales, and there were many instances in the past when I lied to impress people. These included me pretending to be from foreign countries to test out various accents, me making up stories about landing roles in movies, and all sorts of things I now cringe to think about.
Of course, now I realize that’s incredibly self-centered. But there was no telling 2014 Mig that. 2014 Mig believed that the world revolved around her various personal tragedies and heartbreaks, but that she would persevere by transforming all of them into magnificent works of art.
And of course, 2014 Mig didn’t believe Jimmy was really going to do it. Obviously he just wanted the attention. Obviously he had just been lying to us to get sympathy. Obviously this would all blow over and we’d all be friends again, someday in the distant future when I would obviously get over it.
Obviously, right?
So when, on New Year’s Day, 2014, Jimmy texted me "Happy New Years" with at least five exclamation points, I didn't respond.
But I did think to myself how much I desperately wanted to prove him right about at least one thing: that whatever he wanted to do with his life, that I was going to be famous one day.
Like I said, 2014 Mig was maaaybe a little self-centered.
2015
On New Year's Day, 2015, I saw Jimmy’s last Facebook status, in which he said that his New Year’s Resolution was to always “embrace love.”
Since the year before, I had come much closer to forgiving Jimmy, but it was hard to do. He had returned to Ashland and had tried to reconcile with me and many of our friends. Some of us were more willing than others to reach out to him.
He had asked me several times if I wanted to go for a walk. I kept making excuses as to why I couldn’t. I avoided him on our college campus whenever I saw him.
By the time I finally had worked up the nerve to ask him if he wanted to finally go for that walk, he had moved back to Washington.
I saw him one last time in November, when he came down to Ashland for a weekend to record some ADR (voiceover work, essentially) for a short film we’d made, which was still in post-production.
He looked very different. He was an odd combination of seeming both very gaunt and depleted but somehow incredibly happy--the happiest I think I’d seen him since that first New Year’s Party.
We spent the day just acting as if we were old friends and that nothing bad had ever happened. We never talked about the elephant in the room. That elephant followed us all around town that day, but we were able to outrun it at every turn. We talked about dinosaurs, One Piece, giraffes, and the only argument we had was about whether strawberries are a necessary addition to waffles.
More friends eventually joined up with us as the day progressed, and he slipped out without saying goodbye.
That was the last time I’d ever see him in person.
I never got closure for the things I was upset with him about. I never got to tell him how upset I was that he had lied to all of us, but especially me. (2015 Mig was maybe still a liiiittle self-centered.)
But I did get something that, maybe, in a way, was better than closure. I got to spend one last day hanging out with my friend.
And I didn’t appreciate it enough at the time.
So when, on New Year’s Day 2015 came, and I saw his Facebook status saying that he wanted to always embrace love, I thought it was pretentious and rolled my eyes, not knowing that we'd never get a status from him again. Not knowing that he was already gone. That it had been him saying goodbye.
2016
On New Year’s Day, 2016, I was still living in The Bro-Thel in Jimmy’s old room. It had been one year since he died, and three years since he told me we’d find greatness.
New Year’s Day has never been the same for me.
That year, my New Year's Resolution is to try to finish that play I told him about on that night in 2013, and try to find the greatness he said was my destiny.
Because, as he’d always said in so, so, SO many conversations over the years...
“Somebody has to.”
2017
I spent New Year’s Day of 2017 sick in bed. I still lived in Jimmy's old room with his Pathfinder books on the shelf and his firefighter boots in the corner.
I had maintained a yearly tradition of sharing a Facebook memory of us at the New Year’s party in 2013. Looking at this picture again in 2017, I was profoundly struck by what an enabler 2013 Mig had been. That whole weekend, he had been acting so strange. He’d been saying such disturbing things, and instead of seeing the warning signs, I took out the camera.
2018
New Year’s Day 2018 started with a disagreement between me and some friends. Then I saw that picture of me and Jimmy from 2013 pop up in Facebook memories and remembered how short life is.
At that point, I had completely forgotten which play Jimmy told me I should finish on that walk. So I decided I’d better write all of them just to make sure.
2019
On New Year’s Day, 2019, I realized the play that Jimmy had wanted me to write was “The Diminished” (although it wasn’t called that at the time).
I had spent the last several months having a hellish time trying to get it made as a movie and wound up with a short film. A lot of things about the story started to make sense when I remembered that New Year’s Day walk in the wee hours of that morning in 2013.
Jimmy had loved the idea of the lead character taking their own life to stop the bad guy. Maybe what Jimmy did was his own version of that. I named one of the characters in the movie after him without making the connection.
Due to logistical problems and some lessons about my shortcomings as a director that I had to learn the hard way, the ending that Jimmy had loved so much was never filmed. Maybe it’s better that way.
2020
New Year’s Day, 2020 was the first year in many, many years that I did not spend in The Bro-Thel. I had finally moved out of it in September of 2019, and had taken most if not all of Jimmy’s old belongings to a storage unit in the nearby town of Talent.
His parents had initially wanted me to hang onto his furniture, which he had helped build and which had great sentimental value, but after moving away, they gave me their blessing to sell them if necessary. I held onto those things anyway.
I held onto his things for as long as I could.
2021
Jimmy’s belongings and so, so many of our old memories were destroyed in the Almeda fire a few months ago, which devastated much of Southern Oregon, particularly Talent, where my storage unit had been. My unit has been reduced to a pile of rubble buried under several layers of sheet metal, which the unit owners are still in the process of getting removed. (There are a lot of insurance reasons that they can’t get the metal removed sooner, and I completely understand that it’s a complicated issue.)
I don’t know if anything in my unit survived the fire, but I’m hopeful that I will eventually find something in there once the metal gets moved. I’m particularly hoping that something, anything of Jimmy’s, might have made it through unscathed.
In the meantime, I have been living in Los Angeles, where I’m staying during the pandemic. My original plan was to move here in 2020 permanently, but the pandemic definitely altered those plans.
The wonderful humans at my work have very generously agreed to a temporary remote work agreement, so I’m able to live in a beautiful spacious house in LA during the pandemic and keep my job, which I love very much.
Although I am not going out and auditioning for films or going to networking events or anything like that, I am so glad to be here. I’ve found at least one of Jimmy’s old things--an Edward Cullen lunchbox (which is currently full of old Arkham Horror cards from the board game, which sadly didn’t make it out of the fire).
Just a few days ago, I learned that a talented young man named David, who I’d met a few times and had many mutual friends with, took his own life. I didn’t know him well, but seeing the posts on social media from others who did was heartbreaking.
Especially now, when so many of us can’t see each other physically, it can be so incredibly difficult to know who’s fighting invisible battles and how you can be there for them.
I still don't know what any of us could have done differently for Jimmy, or for David, or for anybody who decided it was their time to go.
I’d like to end this with something profound, but the only thing I can think to write is to encourage us all to think of other people and to be as honest and as kind as we can.
So if you're reading this and you know someone who wants to go early, please talk to them. Even if you can't talk them into sticking around. Just talk to them. Even if it's just about bumblebees or hippos or why salmon has an "L" in it.
Be there for your friends. Because somebody has to.
New Year’s Day, 2022
Last night, I went to a New Year’s Eve gathering and got incredibly sad. Even though time and distance have done a lot to help me forget and make it less painful, New Year’s Eve remains a terrible night for me. Memories of Jimmy, finding out about his death--they all hurt. The good ones hurt, even.
The fake memories hurt the worst. The fake memories where I’ve imagined what was going through his head, or what transpired. I’ve conjured up all sorts of horrible things, imagining them like a movie, and I’ve played that movie in my mind so many times--at least once a year, since 2015--that they feel like real memories. I’d love to forget them.
I’d love to be able to sustain a happy note on New Year’s Eve--one that carries through into the New Year as I watch the ball drop, or hear friends and neighbors yell “Happy New Year!” to no one in particular.
I haven’t been a particularly great friend to anyone lately, not even myself. Time and distance can do that, too.
A lot has happened since moving to LA. I was in a few plays, and while I loved being on stage again, I felt like I was honestly just OK in them—and maybe this feeling of needing to be legendary is something that gets in the way for me—something I need to work on. I’m not sure.
I no longer have the wonderful day job, for reasons I won’t get into. It still really saddens me—it was a job I’d had for 5 years, and I’d gotten used to job security. Now, I work in an escape room, which is a lot of fun. I play a creepy maid who frightens guests, and has an Irish accent because I tried it out and the guests seem to like it. It’s rewarding to me, fulfilling even.
Granted, I don’t make nearly as much money and I had to figure out my own insurance and everything—all sorts of really fun adulting stuff. But maybe in the long run it’s best for me. I do feel a lot happier there. And I do seem to be awfully good at scaring people.
I was also in a few films, and keep auditioning for them. That’s one big plus to not working 32-40 hours on a computer, is getting to spend more time pursuing acting more easily.
Most of my auditions seem to go well, though few of them so far have resulted in me getting cast. That’s okay, though. I’ve met a lot of interesting people, and sometimes they even like my crazy, long-winded stories!
The thing that I guess has made me the absolute saddest is that I haven’t been as inspired lately, but that’s changed. Over the last couple of days, I’ve returned to a lot of my old writing projects. I’m thinking of adapting some into audio dramas. I’ve even started on a couple of scripts.
I still need to finish The Diminished, or at least do something with it. I know I’ve been putting it off. Sometimes it’s hard to find the motivation. Sometimes a story accrues so much baggage that telling it doesn’t feel fun anymore. But it’s important to remember that telling stories isn’t always about fun--sometimes a story needs to get told. Sometimes there’s something rewarding about providing the fun for other people, and not making it all about you, the storyteller having fun. But I digress.
On New Year’s Eve, I was glad I got to talk to my dad on the phone. I stepped outside the party and we just talked for hours, until it was almost midnight. We talked about monster movies and particularly the Wolf Man, and how the Wolf Man doesn’t always seem as scary as the others--like Dracula, Frankenstein, etc., and part of it might be because he’s just so lonely. He’s just such a bummer. And he only has powers sometimes, but his powers are a total inconvenience. We talked about some ways that we could make the Wolf Man fun. Maybe he goes on a hiking trip--sounds a lot less drab than chaining himself to a wall, right? Maybe he finally gets a bride, like Frankenstein got, or Dracula got three of. You never really hear about “Bride of the Wolf Man,” after all.
I promised myself last year that I’d update this again on New Year’s Day, but it’s actually January 2nd. The truth is, I spent most of January 1st writing various scripts, immersing myself in creating utter fiction, with maybe a few kernels of real life thrown in there.
I think Jimmy would have preferred that. He always did like a good story.
I haven’t had a proper New Year's resolution in a while because of how bummed out I get at this time of year, but I guess I could make one now…
It’s to write more frequently. Not to finish things, not to make things perfect, not anything like that. Just to do the writing. Maybe I’ll write a Wolf Man story.
And maybe be a better friend when I can, too. Since, you know, somebody has to.
(Coming soon in 2023, “Friend of the Wolf Man”? …We’ll see.)
Me with Jimmy at the New Year’s party in 2013.