by Josh Samman
Oh, I remember this one.
No, it’s not real, but in my mind, I choose to believe it’s genuine. If only one last time.
I can’t believe this happened to us.
933-2189 meant I got Isabel, my Isabel. She was calling, asking what I was still doing here, why I hadn’t done the things I promised I’d do, and just come home already. Cross your t’s and dot your i’s she tells me, stop wasting your time down there. Get it over with. Do what you’re going to do and come home already.
There’s no one waiting for you. You know better.
It was bizarre, the feeling of wanting it to all be over. It felt like the end of a long evening, wanting to just go to sleep and call it a night. My eyelids were heavy. I was delirious and vacant. Nothing mattered. I readied myself for the end, with the notion that my life had run its course.
What else is there to do?
Eulogy done. I’d said my words, and now it was over. I was barely alive anyway, the closest a soul could be to dead while still breathing. I was present only physically. My mind was elsewhere, itemizing all the ways it went wrong. Every waking moment was spent retracing the steps, a systematic calculation of each detail that could have gone differently. It consumed me, drove me insane. From the moment I woke, to the moment I went to sleep, the collective of my mistakes was the demon in my brain; picking, eating.
You're a shit person.
I felt like a detriment to those around me. The person I was, everything I’d become, all sane and rational thought had come to a swift end.
You're a careless, selfish, destructive shit of a person. You always have been.
I was disgusted. I hated looking in the mirror, or even passing by them. My self-loathing was comforted only by the feeling that I wouldn’t be here much longer.
They were right about you. Everyone who said they had a bad feeling about you was right.
Appetite, inhibition, sleep function, decision making, everything was haywire. Reality was setting in, and I wanted to separate myself from it.
You did this, you fuck. Stop feeling sorry for yourself.
I was tortured, day and night, as my mind tried to make sense of the chaos. Thoughts of her in our earlier life, memories of her in our last throws, dreams of her being pregnant with our child. I had a recurring one, of me telling her the big misunderstanding, where we all thought she’d been in an accident.
It’s all over.
I would leave Lance’s for nights like these, and check into a hotel.
This is the end.
I don’t remember where I got the pistol. Most mornings I woke up next to it I couldn’t remember how close I’d gotten the night before. Some nights I did remember. I remember not being afraid. I remember dry firing into my temple, or pressing the cold steel against my forehead, trying to conceptualize my pain being gone in a single click. I was comforted by the availability of it.
Just do it, bitch.
Some nights the last thing I remember before dozing off is swallowing a cocktail of opiates and benzos. I was playing my own game of Russian Roulette, walking a fine line in the name of plausible deniability, should I drift off into a sleep I didn’t wake from.
Plausible deniability.. That’s the ticket.
I ate a few extra Vicodin for good measure before drifting into another nightmared sleep. Nice and numb, nice and numb. This won’t hurt a bit.
90.
“Death steals everything but our stories.”
-Jim Harrison
It came and went in waves. I'd given up and regained hope a dozen times over. I stayed heavily medicated, and journaled about what was happening as I did. Earth had turned into a desolate place, just a dustbowl to wander. I was on the brink and wanted to provide some sort of explanation as to what had happened if one of these things did roll in and kill me. I wrote, and wrote, and wrote. It started with her eulogy and never stopped.
I shared portions of things I’d put on paper. Some with just friends and family, some with the world. I wondered if what they were reading would be the last thing I’d ever write. It was raw, unpolished, and often repetitive, but if there were words to come out, it gave me temporary reprieve.
It was in this stage of the process that I started to actually remember what folks were saying to me. Much of it was just noise, but to this day, my feelings towards the people in my life are often based on these very conversations, when I was in such a dark place, when words were at the height of their importance.
Most of what everyone said was infuriating, but that was only because I was furious with everything. I had illogical rage, with myself, with my friends, with people that were moving on with their lives, being alive when she wasn’t. I was angry with her for leaving me. My grief was evolving.
Some folks commented on the fragility of life. I wanted to bicker with them. Life isn’t fragile. Life is resilient. Death is irreparable, the finality of it just gives life the facade of fragility.
She’s still with you, some insisted. No, no. She was in a box on North Highway 27. I know, because I put her there. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, they said. All around the world, people encounter things every day that make them less of a person than they were before. I rejected any bit of comfort or reasoning anyone tried to offer.
People told me I made them not take their lover for granted, as if I did. My situation reminded them to appreciate what they had. I’d never needed that reminder, not once. I knew what I had when I had it. It was the only thing I was ever sure of.
Many people told me to call them if ever I needed to talk. All but few kept that promise. Once things got heavy, people stopped answering their phones. That’s why people pay grief counselors, I suppose.
Folks asked me the same question I’d heard the last eight years. When’s the next fight? with an occasional I’d sure hate to be that guy. I felt as if I could barely keep my head above water, and they were asking when I was going to swim the Atlantic.
It was many people’s way of looking for an indication that I was ready to resume normal life, that I was willing to go back to old Josh. I wasn’t ready, and I wasn’t sure we’d ever be seeing old Josh again. It irked and confused me to no end that that’s what people seemed to care about most. When are you going to go psycho on some poor guy in a cage? I knew the next fight would be an emotional and violent one. I could feel the rage, fucking and growing inside of me. I still had no idea how after I’d just dismantled my life and the lives of several others, that that’s what people wanted to see; me destroy more shit.
There were few, who asked if I was going to fight again, rather than when. That was the more appropriate question. Gerard from TUF asked, and didn’t tiptoe around other subjects either.
“Have you thought about killing yourself?” There was something grossly refreshing about the matter of factness in which someone finally asked that. I told him I had, and he shared a story of his uncle, who walked face first into an oncoming train. He’d become sick, he explained, and could no longer handle the effects of the treatment he was undergoing. The condition he was treating was Hepatitis C.
He hadn’t known about Isabel being sick. I told him everything. He explained some members of his family never recovered from his uncle’s death. He said we have a choice in which direction we move after tragedy and that the next few months would be important. “Have you watched The Fountain yet?” He asked. I couldn’t even listen to the damn soundtrack. “One day,” I told him.
Some of the advice was helpful. Chael reached out and gave me words about the path of defeat, and how time moves in only one direction. I remember my conversation with Theresa too, and the effect it had on me. “You have to live on for her, in the way she would want you to. You have to think of the things she loved most in you, and you have to do them for the rest of your life.” I tried to look past my self-contempt, to remember what it was Isabel loved in me in the first place.
She liked when I was a gentleman, when I opened doors for people a
nd tipped waitresses well. She liked when I wore my hair long, and when I played guitar. She liked when I gave to charities through Combat Night. She liked when I told stories about my past, when I was ambitious, and had goals to work towards. She liked when I recycled, and cleaned up after others that littered.
She liked when I was opinionated. She liked when I wasn’t judgmental of people, as I had a habit of doing. That may have been why she loved me, because I didn’t judge her. She liked when I went out of my way to help others, and when I told people “I love you.” You can never say that too much, she’d say. Big things, small things, I remembered it all.
I often thought of her sentiments on being pitied, and how it applied to me now. When she was struggling, folks were always patting her on the back. She loathed it, and I was reminded of it several times a day. That was all anyone seemed to want to do, pat my back like I was a fucking dog.
It wasn’t just the back pats. Everything reminded me of her. The triggers were endless, and I had to become calloused to them one by one. Every song on the radio corresponded with an image of her singing it. Black Honda Civics became the only car I saw on the road. Tire commercials made me want to throw my remote through the television. Beers we liked, dishes we loved, movies we watched, everything from my past life became something to avoid. It wasn’t just the only thing on my mind, it was on the minds of everyone around me. Maybe my transparency was the reason they felt the need to address it, always asking how I was doing.
How does it look like I’m doing?
I grieved publicly, a lot, and used social media as a blog to share things about her, about us. I didn't know how to reach out effectively otherwise. It was unhealthy, having the same medium through which I was grieving also be the place where thousands of pictures and memories were housed. Everything was main-lined, streaming and cycling through itself.
It was such a stark contrast to the way most of her family were dealing with the loss. They kept their feelings so private. It pained me each time I shared, thinking it may be causing someone else agony. It made me feel like I’d hijacked the grief train, like I thought I was the only one in pain. I just dealt with it differently. Sharing things about her was a strange little flame, the only one I had to keep me alive, and I couldn’t let it go out.
Beth and I were at lunch, one of the few we had over the course of weeks. She needed to talk to me about something, she said. I was expecting her to tell me it was time to shut the fuck up about all of this. That’s enough. Time to be quiet. Stop picking the scab, you selfish prick. I always thought it would be coming from someone sooner or later.
I always felt bad for Beth and the things that I’d put her through. I knew it was her that felt sorry for me now. I felt like it was just one more shitty chapter in her Josh Saga.
She was one of the only ones that would always answer her phone. She was kind to me, and admitted that this task had been the most difficult of her career. All of us were struggling to find any semblance of a silver lining.
“Have you thought about putting anything you’ve written into a larger body of work?” Her lunch wasn’t to tell me to shut up. It was the opposite.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that if you’re comfortable sharing this stuff, then you should probably think about writing a memoir. I think it could be helpful to others.”
“I don’t think I’m in any position to help anyone. And I’ve got no ending.”
“I’m confident you’ll find one.”
There was something about her insistence, her deliberation, her seriousness, that touched me. It felt like Isabel, urging me to go to The Ultimate Fighter. It was Isabel, in my mind. She was just speaking through Beth.
“I don’t know that I can tell this story without divulging things people don’t want revealed.”
“I think you’d be surprised. I feel strongly about this.”
I went home with a million more questions and objections in my mind that I wished I’d thought of at lunch.
Was this rational? Is any love rational? Was she really the most glorious thing ever, or was it just in my mind? Did that even matter? Did I owe it to her? Did I want to dig this deep, to immerse myself in this story for years to come? What would she want?
It felt like such a monumental endeavor, in the same vein as speaking at her funeral. It was impossible to fully capture and convey the beauty and complexity that was her, but I decided it would add to tragedy not to try. If the Shah of India could build the Taj Mahal, and Van Gogh could cut his ear off, the least I could do was try to write some words about a girl.
I had wind in my sails again. It wasn’t much, and it was in a very different direction than I was sailing a month earlier, but I was still sailing.
91.
“You are beautiful, but you are empty,” he went on. "One could not die for you. To be sure, an ordinary passerby would think that my rose looked just like you - the rose that belongs to me. But in herself alone she is more important than all the hundreds of other roses: because it is she that I have watered; because it is she that I have put under the glass globe; because it is she that I have sheltered behind the screen; because it is for her that I have killed the caterpillars (except the two or three that we saved to become butterflies); because it is she that I have listened to, when she grumbled, or boasted, or ever sometimes when she said nothing. Because she is my rose. And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.” “What is essential is invisible to the eye,” the little prince repeated, so that he would be sure to remember.
-Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Talking and spending time with Isabel’s family became my favorite thing to do. I loved learning about where she came from, seeing a piece of her in all of them. “You stick around as long as you need to,” Cathy told me. As long as you need to told me I was on a timeline. They were patient with me, and forgiving. They had a damaged person clinging to them for any last shred of Isabel that I could find. We all get things we don't ask for.
There were so many of them, all with their own special memories of her. They were the most remarkable group of people I’d ever met. I could see a piece of her in all of them. I saw how she was shaped to be the person she was, and why the acceptance and validation of her family was so important.
Sue Monroe was a spitting image of her daughter. They moved the same, scurried with the same cute stride as they walked. They said the same things, the product of a lifetime of Isabel stealing her mother’s quips and quotes. They hugged the same, and latched onto arms with the same affectionate touch.
Sue lived right down the road from the gravesite and had to drive past it every time she went to and from work. We visited it together often. We’d go there, and she’d ask questions for hours about Isabel, about us, and I did the same.
I relied on Sue for so many things. To see glimpses of Isabel when I needed her, to answer late night calls and texts because I did the same for her. I relied on her to see Isabel as a young woman, as I did.
She invited me over often, wanting someone to go through Isabel’s journals with. I didn’t know what to think of it, or why she did it, but I knew I wanted every last morsel of Isabel that was left around, and would take it however it came. I broke my promise to Isabel about never reading her diaries.
There were no dark secrets I hadn’t known about, nothing I hadn’t heard. Instead, it was books full of art I’d never even known she was capable of. Volumes and chapters lined the pages, filled with even more reasons to fall in love with her. Short stories, sketches, and poems, about everything. About her brothers, about her drug use, about lust, and self-reflection. She was powerful, far beyond her years in mind and soul.
Besides Sue, I relied heavily on Cathy. She reached out often, and was instrumental in keeping me connected to the Monroes. She made sure to invite me to family functions, and served as a buffer between Dallas and I. He and I never kne
w what to say to each other. She answered her fair share of late night phone calls too, and left me with a bit of wisdom each time we spoke. It had to have been difficult for her, having to console the two saddest men on Earth. She did it with grace.
Cathy made sure to get me a locket of Isabel’s hair, and I wanted to do something special with it, something besides having it sit in a dresser drawer with countless other relics. Isabel’s hair was something so special to her. No one had seen her cry as I had, as she lost it in the shower, or tried to hold herself together as she brushed it.
I read of a practice in which kings made jewelry of their queens’ and princesses’ hair, like the opening scene in The Fountain. I found a jeweler that specialized in it. I took the locket Cathy gave me and made a ring for Dallas, one for myself, and an amulet for Sue.
Sue told me it was the best gift anyone had ever given her. The ring became my most prized possession, too. It was my talisman, my proof of having once been in love and being loved in return. It was the most acceptable manner in which I could still carry a piece of her with me.
To most of them, she was still with us anyway. When folks dreamt about her, they took it as her visiting them. They saw butterflies, birds, and sunsets, felt gusts of wind, and swore it was her. Cathy and I talked about religion, and I told her I was an atheist. She suggested I switch that word to Agnostic if I wanted any sympathy from a family of Southern Baptists.
Tragedy, as I was learning, was a bleak time to be an atheist. We were all accepting of each other’s beliefs, but the implications were enormous if fundamental; them thinking that she’s up in heaven, and I’d be going to burn in hell.
I wished that I could’ve believed how they believed. What bliss it must’ve been, imagining being able to see her again, and what comfort it would’ve brought, knowing there's a grand order and plan for everything; not random, cruel, chaos. I listened to all the scripture and bible verses and advice that any of them had. I wanted so badly to believe. Thinking everything happened for a reason was so challenging for me. I couldn’t wrap my brain around believing that what had happened could be constructed into anything better than her being here.