Incomparable

by Brie Bella

  From that day on, we were inseparable. We had to see each other every day, and we talked all the time, locking up our home phones for hours. We had a profound connection, like we had known each other forever, like it wasn’t our first rodeo. He also had a beautiful family—even though they had suffered such a horrible loss with the death of his brother, they were so positive, so deeply spiritual and grounded. I loved being at their house—it undid some of the bad things that had happened at my own.

  I was going through so many issues with my own dad that I needed to be around someone who was unwaveringly positive. That was Bear—I never heard him say anything negative. He didn’t always say a lot. He was a guy of few words, but when he did speak, it was always the truth, delivered kindly and gently.

  I remember one day, my dad’s girlfriend called me to tell me that my father was in the hospital, that he had cancer. My dad and I weren’t speaking, but Bear urged me to go. He told me, “If something happens to your dad, do you really want to go through life being mad at him for being a shitty dad? There’s so much more to people. They are who they are. Love is always greater.” It would have been so much easier for Bear to pile onto my feelings, to pick up the cross of anger that I was already carrying, but he pushed me to start speaking to my dad again instead. Even when it turned out that my dad did not actually have cancer, but was in the hospital because he had overdosed on meth.

  Bear was really big on forgiveness and really big on making it right with people. I guess you could call it taking care of your side of the street, being responsible for your own part in the relationship. In many ways you could call Bear religious, but I think a better word is spiritual. He believed in a lot of what Jesus taught. He went to a Catholic high school, but he was more about the spirit of the Bible than the letter. He just breathed living kindness.

  With everything that had happened with my family, my own faith had definitely drifted. Part of my rebellion was rejecting the church, which had been important to my grandparents. But Bear gave me back my spirituality. I believe he brought me back to myself and grounded me at a time when I felt like I was untethered, and most inclined to just float away.

  The summer before our senior year was magical. While Bear was not my first everything, he was certainly my first love. And it was a deep one. I had lost my virginity to a guy friend from school down at the beach a few months before I met Bear. I thought it was a good idea at the time because he was nice and respectful, and I trusted him, but it was awkward and terrible all around, and the next day, I regretted it. That regret, compounded by my Catholic guilt, ended up ruining our relationship. In hindsight, I would have much rather had his friendship than his virginity.

  Bear and I daydreamed a lot about where we’d go after high school—he thought he’d wear a morning tux to our wedding, that we’d have babies. Bear was an incredible artist, and my primary goal, particularly because I felt so directionless, was to live vicariously through him. When I was in eighth grade, I had asked for a guitar for Christmas, which Santa delivered under the tree. My dad refused to get me lessons, because in his mind, only stoners played guitar. I also used to paint all the time, but my parents assumed that anyone who was artsy also did drugs. I think they felt that by forcing me into soccer, they would be assured that I’d have a future free of partying and hard drugs. What they didn’t realize was that by disconnecting me from things I actually cared about, they only made me feel more lost. So at school I threw myself into music, art, drama. And I threw myself into my relationship with Bear, who represented everything I loved and had been denied—everything I hid from my parents at home.

  One night, after we had been dating for a few months, I walked Bear from my house to his car. We shared a really passionate kiss—one of those kisses that you feel inside your entire body. As we stood outside in the dry desert heat, he asked me if he could do something. He lifted up my shirt, unhooked my bra and just held me, skin-to-skin. I could feel the reverberations of his heart in my own. It was a quiet moment, not sexual. It was one of the most powerful and moving things I had ever felt with someone.

  Bear was such a good artist that the local Starbucks asked to put up a show of his work. He taught himself how to play the piano, how to play the guitar. He was an incredible skateboarder. He was simply perfect, complete and self-assured. Someone who knew what he wanted. He also had opportunities—Berkeley and colleges in New York were into his stuff. I figured my graduation plan could be to just follow him around if he’d let me.

  My birthday is in November, and he made me a CD as my gift. His friends mocked him, but I loved it. I’ve never cared about material things, and if he had gone out and spent money it would have made me uncomfortable. So he made me a mix and told me that every song had meaning to each of us, and to our relationship. He wrote “For Bri” across the jewel case. (My family and friends spell my name Bri.) I still listen to it today, and it brings me back to our entire relationship, to this incredible guy. It’s a complete soundtrack to some of the most magical months of my life, of being with someone who made me feel whole. I’m so grateful that he didn’t give me a shirt, or something silly that I would have lost or broken over the years. For Christmas, he gave me a Mother Mary necklace—for protection—that I still treasure. I can’t remember what I gave him, though I’m sure it was embarrassing. But he gave me a Mother Mary—that was just like him, marking moments like that in ways that were actually meaningful.

  On January 18, Bear and I had plans to go and do something. He really wanted to go to the St. Mary’s football game, so I told him to come and find me after. Something happened that messed up our plans, and he never came to meet me. It wasn’t the age of texting, and so everything was set at the beginning of the night and timed perfectly. If you missed each other, that was your only chance. I was pissed, and we argued. This was really unusual for us, despite my hair-trigger temper. The next day he called me on my house phone. He told me he was going to go skate with his friends and then come find me. We both apologized for the night before and felt silly that it had been enough to make us fight. It was a new day and I couldn’t wait to see him later.

  That night, January 19, I waited for him at my house alone. My mom went out with her girlfriends, my brother was at a friend’s house, and my sister—who had fractured her leg two weeks before and been stuck in bed ever since—had been dragged out of the house and to a movie by her boyfriend.

  Bear and his friend Greg were going to pick up our friend Ronnie and then cruise to my house. I knew exactly how long it would take for him to get to me. I remember looking at the clock and thinking, “Dang, I bet he stopped at a party and I’m once again on the back burner.” I started to get annoyed, which built into frustration and anger. Then my sister came through the door, wanting to hang out with Bear. She had been walking into the movie theater with her boyfriend when she asked him to drive her home because she felt a strong urge to see us. And then my brother showed up, wanting to see Bear, too. And then my friends Sarah and Val called, wanting to see Bear. Within thirty minutes, I went from sitting and waiting by myself to being surrounded by people who all wanted to see Bear.

  I mixed some Ruby Red Squirt with a little vodka from my mom’s stash and gave everyone a drink (none for JJ, don’t worry). Then I thought, “Oh, Bear’s here.” I could smell him. I told everyone the boys had finally arrived and walked out to the front. But he wasn’t there. I went to the backyard, thinking maybe he had detoured around the house to finish his cigarette. No Bear.

  Then the phone rang. It was Bear’s older brother, Patrick. He said quietly, “Brie, Bear has been in a really bad accident.” Then he went silent, started crying, and hung up on me. My heart dropped, but I didn’t think death. Death was impossible. I called him back. “Brie, Bear is dead. He’s dead, Brie.” I was in the living room and I tried to grab on to the console, but I collapsed onto the floor. Bear was seventeen, he was invincible. I had just spoken to him hours before. I begged God to bring him back, pleadin
g and bargaining with him that it wouldn’t be weird if he performed a miracle and restarted his heart—this was Bear. Bear was a miracle.

  I thought if I could get to the hospital, maybe it would be enough to save him. My girlfriend Val drove me there, running every red light on the way. The only miracle that night was that we didn’t die as well. I will always remember how that evening smelled, how I could feel death in the hospital. I sat in the emergency room and waited. When they rolled Greg out, he looked like a marshmallow. I remember thinking that if he was alive, and looked like that, I could only imagine what had happened to Bear.

  Greg and Bear were hit by a guy who was racing to a party. He was intoxicated and driving without a license. It was a hit and run, though they caught him and he spent seven years in jail. Bear wasn’t wearing a seatbelt and was flung from the car, but they think the rollbar of the truck would have smashed him anyway. Greg thinks they were hit twice, but knows for certain that they hit the gravel in the center of the freeway and rolled. He remembers looking at Bear in the moment after they had been hit, when Greg had lost control of the car. Bear just smiled back at him, like he knew, like he had already transcended his body. When the car stopped rolling, Greg sprinted to Bear and held him in his lap, but Bear was already gone, he had died on impact.

  Everyone met up at a house to pray and be together after. I went and, for the first time, felt like I didn’t belong. I was the girl from a different high school, and I felt responsible for taking away their best friend. He meant so much to so many different people. One girl muttered under her breath that if he hadn’t been on his way to see me, he wouldn’t be dead. I wanted to hear that. In retrospect, that is insane, but it was impossible for me to not want to hold some of the responsibility. It gave his death some meaning, and a reason, when it felt like it had neither.

  I was in deep crisis and grief, totally ill-equipped to deal with the loss. When you lose a relationship, it can feel like you lose all the memories you shared because they are too painful to remember. And most strangely, you are suddenly left with days full of holes that were once filled up by someone else. Everything has to shift, which is a terrible exercise when you don’t want it to. I wanted to hold that space to think about and mourn Bear, not to just absorb the loss and move on. Feeling “normal” again was a terrifying idea. I didn’t want a new normal without Bear. Every day, I’d had a routine. I went to school, then to my mom’s office, where I had worked as a receptionist since I was fifteen, then to Bear’s house until I had to pick up Nicole at the gym where she manned the front desk. Rinse and repeat.

  After Bear died, I couldn’t go right back to school. I stayed home for several weeks and cried until I was empty. While my friends were busy planning their futures postgraduation, I was just trying to get to the next day. A week ahead seemed impossibly far away. I honestly don’t think I would have made it if it weren’t for Bear’s friends and Bear’s mom, who managed somehow to hold us all up in our grief despite her own. I think she knows, I hope she knows, how much that time meant to me. Being a mother now, I can’t imagine how she made it through those days, much less how she carried us all through. Bear and his mother shared a strong faith, and just being around her reminded me of him. I could have gone two ways at that time. I could have decided to hate God and tell everyone and everything to fuck itself, but Bear’s mom helped me to a different outcome. She helped me to not lose touch with what he had brought into my life—his purpose and his passion. I felt like I had to harness these qualities for myself so they wouldn’t be lost. It was far better and more productive than believing he had lived and died for no reason.

  I started writing, which felt like a way to communicate directly with him. Actually, it’s strange, but the Monday before Bear died we were hanging out at his house. We’d typically start out those nights sitting next to each other on the piano bench, while he serenaded me with songs. His family had a library of VHS cassette tapes—movies like My Cousin Vinny, his favorite, and other classics from the eighties and nineties. That night we were watching something we had probably seen a hundred times before, and he turned to me and said something like: “I have this feeling that I’m going to die young, like before I’m thirty.” I laughed at what I thought was his fantasy of some rock ’n’ roll flameout. I didn’t realize at the time that his soul was preparing him for death. It was sending up a little warning flare that some things are too good to stick around for long.

  In retrospect, I realize his dog Maggie was acting weird that week, too. She was hovering around him, watching and guarding. I can’t help but believe that the gifts he had given me—my Mother Mary necklace, my “For Bri” CD, a clay bear he made for me in pottery class so I’d always have a bear to watch over me at night—were anticipatory totems of protection. They were for when he wouldn’t be there himself to protect me.

  Earlier that year, the Diamondbacks had won the World Series, and the whole town erupted in celebration. Bear lived by the Heard Museum, devoted to American Indian art. There was a vacant house nearby, and one night we hopped a fence and snuck in, so we could watch the fireworks from inside. It felt like it was our house that night, and we were watching a celebration of our future. Just the two of us, alone in the world, surrounded by colorful bursts of light.

  When I’d started dating Bear, I quit soccer. My mom was pissed. Colleges were taking a long look at me, and she thought the possibility of a scholarship was my only chance of going to school. Never mind that I was miserable on the field. “You hate soccer,” Bear had said, “so why are you committing yourself to a future where you have to keep playing?” He was right, even though it seemed like a reckless choice at the time, particularly considering I didn’t have any other options. “You’ve got to do what feels right,” he always said, “do what makes you happy.” It might sound trite, but this was wise counsel from a high school senior. After he was gone, I tried to bury what he wanted for me in my body and use him as my compass.

  When I graduated from high school, Bear’s mom gave me the portrait that he had painted of me that day in the attic. It was a split face. He had painted a self-portrait to make up the other side and then he hung the pair on his bedroom wall. He told me that at night, the moon would shine across our eyes, lighting us both up. I still have the painting, and I look at it often. I’m lucky that my husband, Bryan, is so unthreatened by my past and is understanding of what Bear continues to mean to me. But then, I often think that Bear sent him my way. Before I left town for California, I went with Bear’s family to get bear claw tattoos on my lower abdomen. It’s funny, because I dated a lot of guys throughout the years who did not dig them at all. They were freaked out by their presence. I think of them as a gesture of protection from Bear, a way of warding off guys who have no business being in my life. They are a final totem.

  I still pray to Bear every day. I ask him for help with difficult situations, I ask him for strength before matches, I ask him for advice about tricky decisions. I ask him if he’s doing a big skateboarding ramp up in heaven. If there’s a beautiful sunset, I’ll ask him if he painted it for me. I have reason to believe that he hears me, because he sends me signs all the time. In particular, he sends me feathers at moments when I need them most. A bit after Bear died, I was in a bookstore with my sister, browsing the self-help aisle (as one does). I was trying to work through my wanderlust and lack of direction. I passed a shelf with a book that was about bears. I picked it up to flip through it and a feather fell to the floor. I walked up to the owner of the bookstore and asked him why a feather, which looked like it had just been plucked off of a bird’s ass, was in this book. He looked at me like I was nuts. He took it from me to toss it in the trash, but I asked him if I could keep it. Which made him look at me like I was really nuts. Other times, I’ve asked Bear if he can hear me, and a song from my “For Bri” CD will come on the radio. To this day it still happens with so much frequency it feels impossible that it’s a coincidence. I believe that he is my guardian angel.
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  A few months after Bear died, I was hanging out at his friend Austin’s house. Austin’s mom pulled me aside. I thought she just wanted to check in on me, make sure I was eating and sleeping and taking care of myself. But she told me that she had been in the crystal store in town, and a woman who worked there had called out: “There’s a young man here.” This woman had described what he looked like and said that he was showing her an image of a bear. She said that the young man had been in a car accident and his life was cut short. Austin’s mom raised her hand and told the woman she thought she knew who he was, and that he must be trying to reach her. As Austin’s mom told me this, I remember looking at her like she was batshit crazy. I wasn’t familiar with the concept of psychics and mediums—the Catholic Church, while all about angels, frowns on that sort of thing. Then Austin’s mom told me that the woman in the crystal store had mentioned me, as well as Bear’s cousin Paul, and that she really needed to speak to us.

  I told her I didn’t believe in that sort of thing, and she nodded. “I get it, but I wouldn’t feel right if I didn’t tell you.” She handed me the phone number for the medium, whose name was Tricia. I thought about it for a while. I believed in angels and thought I had seen Bear a number of times. I dreamed about him constantly. So I went to the store, which was called A Peace of the Universe, and found Tricia, to test her. “Listen,” I said, “I don’t know anything about this stuff, and I’m not going to sit here and tell you about my life. What is it exactly that you need?” I was just a high school kid, and I’m sure she didn’t really know what to do with me either. But she sat me down and began to channel Bear. I said nothing.

  She told me things, intimate things, that only the two of us knew. She brought up the night we spent in the vacant house watching the fireworks, which was something Bear and I had kept as a secret for ourselves. I immediately started to bawl and asked her how the fuck she could possibly know any of it. (I definitely said “fuck”; I was upset.) “Brie, he’s telling me.” That first reading was one of the craziest experiences of my life, and that’s saying a lot from a WWE wrestler. She asked me if I had been at the cemetery that morning putting flowers on his grave. She went on: “He said you were crying really, really hard—that you blame yourself.” I told her that it was true, I had been there that morning and I did feel responsible. She replied, “There was a reason for his death—I know it seems impossible, but there was a reason. You have to stop blaming yourself.”