March 18, 2018 10:27 AM
Owen: Cecily… the t shirt. Oh man. Seeing you wear that at the end of the show warmed my heart more than you could know. You are truly an amazing person who ALWAYS puts others and the problems of the world she is passionate about before herself, and not in the easy passive way, in the active way that demands real sacrifice. You are obviously extremely talented and smart and funny and beautiful. You’re the best cousin ever and I love you
I will hold those words with me forever. I miss him right now.
Okay, and now for something funny, the parts of the story I like to live in. Big brother, little sister, older cousin talking basketball. Little sister loves basketball. And basketball player:
November 8, 2018
Leda: Are you allowed to DM basketball players if it’s ———and he makes your story his story?
Owen: No
Stop
Please
Cecily: I mean, yes. But also remember it’s ———who is liking a story that’s praising him. And that maaaaybe doesn’t happen a lot? So, as long as you keep context in mind :)
Leda: Hahaha
All valid points
Owen: I didn’t make a point
Just want you to stop
Leda: I think “no” is a point
Just not a nuanced one
Owen: Haha fair
Leda: But yes Cecily I’m great at keeping context in mind
November 5, 2018
Owen: In the hypothetical situation that the New York Knicks run into the stands and tag you in, and you have a wide opportunity to score on the bulls, your former home team, would you do it? Would you dunk on the bulls?
Cecily: Absolutely. The way they treated Derrick Rose?!?
If Michael Jordan was there no way
But also
I can’t dunk
I can hardly jump
I can barely walk
Owen: Psh well not with that attitude you can’t
Leda: I in fact can dunk
And would happily do so
If tagged in for the New York Knicks
Owen: That’s the spirit
Cecily: Then I’ll pass the ball to you
Guys I don’t want to NOT dunk on the Bulls!
I tried never to prod too much about Owen’s GBM, instead letting him decide what and when he wanted to share with me.
March 12, 2019 2:46 PM
Owen: Hey Cec! Just thought I’d give you a quick update on ma brain sitch. Just finished my second MRI review appt today in Carolina and the treatment is working exceptionally well. The tumor is rapidly disintegrating. Obviously no guarantees but if I continue like they expect me to and like people in the past who have responded like I have thus far then I’ll be sticking around a whiiiiile longer. Basically the news is as best as it could possibly be. I just wanna thank you for all the AMAZING support you’ve given me thus far. I mean the friggin video, the friggin T-shirt on stage, your usual amazing loving self and words, you are truly the best cousin I could ask for and I love you so much. Fam chill sesh/dinner soon!
Cecily: Wow ok this is the best news I could hear. I’m a dweeb and you got me crying this morning! I am beyond inspired by you my dude. More than you could ever know. And it’s gonna stick with me a long time. I’m of course so sorry you’ve had to deal with any and all of this. And I’m happy to be in your corner and I’m thrilled I get to call you family because you are one of the toughest and smartest and funniest and kindest people I know! Thanks for sharing this update. I’m with Rashida now and I’m gonna share with her if that’s OK.
Owen: It’s crazy. I’m insanely lucky.
March 31, 2020
It’s still raining. I got this text from Leda after sending her some of what I was writing:
Leda: I can’t believe you just sent this now because I was literally sitting among the daffodils that just bloomed at my country house and thinking of O. My mom planted daffodils when he was born and his birthday is always right around when they bloom. And then I came back just now and read this. And I’m crying again of course. I love what you said about finally writing about Owen now because the world needs cheering up, and maybe it will make people more happy than sad. I was just talking to my therapist about how I struggle to share stuff on Instagram bc I want to celebrate him so bad but don’t want to look like I’m asking for attention.
Cecily: I think you can journal. And I think you get to celebrate him as much as possible. Everyone who knows you and knows Owen would love to see you celebrate him.
Leda: My dad for the first time the other day apparently learned the phrase “don’t cry because it’s over - smile because it happened”
Cecily: FIRST TIME?!? HE WORKS ON BROADWAY
Leda: But it’s been really helping him. I didn’t want to take anything away.
It’s harder to feel good right away, turns out. Even in a beautiful house outside of a city that scares you. I’m glad to write about Owen. To relive these moments.
April 1, 2020
Jack is healing and getting better and better every day. He is still in Brooklyn with his roommate, taking the time he needs there. It hasn’t been easy on us. I wonder if I’ll lose him. I really hope not. I want it to work out, and I’m going to try, but unfortunately it seems I have very little control over what happens in the future. Especially in an upside-down world. Today it’s raining. Tomorrow and the rest of the week it will rain. Corona will continue to get worse across the country and globe. But I’ve had a lot of sunny days. And who knows what happens next week. They say the curve will flatten eventually.
Yesterday Leda posted a picture of herself in the country kneeling with the daffodils. It’s a simple post.
“I love daffodils.”
She’s getting there. I’m getting there.
April 2, 2020
I’m so tired. This week I’ve slept a lot. My faithful Lucy next to me. Depression is exhausting. Exhaustion is exhausting.
Last year, Leda posted a picture on her Instagram for my birthday. It was the three of us. It was taken the summer of 2014. I was planning on going to Hawaii to shoot some scenes for a movie. But those plans had just changed. Instead, I found out I was secretly going to Boston to shoot some scenes for Ghostbusters. I couldn’t do both. But friends had thrown me a going-away party anyway. Even though I wasn’t really going anywhere yet. And when I was, it was pretty close. Owen and Leda were at the party. Because they always were there. Anywhere. Easily sitting among my friends. Big smiles.
Owen had a scruffy look that night. His hair was a bit longer, and he had some scattered longish auburn facial hair. Later on, he became much more clean-cut. Not stiff though, by any means. He was still laid-back. He reminded me of a Kennedy. Not only because of his looks (both he and Leda are very beautiful), but because of his manners and grace and elegance and ease around formality and drunken going-away parties alike. It’s something I’ve never learned. I’m the one who showed up to the service with the toilet paper roll in my giant overstuffed purse.
* * *
MY DAD AND his older brother, Ed, were military brats. They grew up all over. My dad was born in Germany. Ed wanted to name him Gerhardt. My grandma and grandpa chose William. Bill. Billy to his mom. Or Billy Boo. My grandma was called Scotty, because of her Scottish background and the fact that my entire family was very fond of nicknames forever and ever until our generation. My grandfather was Colonel Cecil Strong. My dad had to answer the phone “Colonel Strong’s residence. William speaking.” Cecil had a friend named Colonel Poopy Conners. I love that name, which is the only reason I’m including it. Ed was better at the discipline part of being an army brat than my dad, I think. One of the stories I managed to get out of my dad was that in grade school once (in Turkey, I think) his teacher told him his book had dog ears. And he turned and told her she had dog ears. But he wasn’t all sass, because when Cecil was stationed in Georgia, and the family lived there, my dad’s report card featured a glowing note fro
m his teacher, who said, “Billy is a fine southern gentleman.”
Cecil passed away of a sudden heart attack at the age of fifty-seven. Ed was in college. My dad was seventeen. That’s why I can only manage to get some stories out of my dad. He’s locked a lot of it up. It’s painful. I’ve only seen my dad cry a handful of times. Mostly recently, because of losing Owen. Once with my brother and me in front of Cecil and Scotty’s graves at Arlington National Cemetery, the only time I’ve ever visited with him. But other than that, he’s been a bit of a closed book, and it’s okay. I keep trying. I found pictures on Ancestry.com once of Cecil and his many brothers in college. I saw a yearbook photo of his brother Howard, my great-uncle. I showed my dad and said, “Wow, he looks like Owen.”
“He does, a little bit, yeah. Pretty sure he was gay.”
I texted the photo to Owen and Leda, too. I liked texting them what I could remember about our grandma. Scotty developed Alzheimer’s pretty young, in her late sixties, I think (although it’s hard to pinpoint when it started, which is normal for that heartbreaking disease), and she passed away in 2006 when I was twenty-two. The year feels a bit irrelevant, though, as it felt like I had lost my wonderful, lively grandmother already by the time I was in high school. I adored her. She had a fun Southern accent (she was from San Antonio, Texas) and Jackie O hair. She always wore turtlenecks and scarves and coral lipstick. She loved to laugh. She dove for a Nerf football once while visiting and had to get stitches. She called me Lulu and would tell me when she had to “wee wee.” She told me stories about her brother, Pooh (Alan), and her sister, Jessie. I would sit on her lap at my dining room table and make her tell and retell. I liked talking to Owen and Leda about her, who never got to really know her like I did. They were younger than I was and she got sick pretty young even though she “lived” to be eighty-one. I told them the stories I could remember.
While I got to know Scotty very well before we lost her, or what was really her, my dad and his brother, Ed—Leda and Owen’s dad—had a lot of military friends of the family and extended family members who I never really got to know. But Owen and Leda seemed to know all of these people somehow! Like, they were having brunch with them! I had no idea who any of them were, nor even could I imagine how to behave in the presence of disciplined military folks. I went to art school and love the F-word and hardly know the rules for ordering a pizza over the phone. But Owen fit in well with everyone, everywhere.
And again, it was never fake with him. The smiles were real for everyone. He just maneuvered between worlds really seamlessly. He could work in the corporate world of the Dursts (Aunt Laurel’s family) and then go on to write and perform music with his band the Evening Fools.
I always do this. I get lost trying to tell one simple story. I told you I was lost.
* * *
WHEN LEDA POSTED the picture of the three of us at the party, as I said, it was 2019. February. Owen was more clean-cut by then. She wrote, “Remember when Owen Strong looked like this?” And he wrote, “Thanks for making me look like I time travelled, Leda.”
And now here I am, Owen. Time traveling. Looking for you.
April 3, 2020
His birthday is coming up. In two days.
I didn’t go to his party last year. And I remember the guilt I’ve been holding deep in me in that place you hold the things you can’t reach so you can never clean it out.
It was a big one.
Thirty.
He had a big party as strangely diverse in its attendees as his service.
My dad showed me a video on his iPhone and I laughed when I watched because my dad accidentally filmed some lady’s back for ten seconds because he was clearly having difficulties with his eyesight, working his iPhone, and wanting to watch the action in person.
A very “dad” video of an important event.
But it’s all I had.
Because I wasn’t there.
I couldn’t go because of work.
I’m sorry to miss it, I told him, not lying.
But I did miss it.
And now I can’t work.
And he won’t have a party this year.
April 4, 2020
When I spoke at his service, I spoke with my dad. I figured we could hold each other up. At one point I noticed he was grabbing two pages instead of one and was going to turn two pages and miss a page, so I tried to slyly help him, so he could keep saying the words I knew were as important to him as mine were to me. With no moment of confusion trying to find his place. It’s another way you can lean on one another. I also didn’t want him to feel “old” or embarrassed. He, of course, being the fast-thinking and deft public relations pro he has always been, turned it on me by slightly chuckling and thanking me and then making some joke about cue cards on SNL. I don’t know. Not a great joke. But, pride or whatever, you know. Maybe I needed to lean on him more than he needed me.
We talked a bit before about what we would be saying, how we didn’t want to overlap. For instance, we both wanted to share the same story from an old picture I had of four kids in a hotel pool. It’s me, two other kids who were family friends, and Owen. The three of us other kids are all around eleven. Owen must be about six. He had just broken his arm. He had a bag around his cast and he was walking around the shallow end of the pool all day and asking over and over, “Does anyone think this is fun?” It’s one of my favorite stories. He was such an oddball. But in this particular picture, none of us are smiling except for Owen, who is grinning. No one smiling except for the kid with the broken arm in the pool.
My dad said he wanted to speak for my uncle Ed. And he just kept saying, “Why? Why Owen? Why now?” There is no answer of course, and I wasn’t so sure I loved asking it right then because it felt angry, and again, I wanted to try my best to keep my grief as full of love as possible, as I’d inwardly promised myself and Owen, wherever he was.
I’ve occasionally thought that maybe we were lucky to have lost Owen when we did, that awful day in January, instead of now. But I never really could say it. Because to say that makes you think you are somehow “putting it into the universe” that you feel lucky that someone went and really you’d rather they hadn’t even had brain cancer in the first place! But here we are, almost three months into having lost him, and we are lucky he went then because of what we wouldn’t get now. We were lucky because he got to be with loved ones in the hospital, singing with them and holding hands and hugging. We were lucky because we got to have that service and we got to hug each other. I was hugged the longest by an older man I don’t know, still don’t know, but we held each other for such a long time, him just saying how sorry he was.
Maybe I can offer up one answer to my dad’s question: why Owen?
Owen fell madly in love after being diagnosed. He released two of my favorite songs with his band. One amazingly right before his last week in the hospital. He helped arrange the strings on that song, without even being able to play any strings. He went to basketball games. He covered scars with hats and became the fun guy who collected hats. He came to SNL. He danced. He smiled. He laughed. He read. He ate ice cream. He told my uncle he’d had the best year of his life.
The entire world will be affected in some way by coronavirus. We don’t know how. We don’t know if we will be sick or someone we love will be sick. Could the unthinkable happen and could we actually lose someone? And why can’t we control this fucking thing? I watch Cuomo speak to try to understand the science. We try to wrap our minds around the language of COVID-19 and Ebola drugs and malaria drugs and what it does to your body, and we can only watch, helpless.
I hear and feel the fear and pain and grief and sadness in people and how it manifests in lashing out and hoarding and turning on one another, and it’s dangerous and it’s sad and every day I have started to feel it more and more: the world needs Owen Strong.
This sounds hyperbolic and, quite frankly, impossible, I realize. I don’t mind the hyperbole, since I still see him as a bit of a sup
erhero figure. But I guess what I really mean is this: I was afraid to talk too much or share too much of this loss for many reasons. It would mean acknowledging something as real when I wasn’t ready to, I wasn’t sure it was my loss to share, and I was afraid of never being a good enough writer to properly honor him, just to list off a few.
Now I’m ready. Leda is ready. I want to write about him. I want to talk about him. I want you to know him. I want you to feel a little better after knowing a bit of his story. Maybe, just maybe, somebody will feel less afraid about the uncertainty that lies ahead. Maybe we can find moments during a very scary and difficult time to feel lucky.
Because who knows: as Owen proved, the worst year of your life could turn out to be the best year of your life.
Maybe that’s why, Dad.
April 5, 2020
I’m adjusting to life in the Hudson Valley with Matt and Kevin. I almost erase that sentence immediately. Or put quotes around adjusting. I feel like every sentence I’ve written lately I’ve wanted to qualify, explain how the words aren’t quite right for what I’m feeling. But maybe I just have to accept it’s because nothing is feeling quite right and every word feels too “soft” and I don’t feel like going too “heavy” is very helpful for me right now.
I am slow to adopt FaceTime and the Zoom—whatever people are doing. Jack (who is still in Brooklyn and still in my story, which makes me happy) thinks it would be good for me. To combat loneliness and missing people. But it’s not being alone that is making me feel lonely. And I’m just not ready for all my friendships to turn into bad views of my face, when I’m also someone who likes to be able to look away when I need to. And for me, phone calls “just to chat” always feel so forced or something. I’ve always found them a bit rude. The timing always seems better for one person. I don’t mind the idea of interacting without being in person. I love to text. I love to write emails. I think it offers more space for people to take their time to respond when it’s convenient, and you can really think about what you want to say. Phone calls for me have always been for emergencies and business. Not friendship chats. Because it’s never been like what it’s like when I’m with my friends in person. Where all of a sudden you may get up and dance. You can laugh. You aren’t going, “What else, what else.” Pauses don’t mean anything. Silence is acceptable. You aren’t just “updating,” you are creating and discovering, and I’m using words that sound important but in my head I’m applying them to even the silliest and dumbest situations and conversations and games, I promise. It feels alive and like anything could happen. I love that.
This Will All Be Over Soon Page 3