Intro
Jessi died in January of her 32nd year, leaving behind countless beloved family members, friends, acquaintances, and a few requisite frenemies. I could easily have been one of the latter. In fact, there were a few years when I held that status in her life, and she in mine. However, a phone call one snowy night in December 2006 changed all that.
Recovery
It was the night before she was to embark upon a 28-day residential program for alcoholism.
“I know we’ve drifted apart,” she told me, her voice wavering. “I feel really bad about that.”
“So do I,” I replied, and it was the truth. Even though I remained skeptical, I stayed on the phone (if nothing else curious as to what might unfold).
“I’m going to get help for my drinking,” she continued. “I’ll be at Hazelden over Christmas and New Year’s. I’d love it if you could come visit me there.”
I hesitated before telling her, “Sure. I could do that.”
And so I made the 90-minute car ride from my studio in Minneapolis to the treatment facility in quaint Center City, Minnesota. I arrived at the same time as her mother, Barbara. We pulled our cars into the parking lot and slammed our driver’s side doors simultaneously. Our eyes locked and we walked towards one another, hugging briefly and exchanging quick greetings before each walking inside.
Jessi met us in one of the treatment center’s many common areas. Her eyes lit up at the site of visitors.
“Thanks so much for coming,” she told us. “Really, it means a lot.”
We followed her through the hallways, which were bright and tastefully-decorated, towards the room she shared with another girl. Two four-foot-tall cubicle walls divided the two sleeping areas. In another section of the room was a small lounge area with a loveseat, coffee table, and armchair.
On her walls, she had posted photos (some old and some recent) of her loved ones, as well as postcards and other attractive images, arranged with the keen eye for design that she had always demonstrated: the bedroom in which she’d lived at her parent’s house as a teenager; the dorm room we’d shared together freshman year at college; the room in the party-house where we’d lived in our remaining college years, and all her apartments since had shared her unique style of decorating. Her passion for music, her love of classic films, her affection for Tin Tin; and her loyalty toward her loved ones were recurrent themes.
It was the first time in years that I could remember seeing Jessi in a state that was neither drunk nor hung-over. She seemed a bit uncomfortable, but at the same time radiated a glow of healthy exuberance which would only grow more resplendent the in months to come. She steered clear of alcohol during that time: in spite of her longing for it; in spite of the ex-boyfriend who would repeatedly tell her that her friends didn’t like her as much since she stopped drinking, and in spite of the fact that alcohol could be found just about everywhere in this town.
In her sobriety, she nurtured a passion for gardening. She rented a plot in a community garden, where she grew various herbs and flowers. She continued a long-standing tradition of home-cooking, using fresh herbs from her garden in her recipes whenever possible. She went to movies and museums; she traveled. She bought a camera and took hundreds of pictures; sharing them with her friends via Facebook and Shutterfly.
Jessi looking radiant a few months into her recovery. This photo was taken at the Artists’ Quarter in St. Paul (June 2007)
New Dehli
Jessi took a job overseas nearly two years into her sobriety. She had family friends in New Delhi (having lived there for a few years as a child), and she resided with them while she got settled into her new location. She remained free of alcohol and drugs while in India, focusing instead on observing all the sights and sounds of her environs. In a letter from New Delhi dated 15 November, 2008, she wrote: “ . . . everything is new and exciting, and I am never ever bored. When I’m not at work, I spend time exploring the city, as you can see in my photos. It is beautiful here, but the beauty of course co-exists with a lot of poverty and filth, too, depending on where you are. It can be very depressing at times. I try to focus on the beauty. Oh, and the food! It’s fabulous. I didn’t realize before I came here that there are like 20 different kinds of Indian bread and all of them come to you freshly made and piping hot. I’m eating very little meat and lots of vegetables and grains. We have dal with just about every dinner.”
She sent care packages and postcards to her loved ones back home. She sent us a link to the blog she was writing at The Times of India, the largest and most widely-circulated English-speaking paper in the country. I loved getting postcards from her time spent in the Indian cities Varkala, Jaipur, Manali, and various others. She visited Thailand, Cambodia, and the Himalayas, documenting her travels in photo essays that would one day outlive her.
After just over a year in New Delhi, Jessi returned to America and I – for one – was overjoyed. Before seeing her, I spent nearly and entire workday in a fit of frenzied writing which resulted in a long blog post toasting our friendship, which had spanned nearly two decades to this point.
One of the photos Jessi took in Jaipur, India (Probably sometime in 2009)
A Happy Homecoming
Our reunion was spent at Pizza Luce in Uptown Minneapolis. She had just gotten her hair done by a “cute” stylist named Mike at the trendy Revamp! Salon on Hennepin Avenue. She wore a green wool jacket, skinny jeans, and black flat-soled leather ankle boots. She looked phenomenal.
I don’t remember what I wore, but I do remember that I was relaxed after a session with my therapist, whose office was only a few blocks away.
Jessi showered me with gifts from her travels. I oohed and ahhed over the sterling silver earrings she’d bought; the jasmine-scented essential oils and homemade glycerin soap bar; the colorful journal in which I could record my thoughts.
Although I was more than a little embarrassed that I hadn’t brought her any sort of homecoming gift, she didn’t seem to mind that I’d shown up empty-handed. I treated her to dinner; it was the least I could do. We spent a couple of hours chatting and catching up. Afterwards, I dropped her off at her mom’s place by Lake of the Isles, where she’d been staying ever since her return.
The following year, I felt closer to Jessi than I had since adolescence. This was sober Jess; who could make you roll on the floor with laughter after quoting an obscure line from a movie or sharing a witty anecdote. This was extremely thoughtful Jess, who listened with patience while I ranted and raved about my latest relationship drama. This was Jess who enjoyed fine dining and walks outdoors – even during inclement weather. She and I kept a similar pace; it was one that others would complain was too fast. “Slow down!” we’d often hear from our walking companions. But when the two of us walked together, the pace was perfect.
In the summer following Jess’s return from India, she went up to her family’s Northwoods cabin just about every weekend. Sometimes she’d go alone, but more often she’d invite friends. In late July, I was invited up with her for the first time in 10 years (having been banned from the cabin during our time as frenemies). It would be just the two of us and my feline companion, Kier. At some point during the 3-hour drive north, we stopped at Chipotle for dinner. It had been a favorite of ours during college; the only difference was that now, we savored our portions, really focusing on each bite versus gobbling the thing down whole in order to ease the hangovers we’d accumulated from a previous evening’s debauchery (as had usually been the case during our college years). Nearly ten years later, we were both sober: Jess for nearly four years, and me for merely a month. (I’d made it to 18 months without alcohol only a few years prior, but I’d relapsed.) I’d recently started attending 12-step meetings; something that Jess did on occasion, as well. We would occasionally exchange our thoughts on the program and some of the people whom we’d met through it.
This is the cover of the journal Jessi brought home from New Delhi (Oct 2009). It’s called “Yaatayaat Jam,” and is designed by an Artists’ Collective called “Play Clan.”
Northwoods Weekend
Our journey to her family’s Northwoods cabin would be one of our last outings together. (That I am one lucky S.O.B. for having shared that weekend with her is not lost on me.)
On our first evening, we bought groceries to tide us over for the weekend. We selected corn on the cob, veggie burgers, zucchini, and a bit of steak to grill. We also purchased eggs, tortillas, and black beans for breakfast, and ice cream for an extra special treat. Since neither of us was drinking alcohol, we bought sparkling white grape juice as a “fun beverage replacement,” at my insistence. (This was one little trick that had worked for me in sobriety: buying either sparkling fruit juice or mineral water in fancy bottles to coax my body into thinking that what I was drinking was every bit as good as alcohol. The best part: no hangover.)
Around sunset on our first night up north, we paddled her family’s pontoon into the middle of the lake and chatted about some of our old mutual friends (among them my then-future husband, Jeff), rehashing fond (and some not-so-fond) memories from our shared past. The sky turned pink overhead as the sun descended behind the lake, and we paddled the boat back to the dock.
Later that evening, Jess played some VHS taps she’d recently come across from her childhood. They featured summers with her family at this very cabin, and a birthday party in her New Delhi home. Her father, Bill, had filmed hours-upon-hours’ worth of footage over the course of a few years. Of this, we watched only a small portion.
“I’m sorry,” Jessi told me at one point. “I know this must be really boring for you.”
“Not at all,” I replied. “It’s fun to see what you were like before we met.”
We laughed at the segment where, cranky with her father, who was trying to film her, Jessi copped major attitude, telling him that she wouldn’t smile for the camera unless he did her some favor for her in return.
“You were such a brat,” I told her with a snicker.
“Yeah,” she chuckled, and continued in her best Brooklyn mobster accent: “You gonna do somethin’ for me, I’m a-gonna do somethin’ for you.”
After awhile, we ceased watching the home videotapes and switched to Rain Man. Later, we had ice cream topped with miniature peanut butter cups, read each other’s Tarot cards, and gabbed for a while longer before nodding off to sleep.
The next morning was bright and sunny. We prepared huevos rancheros while The National’s Purple Velvet played on the stereo in the background. Jessi wouldn’t stop snapping pictures of me, sans makeup, as I went about my business that morning.
“Will you stop?” I asked her, laughing.
“But why?” she retorted.
“I’m just not feeling very sexy right now.”
Jessi rolled her eyes and gasped: “It’s not like I’m submitting these to Penthouse.”
Later in the day, we sunbathed on the dock, soaked up tons of sunshine, read, and talked. We took our rafts out into the deep water and floated for a while in the middle of the lake. At one point, I remained very still to take it all in: first gazing up at the cloudless blue sky overhead, and then at Jessi’s slight figure lounging on her inner tube above the glistening waters of Little Pelican Lake. Here she was, my close friend-turned-frenemy-turned-close-friend. We’d come full circle.
I smiled and let the sunshine permeate my entire being.
That afternoon, we drove into town so that Jessi could use the internet. While she worked online in a nearby coffee shop, I browsed through books in a cozy little shop on the town’s main strip. I paged through a book filled with pictures of the Aurora Borealis as viewed from the Northwoods. Putting that book back on the shelf, another one caught my eye; this book was a collection of photos taken in almost every country of the world. Being that Jessi had just accepted a position in Cambodia and was preparing to leave in the coming autumn, I scanned through the index, searching for
the “Cambodia” photo selected by the book’s editors to represent that country.
The Cambodia photo was not a monument or an ancient architectural structure or a portrait of a woman wearing traditional garb. Rather, it was two children – perhaps 5 or 6 – playing in the blackened waters of a Cambodian river.
At that moment, Jessi walked into the bookstore and tapped me on the shoulder.
“Hey,” she said. “Whatcha reading?”
“Oh, it’s a book of photos from around the world,” I told her, holding the open page so she could see. “This one was taken in Cambodia.”
She squinted her eyes to get a closer look.
“Hmph,” she said.” They probably could have picked something more attractive.”
“My thoughts exactly. The water looks filthy.”
With a shrug, I placed the book back on its shelf. We departed the bookstore and drove to Breezy Point, a few miles away. I wanted to find the cabin that had once belonged to my grandparents. Although they’d sold the place well over a decade ago, my grandmother had died only a few weeks prior, and I wanted to pay homage by visiting (and maybe snapping a few pictures of) the old family cabin. However, I wasn’t able to find it. The Breezy Point area was much more densely populated now than it had been when I was a little girl, and each cabin seemed to look just like the last. This made it next-to-impossible to pick out the one that had once belonged to my family.
Defeated, I drove back to Nisswa, where Jessi fired up the grill in anticipation of our dinner: steak and grilled vegetables. I poured us each a glass of sparkling white grape juice and snapped a few pictures of my handiwork.
We ate well and, after dinner, went for a walk along the lake shore (which meant trespassing into the yards of her cabin-neighbors). I walked barefoot part of the way, but quickly replaced my flip-flops after a few hundred feet because of the sharp rocks on the ground which pricked the bottoms of my feet.
That night, the light of a full moon streamed through the windows and onto the pillow beneath my head. I stared at it for a long time before falling asleep.
The following morning started out sunny, but clouds gathered overhead as we prepared our breakfast. The sky was dark and foreboding as we tidied up the cabin, and fat raindrops had begun to fall from the sky just as we were packing the last of our belongings into my car. We drove away from the cabin: me in the driver’s seat, Jess passenger-side, and Kitty Kier in the back seat. We stopped in town to drop off the weekend’s worth of trash and, afterwards, picked up a snack from Jessi’s favorite mini-donut stand.
“You’ve got to try these,” she told me, offering me the bag of doughy, sugar-coated goodness. “They’re amazing.”
We ate them during our drive home, with gooey fingers and sugar granules falling from our mouths to our laps.
View of Little Pelican Lake from the dock in front of Jessi’s cabin (July 2010)
Home Again
There was a lot of construction along the highway, slowing down our three-hour drive to a snail’s pace. Normally under these circumstances, I would have been uber-annoyed, but Jessi was such a good conversationalist that the time sped by quickly.
I dropped her off at her mom’s house and then drove a couple of miles north to my studio apartment. I was just bringing Kier upstairs in her green Samsonite pet-carrier when I got a phone call from Jessi.
I heard giggling on the other end of the line when I answered.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“Jeff just updated his relationship status on Facebook. He’s now listed as ‘in a relationship.’ Congrats, Gina. You’re now Facebook-official.”
“And I’m not even on Facebook,” I said, laughing. “But thanks for passing along the info.”
In not-quite-three months that followed, I didn’t see a whole lot of Jessi. I worked a 40-hour-per-week day job, and she spent most weekends at the cabin. We did manage to get together with our friend Tim at some point in August or September. The three of us caught up over dinner at the Birchwood Café. When I dropped Jessi off that night, we lingered for a long time, talking about her upcoming trip to Cambodia, and Jeff’s and my plans to visit her there. It was all going to be happening so soon!
Summer memories (July 2010)
Memorial
In October, Jessi had agreed to accompany me as my date to my grandmother’s upcoming memorial service, since Jeff was still living in Florida at the time and could not attend the service with me.
On the evening of the service, Jessi and I met beforehand at Pizza Luce. It had been nearly a year to the day since Jessi had returned from India, and here we were at the very same restaurant where we’d met upon her return. On this unseasonably warm autumn’s evening, we sat at a table on the restaurant’s front patio. Jessi was wearing sandals which showed off the bright red pedicure she’d gotten for her friend Laura’s wedding, which had taken place only a few days prior.
Jesssi listened as I rehearsed the speech I’d planned to give at my grandmother’s memorial service, laughing when I stumbled over a word.
“It sounds great, Gina,” she told me when I’d finished.
“Really?” I asked. “I feel like it’s all so jumbled.”
“No, it’s fine. You’re your own worst critic.”
“You had to give a maid-of-honor speech at Laura’s wedding, right?”
Jessi nodded, and continued. “I was sure I’d sounded like a bumbling idiot, but Laura’s father thanked me afterwards for my ‘moving’ speech.”
We continued chatting and finished our meals, then went to our separate cars. Jessi had forewarned me that she would have to leave the service a bit early so that she could spend time with her friends Becca and Mike.
“I don’t mean to be rude,” she told me. “I just feel so rushed, ask if there’s not enough time to spend with everyone before I leave.”
“I understand,” I replied. “I’m just happy you’re coming with me. It will mean so much to have you out there in the crowd for moral support.”
My speech went well, and Jessi surprised me by staying until the very end of what wound up being a rather long memorial service. Afterwards, I conversed with my grandmother’s friends and former coworkers who had come to pay their last respects. Jessi approached me near the stage, excused herself for interrupting, and let me know that she had to get going. I thanked her again for coming and we made tentative plans to see each other one last time before she left for Cambodia. We hugged and she went on her way.
Jessi and I at the Jungle Theater, right before the memorial service (Oct 2010)
Last Brunch
I met Jessi the following Sunday morning at the Grand Café in South Minneapolis. Our mutual friend Tim joined us.
That day, I revealed to Jessi and Tim that Jeff and I had made plans to elope to Colorado at the end of the month. (We were telling our closest friends and family members, so it certainly wasn’t an “elopement” in the traditional sense of the word.)
Jessi was surprised, but at the same time excited for us. She’d known Jeff as long as I had (over 14 years at that point). I promised her that Jeff and I would come visit her in Southeast Asia for our honeymoon.
Even though it was early afternoon by the time we parted, the shadows already seemed long. Autumn had officially arrived, and yellow and orange leaves fell from the tree branches above us, drifting down to the streets below. I’d biked to the Grand Café that day, so I walked my bike alongside Jessi until we reached her car a block from the restaurant. I stood my bike on its kickstand and stepped around it in order to give her a long hug.
“I love you,” I told her. “Be safe.”
“Love you, too,” she said.
I hopped on my bike and rode away.
Angel emblem on a gravestone in Minneapolis’s Lakewood Cemetery (Oct 2010)
Silence
Jessi left for Cambodia a few days later and I went about my business as usual. I was used to the drill by now. After all, she’d just left for a foreign country two years prior. All was well the last time around; why shouldn’t it be this time?
But all was not well.
It was hard to say when, exactly, things took a turn for the worse. In the beginning, her emails were spotty and her thoughts seemed a bit scattered; anxious. There were no postcards from her, which seemed out of character. When I asked her for her address, she said she didn’t know it but would find it and let me know soon. And then, silence.
I sent her emails about once a week and always got the same response; that is: no response.
“I’m worried about her,” I told Jeff early that winter.
“I’m sure she’s fine,” he tried to reassure me. “She’s probably just trying to adjust to her new life in Cambodia.”
And while I wanted to believe him, it seemed so unlike her.
A few weeks before she died, Tim, and Jeff and I met up for dinner at Bar La Grassa, a trendy restaurant in the Warehouse District. We had a wonderful time, catching up and trying all sorts of interesting foods. At some point during the course of the evening, Tim mentioned that he’d seen news about protests in Cambodia. He mentioned that several people had died.
My heart jumped in my chest: Was this why I hadn’t heard from Jessi? Had something awful happened to her?
I took a deep breath and mentioned, again, that I was worried about her; that I hadn’t heard anything from her in a month.
On a Monday morning in late January, I learned that she’d died. The disease of alcoholism had taken her as one of its victims; she’d relapsed a few weeks before her death and things had simply spiraled out of control.
Her ashes were flown back to the United States and her funeral was held the following week. My tears wouldn’t stop flowing. Every moment that passed carried with it a glimmer of her.
Now, one year later, my tears have subsided but these memories remains of my one-time frenemy and beloved friend.
Writing about her seems to bring her back to life, if only for a moment.
Père-Lachaise (Jan 2008)
