Photo Taken from Mark Bilbrey’s Facebook Page
I want to tell a story about something that happened to me recently, but I do so at the risk of making a tragedy too much about myself. Please know that I have no interest in making someone else’s loss about me, but I also want to acknowledge the plainly obvious truth that losing a friend or loved one hurts.
So this story begins with me engaging in one of my best traits: sleeping in.
One of my favorite professors at UGA was an English professor (shocker) named Mark Bilbrey. He had been my English 1102 professor and also taught some Creative Writing classes. He was doing a poetry reading at Cine in downtown Athens one evening, and I had planned to see him. To my knowledge, the event started at 8pm.
So, as one does, I took a nap. When I woke up at about 6:30pm in my room on the corner of Reed Hall, I double-checked the time and saw Mark’s poetry reading began a couple hours earlier than I expected. Already being several minutes late, I bounded out of bed and ran up the street to find Cine as quickly as I could.
Though I certainly was not on time, I did make it for the tail ending of the event. Fortunately for me, it was a twin-billing with Mark as the second reader. So all I missed was some random poet I had no interest in hearing anyway!
(I’m sure they were lovely.)
After the event, I stood there with Mark and another fellow student as we discussed his poetry. When I asked Mark if he had any poetry published online, he mumbled a website name that my bad ears misinterpreted horribly, but in the best way possible.
“I’m sorry. Did you just say you had poetry on 42Cobras.com?”
That was not the case, sadly, but he gave me an idea for what was the coolest website name I’d ever heard, and thus my social media history was born. I’ve used the name 42Cobras for Twitter, Instagram, and all sorts of online…stuff. (Feel free to peruse my original blog and get a good laugh.)
Over the next couple years, I saw Mark in passing in Park Hall and we would wave and say hi. I even took one of his poetry creative writing classes entirely based on the fact that he was leading it, because trust me when I say that my poetry is dreadful.
He would move on to teach at a college in Wisconsin and we temporarily lost touch, but then we caught up again through the wonders of social media.
When it came time to professionally edit my first novel several years back, I called Mark because he had started a business as a freelance editor. It is impossible to overstate just how effective he was in making my first novel what it was. His feedback and his insight were incredible, and I loved every time we would go back and forth on a chapter, polishing it to something approaching perfection.
Here Mark engages in one of the purest acts a man can: Turning the otter cheek. (Photo taken from Mark Bilbrey’s Facebook page.)
The last time we spoke, regrettably, would have been when he finished editing my novel and passed it back over to me. I believe we texted one or twice when Ivey and I took a trip to Nashville back in May of 2017, but I can’t seem to find anything after that.
Fast forward a few years and I’m having a meeting with a gentleman and we are talking about my books. It’s a great meeting, he’s looking to sell my books on his website and at festivals and outings all around the Athens area.
Wonderful! And in the course of our conversation, I mention that my editor did an excellent job and was, as I have said here, an invaluable asset in making that novel a book worth reading.
So when the gentleman I am meeting asks if my editor is still accepting clients, I decide to do a quick Google search to see if his freelance website is still up and running.
And that was the moment when the breath left my chest.
I was genuinely in denial at first, because it didn’t seem possible that my friend had died. Even more obviously, certainly he hadn’t died five years ago without me knowing!
There were other reasons that the articles I came across didn’t seem likely to be regarding him, but it didn’t take long for me to realize the terrible truth.
I had to regroup and explain to my host that my editor had actually passed away and that I was just now learning this fact. If I’m being honest, the rest of the meeting was wasted on me. Mark’s death was now the only thought occupying my mind.
Over the next several days, I kept going back to this new revelation, asking all the usual questions people ask when someone they care about dies. How could this happen? What were our last interactions like? What now?
For me, however, there was an additional question I had to deal with. How in the world did I let more than five years lapse without speaking to Mark?
I vaguely remembered trying to send him a message when I decided to publish my novel to see if I could send him a copy, but I had intentionally avoided reaching out to him recently. I was ready to edit my next novel, but I couldn’t yet afford to pay him a reasonable salary for the work he would put in, so I had put off contacting him because I felt guilty. I could hardly ask him for a coupon, after all, since he was a friend and because he did such great work. He deserved his fee.
All these excuses and rationales fell away, though, when I realized that I had let them prevent me from doing what was right. I had been cavalier about staying in touch with my friend, and because of that I never knew that he was gone.
“I’ll miss you, Mark. I owe you far more than I ever could have repaid.”
Had it not been for this chance mention in conversation during an otherwise routine meeting, I still wouldn’t know that Mark had died.
Five years.
And what’s crazy is that I had been living my life entirely unaware of this fact. It was, for that whole time, as if Mark were still alive. Like I could just shoot him an email and ask him how Nashville was going, or see how his work as a cheese monger was going.
Philosophy and science have been skirting around this question for centuries. Schrodinger’s Cat, trees falling in the woods, I vaguely remember something about a chicken.
Is reality created the moment something happens, or the moment that we perceive it happening? Even though Mark died five years ago next month, I can certainly attest that his bygone passing is a fresh wound for me.
And in a perverse sort of way, perhaps that’s the best we can ask for. Perhaps we can just hope that our actions in life will mean enough to people that, when they learn of our passing, they will feel something.
I know that we all say we will cherish our friends more when someone we care about dies, and we all say we’re going to keep in touch better with the people we love while they are here, but I can honestly say that I’ve been convicted to do better when it comes to keeping in touch with my friends.
If for no other reason than that I never again want to feel like such a bad friend that someone’s five-year absence from life goes unnoticed.
You know what? I originally wanted to end on that last paragraph at first, but it just doesn’t seem right to close out with some pseudo-philosophical feel-good sentiment. I was going to sign off on a lovely little aphorism and tie the bow, but it feels wrong.
Instead, I’ll end on this. Death hurts. There’s no getting away from that. Losing people we care about hurts. Such is an immutable, unavoidable fact of reality. And I think maybe we need to be willing to admit that fact openly. So, here I am. I am willing to admit that losing my friend hurts. And I am going to miss him.
I’ll miss you, Mark. Thank you for being the kind man you were. I owe you far more than I ever could have repaid.