Consummatum Est

Loss.

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(Trigger warning: every bad thing ever.)

My friend Tim McCready and I drafted a book. It’s a multi-volume book that would exist in an edition of three, or maybe four. Hardbound in pink fake fur, or gator skin, or engraved metal, or birch bark. The idea was to make the most pompous, absurd, overbaked book since medieval monks first illuminated the Bible.

In it we hash out life and love and women and men and mental illness and despair and hope and music both obscure and not and silliness and unsupportable opinions and family tragedy and absurdity of every flavor. It’s full of shit we would never want anyone else to read, which is kind of the point. It’s conceptual. It’s ironic. It’s deeply serious. It’s hilarious. It’s an objectively terrible idea for a book, which is why we love it. We laid out all the text except the ending.

We didn’t write the ending because the text is the entirety of our near-daily email correspondence, dating from the dawn of internet communication circa 1994.

Now I have the ending.

Tim died this week by suicide. It was a brutal shock, though not entirely a surprise. Tim and his sister suffered Epstein-level sexual abuse as children. He developed Dissociative Identity Disorder — a condition whose sufferers rarely live past 40. Most die by their own hand (really, the invisible hand of the abusers). Tim made it to his 50s.

The mewling seizures of grief strike without clear incitement. They just descend. Weeping, shuddering, I can’t move or speak or open my eyes. After, I’m parched.

Tim was a genius. He was a musical prodigy. He entered a PhD program for psychology. He became a master woodworker. I watched him casually whip up homemade hollandaise for eggs benedict while chattering happily to me about arcana of contemporary art. But he was kneecapped by the consequences of the abuse.

His performances with Timothy Bailey and the Humans were occasions of cultic fervor. People struggled to describe the transcendent bond they felt with him. Those who suffer resonate at a frequency other sufferers can feel in their chests. He was a luminous being. I talked to Tim more than any other human, I think, except my wife.

He knew he was on a short clock. He was gentle but frank about this.

When Alison and I got married, we asked our guests to prepare a haiku to read at the reception. Silly, solemn, whatever. Most people probably agonized to choose the perfect aphorism and shoehorn it into 17 syllables. Tim showed up with a yellow notebook filled with 31 haiku — wise, funny, profound — that he composed in magic marker on the airplane. We regularly quote certain ones to each other. Over the years, they’ve become almost mantras, guiding principles. The yellow notebook is one of our prized possessions.

Here it is: