In the glare of the lights I stood shivering, gripping the worn wooden podium with shaking hands. I had been onstage countless times before, and the lights had always made me sweat. On that night in late September, however, the lights chilled me. Two months and a day after his death, I stood on the stage where he had played countless times, to tell over three hundred people, his parents included, why I loved him. That evening was a celebration of the life of my boyfriend, Parker. He had died in a swimming accident that summer, trying to save the life of a friend. A deep breath in, a deep breath out, and I began to speak, seeing his mother’s tearstained face in the patches of my vision unclouded by the lights. I concentrated my thoughts and words on the qualities he had in abundance: his energy, his generosity, his good humor, his talent, and his passion for life. I felt a desperate need to express myself to all the people gathered to remember him, to remind them of him. But I left out so much. The words I spoke were light, reminding everyone of his humor, making them laugh quietly through their tears. I didn’t speak of the two days in which I had waited, with bated breath and breaking heart, to know whether he lived or died. A chance meeting with a member of his church had informed me of only the slightest details of the accident. Being half a world away, with his family in the process of moving, I was left scrambling to contact anyone who could tell me what happened. I needed to hear something, anything, to dispel the nameless fears running through my mind. How was I to describe those hours of waiting to that audience? Of sitting in a darkened room with his best friend, alternately sobbing and seeking to comfort? Those words, had I found them, would not have been suitable for my speech, and so they were not spoken. The criteria given to me for my speech by the principal of the school, of what to say, how to say it, and who would be listening, pushed me beyond my personal grief, to a place where I had to remember his joy and not my pain. Although those moments were integral to my memory of his death, it would have diminished what I had gone through to speak of it to all those people. I had spoken to his father after the accident, and he managed to tell me that Parker was in a coma, before collapsing into tears. I knew that he would die. A friend called me the next day, telling me the news of his death. It was then that I realized the difference between knowing something would happen and the actual reality of it, of the moment at which it happens. The preparation never covers the pain. When I heard that tearstained voice over the phone, telling me, my mind flew away and the only word I could find was no. No. I didn’t want to stand there at his memorial and bare my soul to the audience. They wouldn’t have understood the incoherence of my thoughts, the inadequacy of my words, or the moments I had to steel myself for in the hours, days and months after his death. How I had to try to find the words to tell his friends. Four calls, at inconvenient times to distant places, to people he and I both loved, to give them news they had never thought to hear. With my back to the cold, white tile of my bathroom wall, I dialed and re-dialled the phone of my best friend into the early hours of the morning, until she got off her plane in California and picked up the phone. She was the final person I had to tell, the last of his best friends, scattered across the globe, isolated in their grief. This was the hardest. Cushion the blow? What medium is sufficient to hide the heart from such pain? Words were all I had, and they were not nearly enough. There were calls I received, people who wanted to comfort me, people I wanted to speak to. But the words didn’t come. Everyone was separated from me through a barrier of words. They could find them, and I couldn’t. Then there was the flight to Utah, a place I had never thought to see. It was a long way from Paris, from Maryland, from any place I had ever called home. But this wide, mountainous land was where he was born, and no matter the peregrinations of his family, this was where he was to be laid to rest. Of the memories of that weekend, dimmed somewhat by jetlag and grief, the words of his mother at the funeral push the other images to the back of my mind. Getting lost driving from Salt Lake City to Provo during the small hours of the morning in a soothing thunderstorm, the white of his clothing against the tan of his skin in the casket, everything fades in the face of his mother’s speech. In all the books I have read, the movies I have seen, plays I have been in and conversations I’ve had, never have I heard such words. Her pain, so immense and unreachable, so private, was transmitted to us through her words. She spoke to him, to his coffin, in a small church in Provo, and every word she said was ripped out of her soul. In that half hour, I rediscovered my love of words. She had found the words, to express her grief and her love. She spoke religiously, of the faith that sustained her, and although I do not share their faith, every word resounded in my heart. She spoke with dignity, as only a mother can, of the infinite love, which, despite its awesome and extremely personal nature, she wished everyone around her to experience. Most of the people sitting in the auditorium at the celebration in September were able to speak, to console, to write. The people who spoke onstage with me were the people who have a grief that is formless, nameless and enduring. We were the ones who spoke, who stood before the community and tried to tell him of our love. In the strength of his mother, father and closest friends, I was reminded of my own strength. Together, with our words, we praised him, laughed and cried for him. As I walked out of the auditorium, with my shoulders squared and my tears drying, I was finally aware of my own power with words, and the healing, strength and love they can hold. The months and weeks before my speech had stripped me of my faith in words, a faith that has followed me my whole life, but in the half hour I had heard Parker’s mother speak, and in the time I spent preparing and giving my own speech, I finally reclaimed that faith. In seeing me through one of the hardest times in my short life, words have become even more dear to me.