Remembering Jif by Jody Jenkins

What words can describe the loss of a person dear? And what rationale can justify what you have lost? We may be seeking some compensation for what happened ten years ago, but with what purpose? Does it matter? Our final story for the 9/11 week is an excerpt of a larger one and provides one thoughtful approach to these questions. As Jody remembers the friend she lost, we are reminded that what we could also do in the process of healing is not harbor hate but honor those who have left such a mark in our hearts in their passing. This story is for every person.

Perhaps it’s normal in the wake of the death of a friend you’ve known for so long – and I knew Jif longer than almost anyone in my life – to romanticise youth. So many emotions flood into the pool of your grief, especially after such a thing as the Trade Center attack, that it’s almost impossible to come to terms with them all. But one thing is for sure: endings always lead back to beginnings. And in the search for simplicity, for some kind of clarity, I couldn’t help but return to the earliest moments of our friendship when we awkwardly roamed together, trying to decipher for ourselves just what it meant to be alive. Those days of innocence seem so far from me now, living as we do in a world full of painful complication.

While he was living in Florida and then later in Atlanta, Jif used to often say that we should all get together again. Have a reunion of those of us that were closest and just go off and do something together. Down to a resort on the Gulf Shores or Key West or somewhere like that. Just the guys. Whenever he mentioned it, he seemed nostalgic for something basic we had shared in our youth and had somehow lost over time. And though we liked the idea and paid lip service to it, we were scattered fairly far and wide enough with the kind of obligations that made it seem like something that required the kind of concentration and money we could only really manage to get to later. It seemed so strange that later was the Trade Center attacks and the reason was his memorial service.

I think the day Jif died, some of our youth died with him. As did some of America’s. And so I mourned not only the loss of a friend and many others I did not know but also the passing of a time in my life that we shared that I know we can never revisit in the same way again, with the same innocence and the same sometimes dumbstruck awe at those creatures that flitted recklessly across the stage of time to one day become us. That memory is tinged with a pain that will always be there, for all of us. In an instant we were propelled into the middle age of our existence where too many illusions are threadbare. But it’s what we have and we must get on with it.

A Bosnian doctor in the town of Zenica once told me that it was futile to look for meaning in such things as happened on September 11th. After four years of war in which he had seen his once civil country torn apart and so many of his friends killed, he still had not been able to find a true logic behind it all. “There is no logic to the absurd,” he said, suggesting that in the end the only protest that you could lodge against it was to live your life, to turn your back on the fears that might otherwise give others power over you. And I think he’s right. What happened to Jif such a short time ago is something we will simply have to endure until the time comes when we can finally let it go. Until we can stop trying to find some rationale in it because there is none. But until then we must honor his memory by living our lives without hesitation and with as much joy as we can muster, moving on when we can while never forgetting a friend who is with us no more but will always be for those who knew and loved him.