1994, San Francisco Bay Area, California

By Amy Ettinger

I’m crossing the street when I glimpse the green-eyed boy I fell in love with when I was 15. He’s walking the other direction and I follow, watching the rays of sun bounce off his golden hair. He looks just the way he did when we first started dating, the same lanky frame, the confident swagger. But as he turns I see his profile and I know it’s not him, it can’t be him. I remember that boy I fell in love with died 12 years ago, and I’m just off chasing a ghost.

Ethan and I met during my freshman year of high school. He was dating my best friend at the time and she set me up on a “blind date” with his brother. It took me about 10 seconds to decide I’d been offered the wrong brother, and another two months before Ethan and I started seeing one another.

Because we went to different schools in separate suburbs of the San Francisco Bay Area, our romance was conducted mostly over the telephone. During late night talks, we confided in each other our teenage secrets. He told me his mother had been an alcoholic who sent him to live with his grandmother, when he was 5, and when she got sick he moved around in the foster care system, until he was adopted at age 11.

“Do you know how many women I’ve called ‘mom’ ?” he once asked. When I answered “no,” he told me: “More than a dozen.”

One evening we met up when our two high school football teams were playing each other. Near the bleachers, under the stars, he gave me a silver and crystal chochke and kissed me until my toes curled. But the 25 miles between us felt like an ocean. We started to argue during our late night phone calls. Abruptly, a few months into the relationship, Ethan broke up with me. I didn’t shed a tear, but I seethed with rage in a column I penned for my high school newspaper.

“Of course it could have been worse,” I wrote at age 15. “I could have married him, spent 10 years of my life cooking his dinners, bearing his children, and washing his dirty laundry and then found out what a jerk he was.”

The break-up didn’t stick. We got together again before New Year’s and split up again by Valentine’s Day. Shortly after, Ethan moved on to dating other girls, and I started dating other boys, mostly out of spite. I wanted to get over him more than I wanted to be with him in the first place.

Then one night he called and I forgot all the reasons I wanted to be over him. Eventually we developed a tenuous friendship, calling each other when we were lonely, getting back together for evenings or weekends, and then not talking for months. I imagined that we’d go on this way forever.

The pattern continued until my junior year of college. Ethan and I were living in the same California beach town, but he had dropped out of school and was working at night as a security guard near my university. He was using a large variety and quantity of drugs. That should have been a clue: His biological parents had both been addicts. Back in high school, he wouldn’t even smoke a cigarette. I congratulated myself on pretending indifference, on “moving on.” Eventually he grew tired of being ignored.

A few days before Christmas, he drove up to the mountains and parked his red Camero along a deserted, dirt road. He fastened a hose to the end of the tailpipe, ran it into the car, and turned on the engine. The police found his body hours later. He didn’t leave a note.

I got a call the next morning. My father was sick with cancer, and was rushed to the hospital the day of Ethan’s funeral. Already dressed in black, I had to choose who to say “goodbye” to. I went to be with my father. I was told a storm of golden leaves fell on the family and friends who gathered to watch Ethan buried.

In the decade since his suicide, I’ve spent plenty of time wondering what I did wrong. I was convinced that I could have saved him. After all, I was one of the few people he confided in. He had told me once, during one of our late night phone calls, that I was one of only three people in the world he felt close to.

I wrote about Ethan’s suicide in a column for the local paper: “The reality of death is that 99 percent of the time no one knows what to say or how to feel and you’re left groping for words,” I wrote. “The reality of death is that you are lucky if you can find a little comfort for yourself, let alone successfully comfort someone else.”

Three months after the suicide, Ethan’s family and friends gathered to plant wildflowers near the spot where he had died. We dug through the dry soil to sprinkle seeds, and prayed that healing would take root. But nothing bloomed.

I graduated college and found work. But the question of why Ethan killed himself lingered. It haunted me. The suicide was a random, violent act — one of the hardest things for my mind to accept. And sometimes my mind balked at the idea. I started to see Ethan on crowded streets, in passing cars. I dreamed that he came back to life as a green dragon, transforming from human flesh in front of my eyes. Breathing fire, swaying his enormous tail, he hovered over me. Other nights he appeared just as himself, quietly urging me to let go.

Three years after Ethan’s death I met my husband while working at a newspaper. He was a reporter and I was writing wedding announcements. I shared Ethan’s story on our second date over homemade pizza in his tiny studio apartment. I literally cried into my beer. My husband understood — he had wounds of his own. He didn’t seem to mind there was another man in my life that I didn’t know how to get over.

Psychologists say that falling in love for the first time is one of the most powerful experiences of our lives. Few experiences are as intense as a first crush. The effects on the brain have been mapped and are similar to using cocaine. And the younger you are, the more heady the experience.

So it’s no wonder that most of us think about our high school sweetheart and imagine what might have been. It’s both comforting and excruciatingly painful — and there are days when I can’t help but let my mind wander. I never thought that Ethan and I would get married, so I can envision a life he would have had without me. He would have been 33 years old, still in good shape. I like to think he has a gorgeous wife, a million-dollar home, beautiful kids, and a job he loves. I try to imagine that he is happy.

And that’s the picture I have in my mind when I’ve had a particularly rough day, or my husband and I are arguing. I imagine Ethan — I imagine picking up the phone and complaining. And just as he did when he was alive, Ethan is on the other end of the line, making sarcastic comments about my selfish quirks. Sometimes he empathizes, other times he tells me my husband is right and gives me advice that I ignore. I know that it’s not real, but it gets me through the moment. I see his face, his knowing smile, and I feel safe.

And then I get on with my life.

Amy Ettinger is a freelance writer living in Manhattan and a contributor to the anthology “The Secret Lives of Lawfully Wedded Wives.” She’s written for the San Francisco Chronicle Magazine, the San Jose Mercury News, Backpacker, and Sierra.

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Tuesday, March 13th, 2007 | Email This Post

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