Not An Anniversary Essay
Nearly a year since, I feel compelled to write, but I’m honestly not sure where to start.
Writing has been enormously helpful since Kevin died last October 2. It was something we did collaboratively throughout our lives, so writing, even in his absence, has helped me feel close to him. It is the only way I’ve reliably been able to access the parts of my brain I used to work out in conversations with my brother.
Since Kevin died, I have journaled extensively. I have published essays (here, here and here) and carefully crafted long tweet threads about him and some of what he went through. I wrote his eulogy over and over and over again, logging dozens of drafts before settling on something that I hoped would help others remember him as I do. I took about a month near the end of 2020 to finish the first draft of a full 53,000-word manuscript of a memoir about Kevin’s final years, the abuse and trauma he suffered and my experiences in the wake of his death (note: writing a memoir manuscript in the midst of grief = therapeutic and helpful… unsuccessfully pitching a very personal memoir manuscript to dozens of book agents in the midst of grief = a horrible, horrible, super dumb idea). I completed a draft of a screenplay, toying with an idea Kevin and I talked about for years but never got around to writing together. The screenplay — the first I have ever written and currently a train wreck of a draft in the midst of what I expect to be a perpetual re-write — allowed me to include dialogue that recreated some of the brotherly banter I miss so much. I was usually smiling as I wrote and re-read those scenes, and that was point enough for the project.
Writing has been an essential part of how I have processed and coped with Kevin’s death. But as the first anniversary descends on me with both dread and acceptance of the inevitability that it will come, and it will be a difficult day filled with difficult memories unavoidably flooding to the surface, I don’t know what to write. I don’t know how to make sense of a year without my identical twin brother.
I don’t know how to write something that summarizes a year that would have been so much better with Kevin in it — when so many ridiculous things happened that he would have loved seeing. Jeff Bezos re-enacted the “spaceship that looks like a dick” scene from Austin Powers. People who called anyone who took covid vaccines “sheep” (seriously — they were “baaaaa”-ing at protests and everything) literally cleared shelves of livestock deworming paste to fight the virus. There are jokes for each of those situations that not even Twitter has thought of yet, and I won’t ever get to hear them because Kevin isn’t here to come up with them. Kevin left the planet as his dark sense of humor became reality. And every time I see some particularly ironic story show up in headlines, I mourn his loss more. This is a dangerously stupid world to live in when hilarious stupidity is an emotional trigger. But it’s not just the news turning into a joke-generation machine for what should have been Kevin’s burgeoning career in comedy. It is also his nephew’s sudden love of soccer and the work his sister-in-law has done in the past year, both which would have made him incredibly proud. It is the hope we all felt when the election was finally called and the horror we all felt on January 6 that he wasn’t here to share in, to help me contextualize, to experience alongside me as we had every other major event in our lives. It is all of the triumphs and tragedies, big and small, that he missed, that make me mourn him anew every day. Not sure that makes for a great subject for an anniversary essay. Kinda feels like an excessively melodramatic year-in-review. No one needs that right now.
I could always write about the people who have loved and supported me, who have made the past year bearable, and who have proven that Jonathan Larson’s recommended calendar metric is, in fact, the most appropriate one in times like these. My wife Lindsay, especially, has shown me more love and support than I knew possible. My father and sister and aunts and friends all have checked in on me with frequency and have made me feel less alone in a time when Kevin’s loss feels omnipresent. Kevin’s friends — especially those who he met in New York — have become part of an unexpectedly essential support network and have been available to share stories or help remember Kevin, especially as he was in more recent years. But as much as I treasure and appreciate the love and support I have received, I want to write something to remember Kevin, to focus on the hole he left in this world and what the past year has been like as I have gone about the Sisyphean task of filling it.
I guess I could get into what has happened with Kevin’s abusive former boss, Scott Rudin in the past year. Thanks to the absolutely heroic journalism of reporters like Tatiana Siegel at The Hollywood Reporter, the people who suffered severe abuse while working for Rudin, like Kevin did, got a chance to have their stories told. Their voices forced Rudin to face some minimal form of accountability (so far), and he’s had to distance himself from the shows and movies that were coming out with his name attached. I made a video to post on Twitter to share Kevin’s story, which was seen more than half a million times and generated kind messages of support and condolences from a lot of people Kevin respected immensely in the industry he toiled in for so many years. The support was amazing, but all I wanted to do was to call Kevin and to scream “SEE! Look at all of the people who love and support you! Look at all of the people who care!” But I can’t, so any success is both somewhat hollow, and, as two of Kevin’s favorite creators proved recently, it is also disappointingly fleeting. Frances McDormand and Joel Coen — longtime Rudin collaborators who credible reports say saw him abusing employees — are now trying to distance themselves to avoid any sort of accountability for allowing the abuse to continue with their awareness. Thing is — in trying to escape accountability for themselves, they are making it harder to achieve any sort of adequate accountability for Rudin. And I can’t have that. So since this is somewhat hollow, disappointingly fleeting and very much unfinished, I should find another topic.
Turns out there are a lot of approaches I can take for an anniversary essay. But none of them feel right. I guess that is to be expected, though. Nothing has felt right since Kevin died. This past year has been a lesson in the inadequacies of pessimism and cynicism. It has been a gauntlet of grief and has often felt overwhelming. And I’ve had to go through it without my best friend — part of every part of who I was for the first 36 years of my life. I’m compelled to write, but I don’t know where to start.
Kevin always did like meta-fiction. From Charlie Kaufmann to Rick and Morty to One Hundred Years of Solitude to Deadpool comics, he loved a good shattering of the fourth-wall and pretty much any even moderately-effective experiment in self-aware creativity. Maybe there’s something there I can play with for this? I don’t know — that’s probably too annoyingly passive-aggressive and would probably end too abruptly.
What do you think?
