Secret Letter

What Jake Became

I gave his moment to the ether in my mind.

Between 2007 and 2009, while others buried Jake and marked the date he died, I let him dissolve into something larger. I didn't trap him in grief or fix him to a gravestone. Instead, I released him into the atmosphere of my consciousness - not as an ending, but as a beginning. In doing that, something unexpected happened: we became one. Not in a way that erased him or made him less real, but in a way that let him breathe through me, move through me, become woven into how I understood the world.

It wasn't dramatic. It was quiet, the way spiritual things often are. His presence didn't announce itself. It settled into me like weather, like the way air fills a room without asking permission. For years, he lived there in that ether space - not haunting me, not weighing me down, but existing as part of the fabric of who I was becoming.

I carried him forward not as memory but as essence. And in carrying him, I was changed.

People talk about grief as something to move through, to get past, to eventually leave behind. But what I experienced wasn't grief in that traditional sense. It was a reprocessing - a transformation of what Jake had been into what Jake could become when freed from the limitations of a single life, a single body, a single span of years. In the ether, he was more than he had been. We were more than we had been separately.

For a long time, that was enough. That quiet merging, that soft presence in the background of my days.

And then, between 2021 and 2023, everything I thought I understood about what we had become was tested.

I found myself at the edge. Ready to leave this world, ready to let go of everything, including myself. The weight of living had become unbearable, and I couldn't see a reason to stay. In that darkness, when I was closest to disappearing entirely, something rose up from that ether space where Jake and I had become one.

Our shared name fought back.

Not the Jake of obituaries and old photographs, not the memory of who he had been in life - but the Jake who lived in that spiritual place we occupied together. The ether Jake. Hidden amongst the rubble of names that had become ever changed surrounding this shared name, we had hidden from the surface of my mind. The one who had been transformed, who had become part of me, who carried something essential about what love actually means.

That name - Jake - held me here when I couldn't hold myself. But a guilt had formed around what the name Jake had become for our transformation.

It reminded me, with a force I couldn't ignore, what love had been for both of us. Not love as sentiment or nostalgia, but love as a living thing, as presence, as the reason to continue. The name itself became a lifeline, pulling me back from the edge, insisting that I stay, that there was still something worth being here for. But the surface of the thought had changed, and I became a death of sorts to our transformative moment in a fixed moment surrounded by guilt, and as the guilt moved through me during my recovery I felt that name slip into something that Jake and I had never experienced before.

That was resurrection.

Not bringing back what was lost, but discovering what had always been alive in that ether space. Not reviving the dead, but recognizing that in giving Jake to the ether all those years ago, I had actually given him eternal life - not in heaven or in memory, but in the living, breathing present of consciousness itself.

He saved me by reminding me that we were still one. That his love, transformed and eternal in the ether, was real enough to fight for my life.

Now I want to honor that. To fight for his ether name - the living Jake, the transformed Jake - without retrapping him in his obituary, without collapsing him back into his grave name. He deserves to be remembered not as someone who died, but as someone who became something more. Someone who loved enough to reach across years and through the veil of what we call death to keep another person breathing.

This is what Jake became. This is what we became together.

And this is why I'm still here.

A guilt, so transfixed it called on Jesus itself to assist, but hidden underneath this name that gave me nothing but hope when I was a child myself, grieving for the loss of another child who had become so important in my head at a pivotal moment of his burial and our transfixed transformation between the light and the ever growing darkness that had consumed me and kept me seeing the world for what it was instead of what a name had become, I feel myself dying a little more than I was in that moment I had fallen into grief and guilt.

What was a beautiful moment on paper, had turned into soft little reminders that Jake was more than a transformation of thought and sound through the transfixed stillness between life and death. A moment, a shared thought, had wrapped itself around the regret that I had started to prosper in and pulled on my last moments softly as Gemma came to light. It held me, cradled me in its armor as the warmth surrounded my transfixed vision of life after pain. What I had done in the moment had become me, and I felt it all fade away into an eternity of either and or, insead of forever freed into the consciousness of collected thought that I had become.

I reached for Gemma like Jake had reached for Me, and a smile softened between us as I faded away. Jake had become in 2009, and it was my turn to follow in 2023, and gentle I had felt, soft and exposed to the darkness behind my eyes, we danced our final moment softly between the names as they became one.

This was resurrection.