middle west
An ode to my dead friends and our childhood in Kansas
There are seasons of death like there are seasons of wheat. What is grown is cut down, what is given is taken. All in equal measure and according to providence.
Before he was Connor he was the boy who had percussion lessons before me. I would sit on the splintery little deck out front of our instructor’s home, across from the stone grade school on the crummy side of town. I could hear Connor playing in the basement. He was excellent and precise but too kind to make a wild drummer. To be a wild drummer you’ve got to be devious and risky. Connor, especially then, was sweet.
He would come out through the screen door and avoid eye contact with me. We did not go to the same middle school. I went to one in the center of town that was half-old, half-new. He lived in the country on a green hill that looked over the cornfields. Years later, when we were in our twenties, we walked down that hill together. It was summertime and his brother Scotty was there covered in dirt from work. He intercepted us looking like a happy dog and wanted to know who I was (I wasn’t a girl anymore).
Tomorrow night I will get on a plane to go visit that hill again but Connor won’t be there. He got sick this winter and in January he died.
I had a terrible, adolescent crush on Connor and seeing him walk through the screen door would be the romantic highlight of my week. In class I’d dissociate and dream of things I could say or do to catch his eye. God had only given me five seconds to work with. I never found out how to use them.
The spring before high school started we were both sent to all-city band and that’s when we finally met. I never got to ask him if he recognized me but I am certain he did and was too cool to say anything. Though he never directly cared about cool, or at least not in the way that other kids did. He was still a teenaged boy and I was a teenaged girl and there are conventions.
Our first fall on drumline we spent all of our time together. Not alone, but together. We both played snare drum and I got to know his funny way of talking. He would land dry, smart remarks that the tenor players, both mid-2000’s bros, would run with ruthlessly, driving the comedic temperature skyward until our chests rattled with adolescent laughter. But I was only ever an accessory to their fun. I don’t think he thought much of me then.
The next summer we started hanging out, just the two of us. We were sixteen. I never went to his house in the country but he came over to my Dad’s apartment frequently. We watched movies for hours without touching, him on his side and I on mine. I would talk restlessly because I wanted him to like me.
When drumline started again in the fall we didn’t talk about our time alone. Still, I harbored romantic delusions that he would tell people. Once, I remember, I burned him a mix CD, and in a move that felt reckless, I left it under his windshield wiper where I knew his friends would see it. He came to see me that Friday and pretended it didn’t happen.
We started kissing so we decided to date. Only our closest friends knew. We went to winter formal together. I got him a horrible shirt from Urban Outfitters for Christmas and when we were adults he admitted that he thought I was serious and didn’t know how to take it. Still, he went and got me the new Strokes album on vinyl. That year we spent New Years Eve together with his friends George and Ivan, tooling around town in his Volkswagen.
We dated for a year. I was often frustrated at how cool and dispassionate he was, how he never pushed me to have sex or said he loved me. In retrospect our calm connection, which was really a friendship, was the most grounding force in my life at the time.
I hardly remember how things fell apart. I think it had to do with him having a crush on Maddie Branstrom, but I can’t be sure (I talked to Maddie today for the first time in years, she’s a mom now and an art teacher too). It seemed like a consequence of a greater unravelling, as my homelife became increasingly turbulent at the end of junior year. I stopped eating and switched high schools to help disappear. Fall of senior year my stepdad committed suicide and I don’t have many memories until graduation.
In the late summer right before college we reconnected. He was moving to Madison, I was moving to Detroit, and most of our friends had already left town. It was perfectly warm and a totally free time of life. We smoked weed (our first time doing so together) by the train depot north of town, under a pregnant moon. I remember the cicadas and how the grass looked blue by the tracks. We walked up and down them all night and again the next. He was the last boy I kissed before I left home.
I moved to Michigan and did surprisingly well in college. I got a job working in a bakery and a boyfriend and a horrible little studio apartment with crumbling window frames. Connor came and visited that first summer while on a road trip with some other guys from high school. We drank malt liquor on the stoop and felt deeply adult.
I would see him every year around Christmas. We transitioned to friendship easily, having never crossed the threshold from sweetness to passion. He met my college boyfriend and the other friends I brought home with me. He met my cousins and my mom and I met his brother.
In 2018 he invited me to visit him in Madison before he moved back to Kansas to start med school. It was high summer, like that last one before undergrad. I looped around Lake Michigan westward bound and rolled into Madison in the late golden afternoon. He greeted me in the parking lot of his studio apartment. I quickly dropped my things and we walked side by side to a dock on the southern lip of Lake Mendota. It was brilliant and soft and the trees were rustling green, on the water boats zipped by holding happy people. One of them slowed down and two drunk boys shouted to us, asking if we wanted a beer. Sure, we said, and they tossed them to us, one by one.
We cracked the cans and laughed and agreed that it was the best summer night either of us had ever seen.
That weekend was delightful and the only time we were together like that, uninterrupted for days. We broke into the heating tunnels under UW Madison’s campus but I got spooked so we left. He took a shower and walked out with a towel around his waist and I realized it was the first time I had seen him without a shirt on. I took a shower too and when I got out he had made fresh focaccia bread on his tiny stove.
He told me he was grateful I was there for his last weekend in Madison. I left and a few days later, he did too.
The next time I saw him I had broken up with my college boyfriend but had already fallen in love with a witty guy who would break my heart. It was Christmastime again and we drove to Missouri together. We went antique shopping. I bought a Peruvian tapestry with the image of a long-necked bird, which has hung above my bed now in four different apartments. When we made it back to Kansas he looked at me expectantly and gave me a letter that revealed, softly, how he felt.
I don’t know where the letter went. I didn’t respond to it, and though we never addressed it, I know it hurt him. Still, he understood. When the pandemic hit we talked weekly, for hours and hours about research and music.
In 2021 my grandpa was dying of cancer and I flew back to Kansas to say goodbye. I brought my boyfriend, who was not the witty guy, but a Venezuelan DJ who I would marry in Vegas a few months later. We all got lunch and Connor was kind.
The next month Connor and his mom came to my grandpa’s funeral. I got up to speak and don’t remember what I said, but afterward he approached me and told me it was beautiful. He cried a bit and hugged me.
That summer I got married and bought a typewriter and wrote Connor a letter. He responded with a handwritten one that I still have. In it, he tells me about going on a camping trip with his best friends from college. Their site was invaded by a bear that they had to scare away using a defective airhorn and he lamented not having benzodiazepine darts on hand.
We narrowly missed one another on a trip to Seattle before slowly losing touch. I began my PhD program and he progressed in med school. I texted him in 2024 and we agreed to talk soon. We never did talk but I knew I’d see him, eventually. I thought of texting him about my divorce but it was too much. I needed time.
Did you hear Connor Thellman died? Another friend named Connor texted in January. That was how I found out. I was bringing in groceries and the plastic bags fell to my side as I dropped down in the driveway breathless. I sobbed and felt for him in the air around me. He was there, along with my grandpa.
I always figured that Connor and I would find our matches and raise good, smart families. I would, naturally, love his wife, and he would love my husband. We would get together in the summers with our children and have campfires. I took this as a given but the gift of his presence is now otherworldly and I am left holding things down on this side of reality without him.
In those silent years I always felt him, much in the way I feel him now. He is imprinted in my heart, his specific, calm energy. He could be a little awkward at times but was so, so good. I miss him badly and always will.
Five days before Connor’s service I saw on Facebook that the other Connor–Connor Chestnut, the one who told me about Connor Thellman–had just died, too. Outside of my relationship with Connor Thellman, which had obvious romantic undertones, Connor Chestnut was my closest male friend growing up.
Connor Chestnut was outwardly gregarious and festive and we were both white kids who loved speaking Spanish. He studied it through college, just like me, and as adults we often would just miss one another in random locations across the world. Istanbul, Guadalajara. He was prom king. He would play Violent Femmes on a ukulele and strut main street. One afternoon when we were fifteen under a massive blanket fort he told me that he had attempted suicide. The Velvet Underground was playing, I’ll be your mirror, reflect who you are, in case you don’t know…
I did not see him after graduation but he was always in the atmosphere. He died by suicide.
Tomorrow I go home to a place I left half a lifetime ago to remember people I didn’t think I’d need to. I want to cry and will. I want to dance and sing as well. The dead don’t die, Connor is still my high school boyfriend. And the other Connor is still standing in the lake wearing nothing but a banjo.
Both of them are all around now, looking out for me and totally free.