Hey everyone, it's Anna.
This week, we're bringing you one of our favorite episodes from last year.
Enjoy.
I like to tell Jeff all the time that we should not be friends, because he's a Gemini and I'm a Scorpio and they're not compatible.
Elizabeth and Jeff were best friends, even though a lot of the time they annoyed the crap out of each other.
He loved to give me a hard time and he loved to wind me up.
He loved nothing more.
Elizabeth would pick on Jeff for his weird haircut, his acid wash jeans.
Jeff would pick on Elizabeth for believing in astrology, which he thought was nonsense.
My friend started calling him actually man.
She had this big itchy bite and she said it was a spider bite.
And he went, actually, spiders don't bite.
And I was like, yes, they do.
Have you heard of a black widow?
Actually, man.
Actually, the best way to lose weight.
Actually, the best exercise for that.
Actually, a lot of people think blah, blah, blah, blah.
Whatever he would say, actually, I would just echo it back to him.
Oh, actually?
Really?
Actually?
Then he would get mad.
Then we'd both be mad.
But no matter how much he might annoy her, no matter how much they might annoy each other, Elizabeth always forgave Jeff.
He just had the goofiest grin.
It was just so joyful and a little bit mischievous.
Like there was always a little twinkle in his eye.
And...
We had this relationship where I could say anything, I could joke about anything.
There was no topic off-limits.
Underneath all that teasing and joking, Elizabeth told me there was a pole, an attraction between the two of them, but they were never quite ready to explore it.
They waited...
And waited.
And waited.
I just thought that we had time.
I just thought we had forever to work it out.
They waited until it was almost too late.
From The New York Times, I'm Anna Martin.
This is Modern Love.
Stay with us.
Elizabeth Laura Nelson, welcome to Modern Love.
Thank you.
I'm so happy to be here.
It's really great to have you in the studio.
Put a face to your essay.
We're here to talk about you and your friend, Jeff.
How did you and Jeff meet?
Jeff and I met through my ex-husband, Tom.
He said, I met this guy.
He's so great.
He's an artist.
He's a dad.
His daughter's right in between the ages of our two daughters.
So they were friends and Tom would always come home and he would have something to tell me about.
Oh, you know, Jeff doesn't buy his daughter toys.
He makes them.
He whittles wooden toys for her.
Right.
You know, for for Bedtime Story, he's reading her The Hunchback of Notre Dame.
And he really just really liked him and talked about him a lot.
And how did Jeff go from being Tom's friend to being your friend?
I'm trying to think when we started hanging out, just the two of us.
I guess it was when we started running.
We lived really close to Prospect Park, so I decided I was going to take up running.
And I think I was talking about that at dinner one night with Jeff and Tom and the kids.
And Jeff said, oh, I want to start running.
I'll start running with you.
He was totally game.
And we would text each other.
You know I'm leaving in five minutes and I would run down the block and he'd be jumping up and down trying to pump himself up or stay warm if it was winter.
And yeah, that was when the friendship really blossomed between the two of us.
I love that visual of him on the corner, you running to him, you heading off for the park.
Were either of you runners before?
No, this was the first time that I was really like getting the right shoes and all the gear and all of that.
So we were getting into it together.
It was not easy.
We were definitely pushing.
And so we were kind of challenging each other on the, there's a hill.
So when we would go up that hill, one of us sometimes would be kind of flagging, usually me.
And we both loved the movie An Officer and a Gentleman.
I wish I could connect with you on that, but I don't know that one.
Have you not seen it?
No.
Maybe you should watch it.
You should definitely watch it.
So Lewis Glassett Jr. is the drill sergeant, captain, whatever.
Richard Gere is the recruit.
And there's a scene where he gets in trouble.
So Lewis Glassett Jr. is running him through all these things.
Hard exercises, push-ups and spraying him with the hose and trying to get him to quit, to drop out.
And he says like, I want your DOR.
I think it's like drop on request or whatever.
And Richard Gere says...
I ain't quitting.
I ain't quitting.
I got nowhere else to go.
I mean, the story will not make sense to people if they haven't seen the movie.
It's making sense to me.
But when we were on that hill or any time when one of us really was just so tired, the other one would say I want your DOR And the other would say I ain't quitting.
I got nowhere else to go.
I love that.
You were each other's drill sergeant, it sounds like.
Drill sergeant, park, play buddy.
Tell me about some of those runs.
What territory did you cover?
What did you talk about?
We talked about everything.
We would usually start out talking about how did you sleep the night before.
That was Jeff.
He was obsessed with the quality of his sleep.
So then inevitably it would go into whatever was on our minds lately.
If it was a parenting thing or he was dating someone, my marriage, we did get deep real quick.
And...
I was going through, I mean, I got divorced in 2011 or left Tom in 2011.
So I talked a lot of that through with Jeff.
He was the one.
And he's very good friends with Tom.
And still, their friendship remained strong.
So that kind of gave me the freedom to vent if I needed to vent.
I knew that Jeff was still going to love Tom.
I mean, it seems like you and Jeff felt comfortable talking about everything, anything.
Why?
Nothing offended him.
Nothing really seemed to hurt his feelings.
I don't want to make it sound like he didn't have feelings.
Definitely he did.
There was something about the two of us.
I knew that he knew who I really am at this core level.
And that whatever I might say...
It didn't change who I am and his understanding of me.
So if I was in a bad mood or if I was angry, I said something mean about somebody, or you know, I didn't even have to tell him like oh, I didn't really mean it, or maybe I shouldn't say that.
He understood everything. who I really was.
We had this world that was just the two of us.
Yeah.
Bring me inside that world.
What's something that was just for you and Jeff?
Hmm.
I had a neighbor who was behaving a little strangely.
So Jeff and I decided that we needed to monitor his movements.
Figure out, like, what is going on with this guy?
And it was Jeff's idea that we would have code names.
And he was Blue Falcon and I was Red Sparrow.
He came up with the names.
He might say...
Red Sparrow, I spotted our target.
He's coming toward you.
And I would say, copy that, Blue Falcon.
Did you call each other like Red Sparrow, Blue Falcon out in the world, or was this just a text thing?
Not really, only if we were in private because they were our secret code names.
Sorry, right?
Yeah.
No one could see.
No one could know.
When you got divorced...
Did that change?
How did that change your friendship with Jeff?
Did it change your friendship with Jeff?
Yeah, I don't think it changed it.
We maybe became closer just because I was single, right?
I had maybe more time.
I had time when I wasn't with the girls, when they were with their dad.
So it probably deepened our friendship.
Yeah.
So there's a little bar called Shenanigans.
What?
Shenanigans Irish Pub.
Do you know it?
Yeah, I do.
So they have karaoke on Saturday nights.
And we would go sing karaoke.
We would sing Up Where We Belong, which is the theme song from An Officer and a Gentleman.
Well, it all comes back to that movie, does it not?
The two of you, that was your song.
That was our song.
That was our song.
Can you sing a little bit?
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Love lift us up where we belong.
Yes, this one.
Where the eagles cry.
Everyone's like, it's those two again singing.
Yeah, yeah.
So we were at Shenanigans, had too much to drink, went back to his place, which is a block away.
And I was lying on the couch and he was playing guitar.
He was teaching himself how to play the guitar from YouTube videos.
Also a big Jeff thing, YouTube, anything.
He's like, there's a YouTube video on that.
Actually, there's actually.
So he was teaching himself to play guitar and he was playing Blackbird classic beginning guitar song.
And as he was playing and I was laying on the couch in my drunken state, I felt sick.
And I started to feel this vibe that like...
Oh, my God.
Is Jeff going to try to kiss me?
Is there going to be like it was, you know, when the air in the room changes.
So I quickly got up, bolted to the bathroom.
And I'm, you know, then it was the holding the hair and I'm puking.
Okay.
So you did not kiss.
I know exactly what you mean by the air in the room changes.
It becomes... or I don't know what the right word is.
It's like sharper.
There's a shift.
What about that shift was so... Had you never thought about it before?
I had thought about it only in that my friends had suggested that.
You know you're such good friends with Jeff, don't you think?
Maybe?
And I was always stridently, no, absolutely not.
Why?
I didn't look at him and think like, oh, he's so hot.
And he was my best friend.
And once you make things romantic with somebody, it's going to change your friendship, your relationship.
And I just didn't want to do that.
You didn't want to risk it.
I didn't want to risk it.
But I always had the feeling that I could at any time.
I knew that he was game.
Even when he was dating somebody, even when he was the most in love, I knew.
And I would kind of think like I could just snap my fingers and he would drop her for me.
I just knew.
The glint in your eye.
I mean, how did you know?
We had okay when I was so I was very nervous to start dating again and to have sex again with a new person, right.
It had been years since I'd been with somebody new.
I was very nervous and I went over to his apartment one day and I said Jeff, we have to have pretend sex and you have to tell me the truth about my body.
What does pretend sex mean?
Like, I stripped down to my underwear and he rolled out his yoga mat.
And he said, should I take off my clothes?
I said, no.
He took off his shirt anyway.
He loved to take his shirt off.
And, yeah, we just got down.
I did all these, like, went through a little Kama Sutra of different positions.
And I would say, okay, look here.
See how my stomach is hanging right now?
What about this?
What about that?
What about this cottage cheese on my thigh?
What would he say?
He said, you look great.
You're amazing.
At one point, you maybe can't put this on the air, but I was on top of him.
And I said, look at my stomach right now.
You're not even noticing this.
Do you see?
It's like punched down bread dough.
And he said, if my dick is in you right now, I'm not seeing anything else.
It feels amazing.
You look amazing.
I mean it's so, But it's What a deeply and playfully intimate thing to do.
And I don't actually mean like the sex act of it all.
I mean the like you felt insecure about your body and you were voicing that to him in a pretty vulnerable and open way, like do you see this, how do I look?
And and you trusted him to be able to hold that.
But then also like the fact remains that Jeff is an opinionated, He's an actually guy, right?
And you were... bumping against each other.
So tell me about like, was there kind of like a classic fight between the two of you?
He loved to talk about religion.
That was the main thing is that I go to church a lot.
I'm pretty into God.
I'm a Jesus freak.
But I'm not, I don't love to talk about it.
It feels very personal to me.
And I definitely don't like to debate about it.
I'm not interested in defending my beliefs to anyone or even explaining them particularly.
It's just kind of my thing.
And Jeff, I think he was very curious about spirituality and faith and really wanted to know.
But the way that he would ask me about it came out in this very teasing slash challenging way.
And It really felt like he just wanted to make me mad.
And I would say, Jeff, I don't want to talk about this.
This is not fun for me.
But he loved to argue.
He loved to play devil's advocate just to kind of get someone to debate with him.
And he would just pick on me until I told him to fuck off.
Was he good at apologizing?
No.
I could have guessed that.
Even though he was saying this kind of like ostensibly dumb and hurtful thing, were you able to be like?
This person still knows me and sees me, and this doesn't matter as much.
I think toward the beginning of our friendship, yes.
And toward the end, no.
And that's where the fight started to feel more serious.
It was like, How can I do this?
That's not visual.
But when they're two parallel lines and they get closer together and further apart and closer together.
And that's what I assumed would keep happening throughout our lives, that there would be these times where we, you know, the paths were diverging a little bit and then we would come back together even toward the end.
It's hard to jump, but when we were fighting, when we weren't speaking, I knew that we had this deep connection that was never, ever going to go away.
After the break, Jeff gets sick and their parallel lines diverge again, before coming back together in an unforgettable way.
Stay with us.
Okay, so years pass.
You and Jeff still have this very close friendship.
But even though there are these moments of flirtation, nothing ever happens.
And then at some point, Jeff finds out that he's sick.
Can you tell me how you got that news?
Mm hmm.
I remember he came over to my apartment and I remember exactly where I was standing.
Where he was standing in my living room.
And he said, I have cancer, thyroid cancer.
I cried.
We both cried.
I cried.
We hugged.
I told him he was going to be okay.
And I'm not going to remember exactly the things, but I feel like he had had it for some years.
They told him that he had probably had it for many years.
And it was very slow growing.
And he was supposed to have surgery, you know, take the tumor out.
But he was too stubborn.
And...
He put off that surgery until he really almost couldn't breathe or swallow.
Like, he had to have it.
Why did he put it off?
He thought that he could treat it himself.
He did not trust Western medicine.
Um, jeff had a younger brother who died when he was um.
His name was victor and victor was four and jeff was, i believe, eight and victor was having a routine procedure.
He had a droopy eyelid, i think, and something went wrong with the anesthesia and he died And I think that that affected him for the rest of his life in some mistrust of the medical world.
Doctors, yeah.
And maybe that's part of why he thought that he could use Doctor YouTube.
He tried to tell me about all the YouTube videos he was watching, and I didn't really want to hear it.
He stopped eating bananas for a while.
He really loved bananas and he was like I'm doing this diet where you can't eat anything that doesn't grow at your same latitude.
There was this high dose cannabis oil that he ordered online.
And that he took too much one afternoon and he called me.
I didn't pick up and I saw that I'd missed a bunch of calls from him.
And then I had this frantic voicemail.
He said he thought he was going to die because he was too high.
When he told you about these things he was doing, when you saw the things he was doing the no bananas, the cannabis oil and not following it sounds like the doctor's orders, which was to get surgery as soon as possible.
It sounds like
How did you react as someone who, this is your best friend, how did you react?
I was so angry.
I was so angry and I stopped talking to him and I told him.
I said I will talk to you again when you do what the doctors are telling you to do.
You need to get surgery.
If you call me with any kind of symptoms, any kind of complaints at all, I just I wouldn't hear it, because I said well, you need to get surgery.
I was furious.
I get it.
But what was the, the anger was because why?
I loved him and I wanted him to be okay.
And I thought he absolutely could be okay.
And he was fairly passive about that always.
And in the times when I would stop talking to him, what I wanted was for him to pursue me, to love me enough to fix it, to say like oh, Elizabeth's angry.
Let me talk to her.
Let me fix this.
And that wasn't his way.
When you weren't talking to him, were you thinking about him?
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, always.
Every day.
Every day.
I started to have dreams about him.
I had been angry with him.
We weren't talking.
And I started to have these really intense sex dreams about Jeff.
And I would wake up and be so turned on.
And I would think, all right, I'm just going to calm up.
I'm going to go over there and we're just going to act out this dream where it's on.
Like, I can't, you know, it's like, I don't care if I'm mad at him.
But then I would be so turned on that I had to just take care of it myself.
Yeah.
So I would...
Masturbate and then get up.
By the time I was like having my coffee, I was like, you know what?
It's fine.
I don't need to call him.
I handled it.
Yep.
I mean when you would go through these periods of not talking, sometimes really extended periods of not talking, did you worry about your friendship ending?
Like, did it ever feel that way?
It didn't exactly only because we always kind of went in and out of hanging out every day and we'd be caught up in our separate things.
So I never, never thought that we wouldn't come back together.
I felt like I was his person.
I was his just life partner.
Just doing life together, including when we were mad at each other.
Mostly me mad at him.
I also think there was an element of that the tension was building between us that.
I think the pretend sex was sort of a the pretend sex and the sex dreams.
It was kind of all heading toward this.
Our friendship is becoming something else.
During a time when you and Jeff were not talking, he took a turn for the worse.
Can you walk me through what happened?
So it was the end of May, May 29th, and our friend Ellison texted me a screenshot of a text from Jeff saying he was in the emergency room at Cedars-Sinai.
I didn't even know he was in Los Angeles.
We had not been in touch for some time. and Ellison said, why don't you give it a day or two?
I will find out what's going on.
I'll let you know.
And I said, okay.
And then I think maybe five minutes later, I texted John.
I was not going to be able to wait.
Um, I texted him, um you know what actually i could look.
I mean i could, can i pull up, you have it.
I can totally pull them up here okay okay yeah, may 29th.
Hey, blue falcon, do you copy?
I hear you're in the hospital, red sparrow, i fear the worst, my comrade, what are they saying?
Are they keeping you in the hospital?
When are you supposed to come home?
And Jeff said, well, everything went sideways so fast.
I came here feeling more or less okay, but everything got worse day by day until I couldn't really function.
And there was some more about how he was feeling.
And then I wish I could say I'm not scared.
You're texting him.
He's in the ER.
What was going through your mind?
You're texting him during this.
Like, what are you guys, what are you telling him?
And what are you thinking?
What I felt was I couldn't believe I had let so much time go by without us being in each other's lives.
And that was that same night that I texted him.
I really do miss you and wish we were talking and sharing all year.
That's him.
That's Jeff.
Yeah. we will have a lot to catch up on.
And Jeff said, I'm sorry too, love.
And to that I said maybe we should finally fuck.
Why and i truly mean this like why now, did you mean that maybe we should just fuck?
I meant it.
Why i meant it i?
I think i, i just knew like all of this was just ridiculous.
I think i knew that i wanted to for a long time, but i couldn't.
I couldn't go there.
So you're sending these back and forth.
You've clearly broached this topic in a funny, but in you really mean it.
You're really like, let's have sex.
So when you get to L.A. and you see Jeff for the first time in nearly a year, what's that like?
How did he look?
He looked really good.
He looked really handsome.
He was thin, kind of haggard.
So handsome.
And we just hugged.
I just like fell into his arms and he was just holding me.
Yeah, I think I knew from the moment I saw him at LAX that this was something, was different, and we were going to be together, together.
Even though he had been sick, it was like he had gotten us this really cute Airbnb.
And yeah, I went in and there was a queen bed and then a kind of a sofa bed.
And I said, do you want to sleep in the big bed with you?
And he said, yeah, I need you to be the big spoon.
And he said, I feel really scared, but when you're holding my hand, I don't feel scared.
So we got into bed and I just could feel like he felt so warm and his skin was so smooth.
I just knew I was like, I'm not going to resist this anymore.
So, yeah, I took my nightgown off.
I cuddled right up.
And as I had always suspected, he was game.
I remember him saying, like, oh, I'm so curious now.
And he's just like.
I think we both were just so curious to explore each other's bodies.
As a person you've known for almost two decades but, you know, had never seen completely naked, had never done these things or touched these parts.
Yeah.
And now we were, and it was very comfortable, very easy, very different than any sex I've ever had with anybody ever.
How was it different than any sex you'd had before?
I didn't feel self-conscious.
I didn't feel worried.
I didn't feel like I had to be somebody else or be cute for him or be anything other than who I was.
We just wanted to be close.
It was truly like we had been apart for so long and we loved each other so much, and I was so worried and he was so scared, and having sex with him that night was just like We wanted to get as close as we could to each other and finally know each other as well as we could.
Did you feel like you learned anything new about him by being intimate with him in this way?
Hmm.
We already knew and loved each other so much.
It was sort of like our bodies were just catching up to where we already had been emotionally.
But.
Like physically, maybe there were things that he had talked about that I was like, oh, I see now.
Things, skills he had talked about having.
Was he right?
I mean, yeah.
What was it like being intimate with someone physically?
I mean, he was so sick.
Did it feel more fragile in some ways?
A little.
His stamina was probably not this great.
Did he talk about it?
Did he say, like, did he apologize?
He said the next day he said I wish we had done this before I got sick, because then you would have really seen what I can do.
And it was when we got back home, he wasn't well enough.
I was going to say, when you got back to New York, were you a couple?
Yeah, I think so.
I mean, we didn't officially say, but yeah.
So we flew back to New York.
We got home in the middle of the night.
And then I went and spent the afternoon with him.
I picked up some groceries for him.
He seemed all right.
So I went home and texted with him.
And at that point, he said, you know, you can come over anytime.
And I wish that I had.
But I really wanted to think that he was going to be okay and I would go over in the morning.
And then...
I didn't sleep with my phone next to me.
I should have.
I had missed text from him at 3 a.m., 5 a.m.
He said, are you up?
Hey, are you awake?
And then at 7, he said, whenever you get this, my neighbor's taking me to the emergency room.
And then I went to the emergency room that morning.
How did he look?
He looked the same.
Yeah.
Tired, thin, having trouble breathing.
Still smiling.
We were still joking around, clowning.
I was getting in the bed with him and snuggling up and we're joking around.
But Jeff knew.
I think he knew what was going on in his body.
And he told me, I don't want to fight this.
How did it feel to hear that?
I wasn't surprised at all.
I knew that he was done.
I said, all right, I think we need a death doula.
So I called up an acquaintance who I knew had just become a death doula.
And then...
They let him go the night before his birthday.
Wow.
How old was he turning?
He was turning 59.
And normally there's a lot of red tape to get checked out of the hospital.
And they said, we know it's your birthday tomorrow.
So we're going to push this through, even though it's kind of late at night.
Got home.
And it was his birthday the next day.
So his neighbor got him a cake.
My daughter went and got balloons.
We texted just a few people.
It was a very sweet day, really.
Sounds really beautiful.
We tied the balloons to the oxygen tank.
But also, I couldn't fully take in, even though I knew what was happening.
And the morning after his birthday, the morning of the 12th.
That's when he woke me up real early, before the sun was up.
And he said, I'm I'm done.
That night, I was in the bed with him, and he said, are you okay?
I said, yeah, I'm okay.
Are you okay?
He said, yeah.
And I said, I love you.
He said, love you too.
And then he went to sleep.
And I went to sleep.
And when I woke up in the morning, he was breathing very shallowly.
And I put my head on his chest and listening for his heart.
And I just stayed there in bed with him forever.
A few hours and I don't even know exactly when he passed.
The death doula came in at some point and told me that he was gone.
I still had my head on his chest and I said, no, I still hear his heart.
I still hear his heart beating.
And she said, I think that's your own heart.
I know this is still very fresh.
And so I appreciate it's very difficult to talk about this kind of stuff almost immediately after.
So I appreciate you going there.
Thank you.
I'm happy to talk about it.
I love to talk about Jeff.
But yeah, it is very, very soon.
I mean, even walking here and it's such a nice day today.
And yeah.
My first thought when I walk outside and it feels like summer is oh no, it's summer and Jeff's not here.
And that means it's going to be a year soon.
And just the passage of time has been so difficult in that like it feels like it's shrinking the time that we had together.
As my life goes on, that that piece of my life that had Jeff in it is becoming smaller and smaller and I hate that so much.
Can I ask like, Why do you think it took you and Jeff so long to come together in this intimate way that you did at the end of his life?
Like, why do you think it took so long?
We were both so stubborn, I think.
I also wonder if we were meant to be romantic partners.
I think maybe we weren't.
Maybe we really were just such good friends and soulmates.
And having sex at the end of his life was a way of being as close to each other as we could possibly be.
And that was the arc of our friendship.
We'd always, both of us, wondered.
We had.
Maybe not always at the same time.
We had both thought about it a lot.
And if he had died before we got to, that'd be awful.
That would be bad.
And that's what Jeff said to me when I said we were kissing in his kitchen in that last morning.
And I was crying and I said, we could have been doing this the whole time.
I'm such an asshole.
Why am I so stupid?
I didn't know that we're supposed to be together.
And he said...
I think things happen the way that they're meant to.
Oh, Jeff.
And I think he was right.
You make me cry, cry, cry, my friend.
It is beautiful.
Elizabeth Laura Nelson, thank you so much for talking to me and for sharing your story about Jeff.
Thank you so much for having me. and Rowan Nemistow.
This episode was mixed by Sonia Herrero and Daniel Ramirez, with studio support from Matty Macielo and Nick Pittman.
Special thanks to Mahima Chablani, Jeffrey Miranda, and Paula Schumann.
The Modern Love column is edited by Daniel Jones.
Mia Lee is the editor of Modern Love Projects.
If you'd like to submit an essay or a tiny love story to The New York Times, we'll have the instructions in our show notes.
I'm Anna Martin.
Thanks for listening.
