On Jane Greer

Her, that one, across the hall!

The byways of the internet are an eternal school hallway for all those high school losers—you know, writers—who claim to have hated their teenage lives. Their hate has been transformed. They are in love, finally, with passing period. They have shrunken the space between school bells, between actual work or learning, into bright pocket squares at which they stare and through which they heckle at and call out to each other. They are waving, straining, their arms raised. “Hey! Over here!” Social media is not a bar; it’s the stairwell between chemistry and history and everyone is stalling to see their favorite faces, to make an argument, to get a laugh, to start a fistfight. None of the boys can stop high-fiving, even the weird boys who pretend they are special because they know how to pronounce Goethe.

There across the mass of movement is Jane Greer, not in the friend group, but a friend of friends. A senior who lingers. Her bon mots alight on the ear. In deep winter, she says, “Cold enough to freeze the balls / off a pool table. The temp falls, / ‘wind-chill factor’ kicks in, hard, / dog squats before she hits the yard.” Whoa. But the algorithimic swarm continues apace and Jane fades. Another cold day, the same refrain as I pass. “Any ass out in all this weather / deserves three toes and skin like leather.” Ha! But we don’t exchange names or conversation. She has her circles and all mine feel offline.

So it goes for years. Leave the high school stuff behind. There’s no graduating from society. Even the normies text me memes, often the same memes I see from Jane Greer and others like her, wits and would-bes all holding their instant salons alike, their microwaved stand-up routines stepping on the lines of other stand-up routines. We’re all queuing at the comedy DMV awaiting our official recognization. We’re at the viral lottery store buying in bulk. We’re building the audience factories publishers hope we can coopt. Or we lurk, like me, enjoying the freedom of someone like Jane Greer, not a friend, who risks untrendiness as a form of her trending hits.

Jane Greer “writes like a grownup,” says the only person who is as well read as he claims to be. He’s not even a friend of a friend. And he’s not so much in the hallway (since we can never actually leave the hallway) as he is sharing stories in the concrete quad—maybe a student-teacher, of some kind? Overhearing him deepens what you overhear from her. Jane’s more than funny, this funny person you don’t know.

A quick pause amid the rush:

Like feathers, they drift in
from somewhere out-of-frame,
and none of them can name
where they have been.

Too briefly do they stay
in-frame, falling, lifting,
lightly slanting, drifting
down and away,

with perfect gravity,
into the waiting grave.
They love us but behave
so thoughtlessly.

Back to scrolling! The hallway is not meant for perusal, but for skimming; meant not for close reading, but for click being. As it should be. As it must be. Continue to wander, then wonder, on the next coldest day, how Jane Greer might describe it.

“I haven’t been on here much since Monday.” It’s July 2025, yet you can still hear these words from Jane across the crowd. Not a friend. Another voice you don’t mind in the milieu. The tone is off. “I’ve been in the hospital and am not sure when they’ll release me.” The algorithm and the waving and the lurking continue. Jane is not feeling well. What a bummer.

The next time you pass her corner, someone else is in her place. That hospital tweet has become her last tweet. Jane… is dead? It comes to you as a question even as it isn’t questioned. Jane Greer?

But I don’t even know her! I mean that as a protest. I haven’t even had the chance to get to know her.

I remember being cc’d on plans for my high school’s ten-year reunion. Obviously, none of my close friends were going. Let us out of the hallways! Amid all the planning, a high school acquaintance who’d been active on the Facebook side of discussions died. Not a bit like Jane’s demise, except it was also a surprise. “Michael Flores is dead?” The further surprise of Jane’s unexpected passing is that it felt as close as that high school tinted death. I knew Michael Flores, once upon a time. I didn’t even know that I knew Jane until I could never act on what little knowledge I had. Something more than parasocial, and less than friendship.

I revisit the final stub she sent into the air. She wasn’t just in the hospital. She had diverticulitis. “Prayers appreciated,” she continued. “Personally, I’m praying for and dreaming of large full cups of ice water.” That gleam of glib. That glint of everyday goodness. She just couldn’t help herself.

All writers want to be read—want to share even when they don’t want to be adored—and I missed a chance to tell her that I love her work. There are ways to upend the illusion of the hallway, to step outside its witching rhythms, and say, “Thank you.”

I have her books now, of course. Too late for her, if just in time for me. They deserve the heightened praise that a eulogy invites. A better formalist, she is a fully sanctified Ted Kooser. She has an air, as noted by Patrick Kurp, of Janet Lewis.

One last snatch from the back of the classroom, then, the bell about to toll:

No one will say it, but we know
today’s fresh-flamed hibiscus flower
reveals in one brief, glorious show
our birth, our life, our final hour.

Sacrament and synecdoche
live in a pot near the atrium door,
mirroring holy brevity
which, in a day, is evermore.

I love you all.