I have something I’ve been keeping to myself for a week and a half, while I was putting effort into the slow-moving fiction. At first I felt this wasn’t a story meant for general consumption, until I was sure all the friends knew. Then I was distracted by trying to write fiction every night, even though it was going poorly. But now I think it’s time to talk about a couple of men.
Two weeks ago, in the span of about four days, I lost two old and dear friends. The first was someone I met in marching band at CU. He was a trombone player, and my earliest memory of him was when we had a routine where one long line of woodwinds (I played piccolo) came up behind one long line of brass, merged in like a zipper, and popped our chins up to blast back the stands with a loud push section in the music. My position was to fit in between him and a trumpet player on the other side. When I started dating Mr Smith, I was surprised to learn he knew the same guy from high school and his church. After college, they worked at the same tire and auto repair shop, and I got to see the friend every time I was down at the shop. We stayed close friends ever since, meeting up whenever we could swing by, when we were in town. Before we moved back to Colorado, this friend had moved to Nebraska (which hurt our collective CU alum hearts). A year and a half ago, he was diagnosed with a brain tumor, and he fought a valiant battle against it. Mr S-P took two trips out to Nebraska to visit him, once last year, and once a month or two ago, to the hospice where he had moved. The deterioration was obvious, and I think we both knew we had to prepare to say goodbye. When we were at the CU homecoming Halloween weekend, we tried to get video of the band playing, to share with our friend on Facebook. Mr Smith put up some videos and tagged him that day, but within two days, we learned that he passed away.
When we left Boulder twenty-two years ago, I quickly realized that I was changing permanently from the person I had been before. Back then we had been kids in a LARPing group, and it had once been very important to us. Once we became a military family, the old life faded away forever. I missed a lot of the people from the old group, and I really tried to keep in touch with them, but eventually almost all of them fell away from me. Only one person never once let me go. We all met when he was a nineteen year old kid and we were already in our mid twenties, and he treated us like his big brother and sister. Out of the blue, every few months for years and years, he would call and make sure we still had a connection to the old family. As my health began to falter and my memories got impossibly rusty, he kept taking about people I knew or was supposed to know, even if I only met them once, so I never completely disconnected.
One day, he called and said something along the lines of, “Don’t panic, but I just had emergency surgery for diverticulitis, and it’s really serious.” Stunned, I told him I had literally just left the hospital after three days, for the very same thing. He became my spirit guide through the whole process. We talked about digestion and scars and pain--no topic was too gross and neither of us was too squeamish to talk it out. Two years into it, when I could not heal from it all, I asked him, “After everything you’ve been through, if it had been a choice, would you have still gone through the surgery?” He assured me he would. He gave me the courage to ask for—insist on, really—the surgery that literally saved my life. I was abscessing and days away from having the same emergency situation he had.
When we moved home, and I started a new career while my personal life went upside down, he was still there to guide and teach and support me. He taught me how to deal with difficult clients (him), allowed me to practice writing offers in a brutal market, and helped me to land on my feet when he canceled my very first contract to purchase.
This summer, he called and told me that he was diagnosed with late stage liver disease. Without a transplant, he was not going to make it. The only things I asked him to do were fight and win. But I learned again from him, this time that getting on the transplant list is not an automatic thing. His condition was not out of the blue. His addiction to alcohol had gotten him here, and I had had no idea he was doing this to himself. His doctors did know the situation, and that a transplant was unlikely to happen.
We visited him in September, and he was a shell of himself. He was emaciated and in intense pain. It was heartbreaking to witness. Later, when he was in the hospital for the final time, he tried to do a Facebook live broadcast, and his energy flagged after only a minute. When I saw the video, I knew the battle was lost. It was a week and a half ago when our mutual friend called early in the morning to say he was gone. Today was a memorial gathering at his mom's house. It was cathartic to be with everyone, and to see just what reach into radically different groups of people our friend had. This man touched all of us, and he left a huge hole in our lives. He will be deeply missed.
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