Joy

My friend killed himself. Not abruptly, or all at once. Apparently he had been killing himself for years with alchohol but I didn’t know it.

I got a bit of the story from another friend. How he almost died once and quit the bottle – for years. How he said his liver looked better and then started back, not long ago.

It was shockingly fast. It’s now October and I saw him in August and did not know. In hind sight there were clues. His eyes were red and tiny, His skin wasn’t its beautiful milk chocolate and he had more belly and less muscle than before. We are getting old, I thought. His smile was still so blinding that I didn’t see it. My daughter did though, immediately. She said – mom, he doesn’t look good.

He called me a few weeks before he died. He was slurry. He wanted advice about a pain in his leg. He didnt want to hear me say he should go to the doctor. I was talking about blood clots, etc. Little did I know his blood would cease to be able to clot forever, and he would die a brief but difficult death in a matter of weeks. Thank goodness for morphine.

I said – Hey, I’m worried about you. You’re slurry …. and he said – “yeah, well that’s a whole other thing.”

I didn’t push. I didn’t force him to explain. We weren’t that kind of friends.

We had always known each other, but not that well. Still, sixty years of not-that-well is enough to make you pretty close – like cousins you hardly ever see but are related to. We were related.

I was born to his mother’s best friend when he was still in diapers. That’s when I met him. He was fifth in a family of six while I ended up being one of one.

Being dropped down in that family of loosely controlled chaos was exhilerating. I felt like a wild child, turned out amongst the natives.

I only have a few memories of those years. One is that they had a hotwheel track that went out one window and in the neighboring one. It made everyone laugh and run around as the little cars zoomed between the rooms. I also remember being locked out of their house, on purpose I think, when I was babysat. I don’t know where their mom was but no one seemed to care much. We spent the afternoon rock-climbing the front of the house where there was that boulder siding. Over and over.

There’s more and some of it will stay private but every now and again we’d hear snippets of each other’s life and occasionally our paths would cross.

The past five years I saw more of him because life landed us in the same zipcode when I visited my daughter.

He was a force of nature. He was a friend to everyone and a protector and a guardian to all. I am afraid of big fish but I asked him to take me down to try and find some nurse sharks he said were like puppies. You could scratch them on the head.

He looked after us all when we were in his presence. He kept up safe, and laughing.

Maybe because we had known each other our whole lives he would sometimes fall quiet or serious. There was a lot going on behind his goofy demeanor and he was a serious person.

But what everyone can not let go of – what his friends and all the lives he touched are now talking about the most – is that he was the embodiment of joy. Pure joy. Not silly joy but a grounded joy and zest for life.

Sometimes he would break from the go go go and he and his wife and cats would draw the curtain and watch movies all day. It was always interesting to see him cocooned up like that.

The rest of the time he was managing tourists (whom he treated like old pals), hauling stuff around, jumping in the water, cooking for his neighbors, shouting out to all his people (that’s so and so who works over there and used to be at that restaurant – now let’s go get your parking validated by my buddy over there). He knew everyone and made it his business to see that what needed to happen got done. Even when he wasn’t working he was still on when he left the house. Always in motion.

So far no one as best I can tell is feeling sorry for him. He lived so much bigger than most of us that we’ll spend the rest of our lives trying in vain just to catch up.

What everyone is saying is that we will miss him so much. It’s us we feel sorry for. But he wouldn’t like that. The only thing he would ever accept is for us to go out and seize every day, balls up, face to the wind.

Good-bye my friend. ❤️