I blog when I can’t find words in real life. Happens often because I hate confrontation. Maybe this is healthy, because it’s out there in the atmosphere and off my shoulders and someone is reading it, and it’s an outlet. Maybe it’s unhealthy because if I’m pissed at someone, I’d usually rather vent in the form of typing (sometimes) vague words loosely describing my situation on a computer for whoever to read. I’ve blogged the funny, the good, the bad, the pointless, the fights, everything. I have even live-blogged my panic attacks (thank YOU Generalized Anxiety Disorder for the blog topics!). But this weekend one of my good friends died unexpectedly and I have found myself, for the first time in my life, totally speechless. In fact, I even rewrote this post about five times.
Here is my attempt at words.
I have hung out with the same group since high school. My girlfriends and my guy friends all hang out and have forever. We all somehow merged together, despite some of us having gone to different elementary or middle schools. We spent weekends and Summers hanging out, usually the girls watching the guys on the Montclair basketball court during the day, and all of us, together, drinking in the woods at night…always laughing. I went on to marry one of the guys. Two of my best friends also date two of the guys in the group, who are also my husband’s best friends, as well as my friends. We are all best friends. It is a big group, my husband and I each had nine bridesmaids/groomsmen, and we felt bad because even with nine each we had to exclude part of our group who we also considered very close friends. Our group is so big that I guess statistically, the odds were stacked against one of us. But it’s not particularly common for twenty-something year olds to think in terms of statistics when it comes to death, nor should it be.
My friend was my husband’s roommate for years (which meant I was the obnoxious girlfriend that unofficially moved in on the bachelor pad). His family took my husband in when my husband’s family moved out of the city and my husband needed a new place to call home. He was given so much more than a “home”. Ryan and my friend were more like brothers than friends. They both lost their mothers on the same day and were there for each other during their toughest hours. He stood tall next to us in wedding pictures (he had about a foot on my husband). A gentle giant. He used to pick all of us girls up and throw us over his shoulder – he had a real awesome way of making a girl feel skinny! He could pin down most of the guys and with his foot alone, keep them down, laughing as they tried to get out. He loved WWE, maybe that’s because he could have been a wrestler, given his size. Basically living with him, and intruding on the man cave, I got to experience so many real laughs (I fake laugh a lot I guess?) that go along with hanging with the boys. The disgusting conversations. The legitimate fighting over one of the guys beating the other in Madden. My husband would write parody songs and sing them, with the boys doing sound effects and recording them (one in particular being our late friend doing turkey sound effects as my husband sang to his guitar a song about one of the boys having relations with a girl with turkey-like features). When my husband and I would go for late night dips in the pool, our friend would sneak out in a Jason mask and rise up from the back of the above ground pool slowly, staring, until I noticed him and screamed more loudly than I have in my life. The pranks that go down when being a girl amongst a group of guys.
The shock of the phone call we got with the news of his passing was so great that it brought me to my knees. I kneeled for 20 minutes on the grass in my backyard. On this warm and sunny day in May, the world had stopped. It’s ironic that the most ugly thing that I could imagine happening had happened on such a beautiful day. It has been extremely difficult to be there for my husband, his best friend, who has experienced more loss in his life already than I ever could imagine. In fact, this is my first real loss and I am, I think, handling it poorly. I don’t know how to judge how I am handling it, is there a tool that measures grief? I am really upset. I am also feeling regret. I wish I had more pictures. I wish that last Saturday when I saw him during the Mayweather fight that I had sat next to him and talked to him more, because it had been a couple of weeks since I had last seen him. I wish that I had paid more attention and noticed certain things about his demeanor that I am now seeing in pictures I took of that night. Something in hindsight, was not quite right.
My friend was an addict. Despite stereotypes, not all drug addicts are the same. They don’t all look the same, how a stranger might describe a “junkie outside the T” with sores, sunken-in eyes, looking gaunt. No, some look like my big, goofy friend, who smiled with his eyes and wore Patriots jerseys. Some people with addictions hold down steady jobs, and are respected by their coworkers. They come to our cookouts and parties. They stand with us while we get married. They watch boxing matches with the guys on Saturday nights. They don’t all act the same. Or possess the same qualities. They aren’t bad people. They, like my friend, can actually be the best kind of people. That give their jackets to the homeless guy they talk to on the way to work every day.
People suffering from addiction come from wonderful families. My friend lived with his aunt, who became an aunt to all of us. She is one of the best people I know. People suffering from addiction also have friends that don’t use. I say this because I’ve gotten a lot of slowly asked “Did you and your friend have a lot of mutual friends?” the last few days and if it comes from the wrong person I just want to scream at them: “ASK WHAT YOU REALLY WANT TO ASK!!!! ASK IF I HANG OUT WITH JUNKIES BECAUSE GOD KNOWS THAT AN ADDICT WOULD HAVE FRIENDS THAT DON’T USE!!!” I am really learning the past few days that there are stupid questions. I am not speaking of the questions from friends, I know they care. It’s the randoms. And I know that I am just really angry and being irrational and people in general have good intentions (that “people have good intentions” bit sounds like one of those statements on a job assessment you are supposed to strongly agree with). But I see through it when certain people question. I am finding that there are questions that people ask that are really just nosiness and unfair judgments in disguise. They will reword the question to make it sound nice. Like asking if we had mutual friends. It’s a strange question. Why does that matter? I get it, no one knows what to say. I don’t even know what to say. Yes, all his friends were my friends, and my friends, his. Almost every friend we had was a mutual friend. My friend was a person with a skeleton in his closet, like everyone else. His vice was just more deadly than my glasses of red wine after a shitty day. And we all knew it was there. I can’t even say it was a closeted skeleton, because here we go with another question that I find to be stupid when asked by the wrong person “Didn’t you know?” . Of course we knew it, maybe not the extent of it, but why would we express anything we knew to someone outside of our circle or his family? All any good friend wants is to protect their friends. From harm. From judgment. Of course it was out there between us and our friend, and he knew that we were there. We were family. We still are. And we tried the best we could to fix it. But sometimes “the best we could” is not enough.
Statistically, this was going to happen. I hated statistics in college, but I’ve never hated statistics more than I do now.
