This weekend I woke up to one of those texts. You know the type, where one minute you’re slow dancing with sleep and the next – ding! – you’re sitting straight up, ice water coursing through your spine. An old friend of mine from high school passed away. He had been sick, which is not to say it wasn’t a surprise; that it doesn’t feel entirely impossible.
We’re in our 30s, so few of us are thinking of our mortality as the predator next door. There’s always another day, another opportunity to do better, another chance encounter where you’ll say all of the things you meant to say at the last chance encounter.
The years took Ben and I in very different directions. It’s been easily more than a decade since we sat next to each other, likely in someone’s smoky garage, and caught up. But in the years we shared our lives, we were quite close. We fell onto each other’s maps during that period when your friends are everything. That season when the sun rises and sets with your social status and weekend agenda and you cling desperately to the people who will let you.
After I got the news, in an effort to remember and celebrate his life, I went down into my basement and pulled down a stack of photo albums. I brushed an inch of dust off the top cover and opened the one that looked the oldest. I sat on the cool, carpeted floor, my chin resting on my knee, and flipped through page after page of printed photos from one of the sweetest chapters of my life. And he was there. He was everywhere. In pictures, and in the memories my mind raced to reassemble, and then back into the place in my heart where he’d once resided. Turns out, it was just sitting there, waiting for him.
Nestled in those clear compartments, proof of proms and parties and nights spent sitting around bonfires and lakefronts paraded in front of me like a slideshow, ever so slightly out of focus. Some of the faces have changed, but are still very much in my life. Some are harder to recall. And now one is forever confined, by unthinkable shackles, to my memory.
When we experience the unique hurt of losing a loved one, no matter how close or how far apart we are from them when they go, I think a lot of that mourning can be attributed to something none of us left behind can escape – the passing of time.
I’ve cried so much these past few days. Because he was so young, because I think of his family and what they must be going through, because the non-negotiable permanence of his absence is too gut wrenching to comprehend. Our paths won’t cross some day in a pub or at a wedding – all those usual scenes of lovely coincidental encounters. We won’t catch up. It’s just this now. These photos.
But also, and perhaps mostly, I’ve cried because our happiest times together were both 15 years ago, and yesterday. When I look back through those albums, I see the faces of babies staring back at me. We were so full of false confidence and fool’s courage. We could make a memory out of a few cars full of kids and a seemingly pointless Saturday night. We were on fire for life, and none of us were awake enough to recognize it.
And now … well, it all tastes bittersweet, because a loss more tragic than we could have predicted has made our innocent past feel profoundly important and ironic. The years we spent together, like the finest sand, can never pass through our fingers again.
It may seem strange, but in many ways I’m thankful that my richest memories with Ben are forever frozen in that period of our lives. Sure, we saw each other here and there in more recent years, but when I think of my friend, those aren’t the times that will make me smile. That warmth will be eternally cradled in the space he’s always occupied. In the stories and sweet recollections of a simpler time when a group of kids danced in the flames of unbridled innocence. I’m so glad he was there. I’m so glad we shared that dance.
