When Chris was murdered, it took me weeks to stop crying. Every song we’d ever talked about since middle school made me choke up, and there were so many songs because music was one of our biggest common bonds that I would find myself crying in the grocery store to the songs playing through the aisles. With time, it got easier. Time didn’t make me understand the “why” of it, his sudden death, but it hurt less often. I could think of happy memories and not fall apart, but I still miss him. This morning on the way to work, I heard one of the last songs we talked about before he was killed, a cover song done by Agent Orange, and I had to stop the car. I was just seized with this huge sudden wave of grief out of nowhere. I miss Chris. I miss my friend and his humor and his photography and his brilliance, one of the smartest people I’ve ever known.
When Kevin died in his 30s from colon cancer, I was furious with the universe. Cancer is for old people and we weren’t old. He was just a year older than me. By the time I got my motorcycle endorsement on my driver’s license, he was too sick to ride with me, so we never got to do that. I remember when we were dating, just kids, and he couldn’t afford to send me flowers for Valentine’s Day because the florists jacked the price way up for delivery…but cash and carry flowers were affordable, so he had one of his friends bring the flowers to me like a delivery. That level of kindness and effort set a bar that I don’t think anyone else has ever matched. Kevin told me I was important, unique, special and worthwhile at a time in my life when I didn’t believe I was any of those things…and many years later, before he passed away, we got to talk and he told me that sparkle in my eye, my energy, was one of a kind and that he was so blessed to know me, and I wept and wept and wept on the spot. Sincerity and honesty, saying things from the heart uncensored, so rare, but that was his gift; there was no BS, just a purity in the things he would say. Any song from Cinderella’s “Night Songs” album reminds me of him, makes me smile. I saw someone on a black Hayabusa the other day, and there was that grief, popping up like a damn jack in the box out of nowhere, and filling my eyes with tears. I am a better person for the time I knew him.
I still talk to them sometimes. Call me crazy; I don’t give a damn. In the car, alone, sometimes I’ll tell Chris and Kevin I miss them, I love them and that I think of them often, because I do, it’s all true.
I miss Clay, too, and wonder if there was anything I could have said or done…I saw him the night before he took his life and I never had a single worry that he’d do such a thing. Was I blind or did he just hide it well? And Gracie and the drugs…damn it, life doesn’t have to be a drugged up haze and chasing that escape took you from us too soon.
Gone too quickly, all of you. You are missed. You are not forgotten. You are alive every time I remember you, every moment recalled. Thank you for every laugh, every song, every story.