For my friend

“I could tell by the sound of your voice you weren’t calling to tell me you won the lottery”. I wasn’t. I was calling to repeat the news I’d just received via another friend, words strung together to make a sentence that still doesn't make any sense. A lifelong friend, someone I’d known since before I could form memories, was dead. A boisterous, successful, sarcastic, whip smart, father of two kids - dead - by suicide. 

After that call, I made a few more, sent and responded to some texts, and canceled everything I’d planned for the weekend - our wedding anniversary. The old familiar state of lacquering shock set in - a kind of emotional suspended animation. Of course that’s just the superficial or surface experience, underneath there’s a riot of emotions; anger, fear, sorrow, loss, questions, all roiling beneath the well practiced lid. 

I didn't attempt anything that required concentration or emotional effort. I mindlessly organized a summer’s worth of cluttered camping gear. I went to breakfast with my son in law and lunch with one of my daughters to familiar local places and gently talked about my friend. Jane and I bought plants and I worked in the yard, lathering up a sweat and getting my hands deep in the dirt. Later, we took our paddle boards to a local lake and grabbed tacos and a beer after, remembering our honeymoon 33 years ago. Not exactly the anniversary weekend getaway I’d planned, but she was so gracious and understanding.

Sober, subdued, but safe. Space to let the emotional turmoil simmer down enough to start typing these words and letting each emotion have their say. It’s not that I was particularly close to my friend, in spite of our proximity growing up, we were very different people. It was only in recent years, reconnecting around a trauma we both shared in junior high that I felt a deep connection and appreciation for the man he was and the man he became. With every brief interaction I felt the desire for more time, time to really look back and understand how each of us had come to be where we were, who we were, time to really become friends around something other than circumstance and geography. 

Now I won’t get that chance. While my loss is nothing compared to those closest to him, to those who really knew him, it’s still a loss and feels like a significant one, one I’m grasping to understand. Many of us are, especially the group that experienced, together, the murder of our Junior High teacher, Rod Grayson. My friend was closest to the event, a front row witness, I sat right behind him. More than a few of us have asked what role this might have played in his tragic decision. For all of us in the room that day, or who had Mr. Grayson as a teacher, this feels very personal, unsettlingly familiar.  

Jane and I will drive to Texas soon for the funeral. We’ll see old friends and meet his family I never really got to know before this. A group of us will follow through on my friend’s suggestion for where to meet (and what to drink) saved in a text thread from the last time we got together. We’ll raise our glasses in grief and remind each other we have each other. Hopefully that will be enough.