Watertown, Massachusetts

This piece appears in my book We Had It Coming.

I am sitting in a waiting room right now none of us ever want to be inside of crying about an old friend I'm not entirely sure is even gone yet. The telephone game both figurative and literal going on among friends. I sat and sat and remembered after some time that I could just call him to clarify the matter which I did. Hey man are you alive? Just checking. No answer though. It said the mailbox of the person I was calling was currently full so I texted instead. I was hoping that this was all a misunderstanding but I felt the curious mix of shame and devastation that I had just texted a dead man. I guess I was expecting some kind of miracle.

I noticed the last time we texted he had sent Nollaig shona duit and I said Happy Christmas to you too old buddy.

And then two years of nothing. 

He was from Ireland but had been here for twenty five years or more working in the hospitality business in Boston and he hired me for a restaurant job I would have for many years that changed my life in ways both good and bad. I had some of the best and worst times of my life with this man. Sitting in the closed down restaurant all night chain smoking under the oven vents. Driving across the city at 4 in the morning to get another bag that neither of us really wanted and certainly did not need. 

That’s not true. We wanted it very badly in the moment. More than anything. So that nothing would ever end. Not just borrowing happiness from tomorrow to spend today but borrowing happiness from the rest of our lives. 

I cannot believe we lived through some of that shit and now I guess one of us did not?

He was off the sauce for many years after we no longer worked together and I was very proud of him for that. While sober he was one of the more charming and hospitable people I knew. He was always sort of my boss in the way that someone who was once your boss and is a bit older is always your boss. He was proud of me too for my writing accomplishments despite not ever having any clue about how online media or social media worked. I had to show him how to use Instagram like he was eighty years old. 

He lived around the corner and would have us over for the most lovely dinners. He knew so much about wine. He'd delight in pouring us important sounding bottles and not have any for himself during the good years there. 

I'm not going to sugarcoat it he struggled very badly with substance abuse. Most of us did then or still do now. Oftentimes you probably wouldn't want to be around him unless you were that wasted and maybe not even then but that is how that all goes. A nice person can become an unbearable one so quickly. I have so many friends like that. Maybe that's me too. I don't think so but I wouldn't know would I? That's the other version of me and we are at odds with one another. 

It all feels even stranger because just before I heard that my friend may or may not have passed I had been having a little cry about David Lynch and then my own David was either dead or was not. 

Schrödinger's drinking buddy. 

Restaurant families like the one we were a part of are a fractured fragile thing and I don't know if I know anyone who would know for certain right now. My one friend said their old co-worker said it happened this morning. I hope it's not true. It would be awkward if he has to read this and be like what the hell man? I hope he still can. 

I wrote that yesterday and now I know he cannot. 

I posted the news to Facebook and everyone said how much he made them care about the fine details of working in a restaurant. How he made them more of a professional. He did that for me too. Restaurant labor is terrible in many ways but hospitality is something different. That's a thing you can take pride in. That's humanity.

And now I’m sitting in another kind of room no one ever wants to be in. 

It is such a disorienting feeling when someone you care about but hadn't talked to that much in a couple of years dies suddenly because there is now a freshly dug hole inside of you and yet the day to day routine of your life has not been altered one bit. A new kind of absence has taken over for an older different shaped absence and the two are in conflict. Trying to fit a triangle shaped sadness into a rectangle shaped sadness.

It's 0° right now in Massachusetts in the coldest month in recorded history. 

A friend texted me a couple days later about his own recent experience with a friend who had died by suicide and I said one thing I can't figure out is whether or not I have cried sufficiently. I have wept multiple times but I stopped after three or so days I said. What is that?

Is that enough?

The nightmares about it haven't stopped though. 

Another old friend called and I said the first day or two I just wanted to know what specifically had happened because we think information is an antidote to suffering and then we found out the details and I wished I hadn't ever heard that shit. 

Sometimes it’s best not to know.

I can't help but relate it to when my father died but I suppose that's not surprising from me the little bitch with an eternally dead and dying dad who I kept texting for a while after he wasn’t there to respond ever again. 

I’m doing that to my friend right now too I suppose by writing this. 

Hey buddy I cried for three days after you went over. Not bad right? Pretty respectable. Was that more or less than you would have expected?

After your memorial a bunch of the old gang stood at the door of the Mount Auburn chapel and hugged and lied to one another about how good we all still looked. 

It was a very lovely ceremony by the way. Everyone said that it was very lovely.