I have known I was going to write this post for about two and a half months. I’ve been trying to write now for about ten days.
My friend, who I mentioned in the previous post was quite ill. He battled cancer all summer, with the intention of beating it, getting past it. But it was a struggle. We were colleagues at the day job as well as being friends and I watched as things got worse for him, not better. The weight loss was staggering, though he had tried to lose weight previously, this was not a weight loss program he recommended to be sure. I saw how things became more and more difficult for him to deal with. Not that he wasn’t “handling it”, more that he didn’t have the energy to be able to do what he needed to. The pain was significant, which by itself will sap your energy, even though they tried to manage as best they could. And unfortunately, the treatments weren’t doing what they were supposed to. The fatigue was supposed to be getting better, and it wasn’t. But he’d kept working as best he could. So, when he called to tell me that he was taking short term disability leave, I knew this was a battle he wasn’t going to win. I knew he wasn’t going to be coming back and I was going to be saying goodbye to my friend.
When he first told me of his diagnosis, I told him I was ‘here for the good, and the bad’ so we stayed in touch after he signed off from the day job. Since music was the big thing, we had in common, besides the day job, I began sending him my daily earworms. You know those songs that get stuck in your head for no apparent reason? Those are earworms. There are some that are quite insidious, I won’t mention them lest I inadvertently end up inflicting them on you. Anyway, I tend to wake up with at least one of these most days, so for entertainment purposes, and to give him something fun to look forward to, I sent him a YouTube link to a video or a Spotify link to my daily earworm.
About a week after he signed off, he sent me a note that one of the treatments seemed to help so there was a glimmer of hope. It didn’t last long. About a week later he called me from the hospital to tell me they were sending him home on hospice. I hadn’t seen my friend in the flesh in three and a half years so when he finally gave me a chance to visit him, I got myself right over to see him. First at the hospital, and then when he got home. I knew I was going to have to say good-bye, before that I was going to see my friend and have a chat or two and hopefully a few laughs as well.
I feel very fortunate to have had the opportunity to spend time with my friend before he departed. And I’m very grateful that the trip I had planned to take got canceled. Because my trip was canceled, I had two more opportunities to visit my friend. And yes, we did get a few good conversations in, and a really good laugh or two, and I even got to share some new music with him, that he quite enjoyed.
We don’t always get the chance to say goodbye, to have that last conversation, a last laugh. Sometimes people die suddenly and if we hadn’t told them what we wanted them to know before then the opportunity was lost. Sometimes, we get the chance to say good-bye, the chance to say, or try to say what we want them to know or show them if we can’t say it.
My father passed away rather unexpectedly one night ten years ago. I had talked to him a week or so before, but I didn’t know that was going to be the last conversation I had with him. My sister didn’t know that whatever she said to her husband when he got up to check something one night, was going to be the last conversation, she had with him. My mother had a friend who was dying, and they both knew it. It was a several months process, and my mother took every opportunity to talk to her friend that came up. She had a chance to say goodbye to her friend, as I did with mine.
I wish I could say that being able to say goodbye, knowing that that person is leaving your world soon, makes it easier when the time comes. In some ways it does, and in some ways, it doesn’t. Hopefully, you take the time to make a few more memories and they are good ones. But when the time comes, you still miss your friend, your sibling, your spouse, your parent. There will be things come up that you wish you could talk to them about or share with them and that’s when you will feel their absence most. Just a few days after my friend passed an artist that I’d shared with him released a new cd that has some songs on it I wish I could have shared with him. He would have liked them.
