Goodbye, My Friend

I woke this morning after a long night with a sick kid, staggered into my office to check email – just a part of my morning routine.

This morning, however, I saw a couple emails from two old friends in my inbox.  The subject line was something like “Sad News”.  I sort of braced myself to read that one of our dear theater professors had died.  NO.  They were letting everyone know that one of our long time friends, Steve, had died.

For a while I just couldn’t move.  I thought surely there was some mistake.  You see, I was part of a group of friends in college that I can’t even do justice in words.  We were young, funny, talented, wildly insecure (but masked it with humor), and we wanted to be together 24/7.  The few of us had come together at a pivotal time in our lives and the bonds we formed during those years are like steel.  Even today, the miles that separate us all are many – Chicago, Kansas City, Birmingham, Philadelphia, Charleston, Okinawa Japan, Las Vegas, Beckley, Nashville, Huntington.  But the bond is still there.  It is palpable.  It is just as real to me today as it was then.

Today this sad news has caused us to pick up the phone, write emails, re-tell stories and reach out to each other for comfort, for stability, for understanding.  The alarm has gone off.  We understand all too clearly that it could have easily been one of us.  Our “Big Chill” has arrived.

Steve was 42 years old.  He was five days younger than me.  Today was my 43rd birthday – Sunday would have been his. We would often go to dinner around the 25th or 26th of October to celebrate our mutual birthdays.  Later today I found out he died from a heart attack.  He had been diagnosed with high blood pressure, had begun taking some meds and feeling better.  On Friday evening he returned from work not feeling well, fell asleep on the sofa, then woke throwing up and having chest pains.  He was in his home in Pennsylvania with his partner of 10 years.  911 was called and he died that very night. 

I first met him when in high school.  We went to different schools but competed on the speech teams and would see each other often at the tournaments. One year we qualified for the National tournament in Detroit and about ten of us from his school and mine piled into a van and had the time of our lives on that trip.  That’s when we really started our friendship.

When I started college at Marshall I knew no one.  Low and behold on the first day of class I ran into Steve.  We went to lunch at Wendy’s where we both ordered the same meal – double cheeseburger with mayo only, fries and a coke.  We both had a scar in the corner of our eye from bumping it as a child, and we joked about being soul-mates/scar mates. 

Steve was a magnificent singer and performer.  He was original, daring, had a cutting sense of humor, and was”over the top” in nearly everything he did.  We were attached at the hip for a long time.  Although it was truly just a friendship, it was intimate – in a “I can tell what you are thinking” kind of way.  He would hold my hand and snuggle up with me when we were together.  Something both of us needed-that human touch from someone we really trusted.

There was a period of years when we did not communicate.  Steve went through some very self-destructive  times and eventually I thought it was better to leave the friendship before I was in the middle of destructive things myself.  I don’t know how righteous that was of me.  Looking back, maybe it was selfish.  I do know it was one of the hardest decisions I ever made.

Eventually, time passed and maturity increased for everyone and we reconnected at a reunion.  When I returned to WV in 1997 after living in Nashville for 8 years we rekindled the friendship.  He was living in Huntington and I in Scott Depot.  It was a healthy, grown-up friendship.  He was again pursuing a performing career after a very successful run of upper-level restaurant management.  Soon he was off performing and getting rave reviews wherever he went.   I was sad to see him leave WV, but very happy to see him doing what he had longed to do.

After that, we would talk once, maybe twice, a year on the phone.  He came to visit George and I once when he was  visiting WV, and he would always send a very touching Christmas card each year.

Now it is over.  Just memories.  Another friend posted these lyrics from the musical Wicked, and I think they are prefect for this day, this season:

I’ve heard it said
That people come into our lives for a reason
Bringing something we must learn
And we are led
To those who help us most to grow
If we let them
And we help them in return
Well, I don’t know if I believe that’s true
But I know I’m who I am today
Because I knew you:

Like a comet pulled from orbit
As it passes a sun
Like a stream that meets a boulder
Halfway through the wood
Who can say if I’ve been changed for the better?
But because I knew you
I have been changed for good

It well may be
That we will never meet again
In this lifetime
So let me say before we part
So much of me
Is made of what I learned from you
You’ll be with me
Like a handprint on my heart
And now whatever way our stories end
I know you have re-written mine
By being my friend:

Like a ship blown from its mooring
By a wind off the sea
Like a seed dropped by a skybird
In a distant wood
Who can say if I’ve been changed for the better?
But because I knew you,
I have been changed for good

And just to clear the air
I ask forgiveness
For the things I’ve done you blame me for
But then, I guess we know
There’s blame to share
And none of it seems to matter anymore.

Goodbye, old friend.
Love,
T