“Life doesn’t cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.”

- George Bernard Shaw

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DENIAL

A good friend died today; I went to the movies. Watched every one he and I wanted to see with blind eyes and a buzzing in my skull. I didn’t think at all that day, not even after I got home, and sat myself on the couch to watch old favorites, I was too busy keeping myself from the big bad truth lurking in the back of my mind.

What about me was off today, I wondered, I didn’t feel well, and I didn’t know why.

It wasn’t a conscious decision to ignore it, to pretend it hadn’t happened, it just was, I couldn’t do anything else and I was too numb to realize I was doing it.

ANGER

At the funeral I couldn’t deny it anymore. Not faced with the perfect reality of his corpse in a coffin. I couldn’t convince myself it was really him. There was a moment, a single moment, when I blamed him for leaving. ‘God, you’re an ass,’ I told myself and I went on to blame other people. The drunk who hit him, myself, for letting him leave my apartment that night, his mother, for giving him birth so I’d have to loose him, and after a ‘only the good die young; God can’t stand to be away from them,’ from a woman I didn’t know, I was angry at God too. The selfish bastard taking him away when we still needed him here.

For that instant I believed in God, because he was the only one I could truly make myself angry at.

BARGAINING

By the time they were lowering his coffin, I was done being angry, it wasn’t the time for it anyways, and I was thinking of all the things I would have done to have him back. How I would never be able to name them all, and how much I didn’t care. I know I would have traded places with him, a hundred million times over, if I’d thought it would help.

In my head ‘Give him back!’ became my mantra and in my head I was on the ground screaming. If I’d have thought it’d have helped, if I had thought God was listening I would have kneeled in the mud and begged.

I would have given anything, even our friendship, so long as he lived.

DEPRESSION

Home again and there was an ache in my chest. It followed me for days; a part of me was on auto drive and the rest wanted to drown itself in vodka and ice cream that it could never get its hands on. There were so many things we’d wanted to do and things we’d never do again; he’d never do again. And as part of me was spiraling and the other was in falsified perfection I wasn’t even half a person. I couldn’t help but think he took a part of me with him.

He took the most important part of me; he took the part that held me all together, and I didn’t think I’d ever get it back.

ACCEPTANCE

A normal day, just like any other, I still missed him and he was still gone and I was still pulling myself back together because I had to, not because I wanted to. I was watching TV, I can’t remember what, and I laughed. Not the ‘I am obligated’ laugh that was as hollow as I felt that I’d been sporting lately, but a real laugh. It wasn’t a big laugh, it was barely half a chuckle, but it was real. And so I laughed, with tears in my eyes and a smile on my face I laughed. Part of me was surprised I still could.

He was as gone as he’d been yesterday, but that was okay. I’d miss him forever, but I would be okay too.