“Now, I was someone who could weather any storm and hold back the very ocean with a dam that would never collapse. I needn’t fear the weight of water. I would never collapse under it again.
And then my friend died.”
My oldest friend died on March 30th.
It was a Saturday. The sun was out. It wasn’t a blue-sky day, but it was warm enough to not wear a coat for the eight-block walk to the studio. Valerie was taping an episode of The Kelly Clarkson Show. A friend of mine and I were going to sit in the audience and then meet Valerie backstage after her segments were done. The three of us were then going to head off to dinner.
The day was set to be the exact right kind of joyful. Two weeks earlier, I had been out in Los Angeles caring for a friend I had known since we were 12-years old. He was nearing end of life from terminal cancer. Flying out, I had thought the visit would be mostly for company. By the time I left, I knew that we had said our last goodbyes.
I flew home with our last exchange ringing in my ears knowing it would truly be our last.
When you have known someone almost your whole life, by the time you are each your 50s, how many words have been shared between you? 50,000? 100,000? 1,000,000?
If you could see a transcript of everything you’ve ever said to each other from your first words at 12-years old to the present, the scroll would be so long as to seem endless. It is a hard, painful thing – especially as a writer – to realize that it isn’t, that it will get no longer. It will just… end. There will be no more lines added, no new datestamps, no entry on August 13th when I texted him to wish him a happy birthday or four days later when he texted me to wish me the same. There will simply be a scroll that seemed endless right up until it ended with a total of six words said between the speakers.
At the end of my last day in Los Angeles with my friend, I went into his room to tell him I was leaving. I told him about his care and who would be coming to look in on him and that he was in good hands. I paused for a second and then said, “Love you, bro.” He said, “Love you too,” back. And that was that. It was a goodbye without a saying of those words. We both knew it. I love you. I love you too. There wasn’t more that needed to be said. There was only what mattered. Six words was enough.
Then I left his apartment and cried in the street until I could get in the car and drive away.
I got on the plane home the next day knowing in a matter of days, I would get a phone call to let me know he was gone. Two days later, he drifted from consciousness. I thought the call might come in another day or two. Almost two weeks later, he was still with us - though only in body.
In the long days in between, my friends and I had all sat in a sort of uncomfortable virtual vigil on the phone and in the group chat we had mainly used to trash-talk about fantasy football trash-talk. It was the drawing-in of a circle so as to pull the friends struggling the most closer into its fold.
By the time Valerie arrived in New York the day before the Kelly Clarkson taping, it had been a long two weeks of watchful waiting. I had kept my phone with me at all times. I had kept the ringer turned on… carried it everywhere… slept with it next to my bed.
Valerie’s taping of The Kelly Clarkson Show was the perfect kind of distraction. It was just good upon good upon good. Valerie was kicking off a week that was poised to be special and important. Her book was coming out two days later. She had a hectic slate of appearances and events scheduled for the week. I was going to get to tag along for some; and even after the ones I missed, I was going to get to say “Hi, honey. How was your day?” to someone walking through the door not on calling from the other coast.
I was excited for the whole week. I was excited to be kicking it off at the taping... and I was excited to be bringing my friend and having the three of us grab dinner afterwards. It was to be a happy bringing together: the person I’ve traveled to five continents with over the last 25 years, and the person I could see traveling with for however many we had left.
The taping itself was fun. Valerie and Kelly did a little game show sketch together, and then sat down for an interview. Valerie talked a little about her book and our relationship. The latter had just hit the media a couple of weeks earlier but only to the extent of Valerie being involved with someone new. I was still happily The Boyfriend and in no hurry for that to change. [That lasted about another week.]
When the interview segment wrapped, Kelly turned to camera and segued into what would be a commercial break when the episode aired. As is the protocol with talk-shows, the crowd then burst into applause right on cue as one camera panned the crowd, and another stayed on Valerie and Kelly as they stood chatting while the applause ran its course.
My friend and I were in the second row about 50 feet from the set. I couldn’t make out what Valerie and Kelly were talking about (nor was I trying) but it didn’t take a lip reader to make out the words when Kelly Clarkson’s eyes went wide, and she mouthed the words “He’s here?!”
Valerie nodded and then turned and pointed in my direction. Kelly then turned and looked at me and waved… and I, being a person who is very smooth, did exactly what someone who didn’t have any of this on their bingo card would so: I waved back awkwardly like someone very new to waving and not very good at it.
Once the cameras cut, Valerie was released and my friend and I caught up with her backstage before walking back to our hotel. Valerie had wanted to change into sneakers. We had time. It was barely after 4:00. We could just hang out in our room for a bit and then head out to eat. It had a sofa and a couple comfortable chairs set around a coffee table.
I plopped down on the sofa and my friend plopped in one of the chairs as Valerie looked for her shoes. Sitting there, I remembered that I had turned off my phone during the taping. It had been required and the studio had been militant about it. I hadn’t thought much about it even though it was probably the first time I’d turned it off since I got it. I was so used to it always being on, I had entirely forgotten to turn it back on after leaving the studio.
Once it powered on, my inbox instantly filled with a flood of text messages in the group chat with my friends and from some of them directly. There were missed calls and voicemails from various numbers. The earliest were a string of consecutive missed calls from one number.
Our friend had died while I was in the taping. The string of missed calls had been from the friend closest to him. He had been trying to reach me himself before sending out a group message. I had missed them all. I had literally kept my phone with me for two weeks. My friend had died in the two-hour window when I had been forced to turn it off.
I just sat there on the sofa fresh off of what had been a joyful afternoon, reading through message after message among a group of childhood friends about the passing of the person in the group most responsible for it even existing.
When I finished, I shared the news with Valerie and my friend, and then sent replies to let people know I had seen their messages.
Then I texted my mother. Of all of my childhood friends, she had always had a particular soft spot for this particular friend. Most people did. He was a giant, loveable softie, and he was loved for it. My mom would want to know, so I told her.
Then I compartmentalized, and we went to dinner.
That night, after Valerie had fallen asleep, I slipped out of bed; got dressed in the dark; and slipped out of the hotel to the street. It was late. The streets were quiet. There was a cold mist in the air which felt likely to turn into real rain at some point. I wasn’t dressed warmly enough and didn’t have a raincoat. There had been hotel umbrellas near the exit. I hadn’t taken one, hadn’t wanted one. The cold air was bracing and the damp was uncomfortable, and I was glad for both. Sometimes miserable is exactly the right weather.
Our hotel was located not far from Radio City, Rockefeller Center, and NBC Studios where we had been earlier in the day. It is a mostly commercial neighborhood without many places open late, so late at night on weekends, it gets about as quiet as a neighborhood in New York City ever really does.
That night, between the hour I left the hotel and the weather, the streets weren’t just quiet; they were almost deserted. I was glad for that too.
I just walked for what felt like hours. It was probably two. It was Easter Eve. Outside St. Patrick’s Cathedral, workers were hanging garlands of white roses around the heavy bronze doors of the main entrance. The roses were lush and beautiful and looked as if they had just come into their fullest bloom right at that very moment and for the occasion.
I stopped to take a picture of the scene. It wasn’t a snap for the image. It was a capture to remember a moment. A few weeks earlier, I had done the same thing outside my friend’s apartment in L.A.. Both were memory prompts, emotional bookmarks, of something important enough to not just remember but also re-feel, relive.
Before I snapped the picture, I had been just standing there watching the workers hanging these beautiful flowers around these grand doors in the dead of night. St. Patrick’s is a beautiful cathedral when not dressed for an occasion, and here it was, being dressed in its Easter best. Yet, the thought that went through my head was that my friend would have much rather gone out for a beer with the workers than gone past them into the church. He would have. He was as down to earth as they come. He just accepted people exactly as they were with open arms and big heart. He would have skipped the grand cathedral and gone out with the workers.
I took the picture because I wanted to remember that moment, that thought.
Had St. Patrick’s been open, I would have gone inside. I found my way back two days later, but the night my friend died, I just stood there in the drear taking it in from the street, and then turned to keep walking.
Across the street, there was a food truck lit up with bright strings of lights. Alongside the truck was a long table with utensils and sauces. The street was all but deserted. The street was dead. The sidewalks were dead. It felt like the entire city was dead, but there was this one truck lit up against the dead of night… and all around it was a bustle of activity.
People who had just gotten their food were swarming around the table squeezing different colored sauces out onto whatever was in their white styrofoam containers. There was a line. It stretched almost to the next crosswalk. There literally wasn’t a soul on the street except for the block-long line of people who all seemed to have just materialized without having walked up.
The mist had now turned into a legitimate drizzle; the line didn’t seem to be moving at all; and I wasn’t hungry. Nonetheless I crossed the street and got in line anyway just to be among the living.
Ahead of me in line were two young women, girls really. They were both energized in the way you are when you’re young and had a fun night and are still riding the high of it in no rush to come down. I just stood watching as they took selfies and shot silly videos, the two of them all painted nails and laughter, twirling in the rain.
The line inched forward as the rain picked up. The girls pulled their coats up over their heads, and I pulled up the hood of my sweatshirt over mine. Neither did much to keep off the rain, but mine did the lesser of the two. By that point, my hoodie was already wet enough to doing little more than serving as a middleman in the process of getting soaked.
As I was nearing the window, my phone rang. It was Valerie. She had woken up to find me gone. It was after 2:00. She had been worried.
“Where did you go?”
“I went to get food. I’m about to order. I’ll be back in a few,” I said, as if I had just slipped out minutes ago and that had been the reason rather than just a happenstance late into a walk for an entirely different one.
Eventually my turn came and I ordered what everyone else seemed to be having – chicken over yellow rice - and made my way back to the room. With Valerie sleeping, I just sat with the room lit only by the city lights and quietly opened what I had ordered. It was hot and delicious and perfect in the way middle eastern street food from a good truck can be. I ate little of it. And then I slipped back into bed, pushed up against Valerie to feel her next to me, and slept.
Enduring the long line had never been about the food. The worth had been in the wait. It had extended my time off on my own alone in my thoughts but pulled some life around me.
Two days later, Valerie was on the cover of People magazine and so was our relationship, and then suddenly the story was everywhere, all at once, and life got really loud and busy and fast.
The rest of the week went by in a hectic, frenetic blur.
Valerie was busy hustling from event to event. I was splitting days between trying to write and tagging along with Valerie when I could. I would have gone with Valerie to all her events if I could have. I was happy I made it to half.
When you are programmed in childhood to focus externally on other people, the dysfunction around you begets a heightened function. You develop an acutely sensitive emotional radar which then, as an adult, is problematic and a positive. On the negative side, it is exhausting and it doesn’t have an off switch. Feeling other people’s feelings all the time is tiring when things are ‘normal’. In a crisis, that heightened emotional acuity coupled with your bias toward focusing on other people over yourself becomes more and more imbalanced until you’re wholly self-neglecting even when your coat is on fire.
It does, however, come with one particular silver lining.
While that acute emotional radar makes you lousy at feeling your own pain, it makes you AMAZING at feeling other people’s joy. When someone you love is truly deeply happy, you feel it. You don’t just observe it, notice it, pick up on it; you channel it as if their feelings were your own… and it fills you up.
With Valerie’s book launching, she was seeing something which meant more to her than people could know finally coming to fruition. After what had been a very hard period in her life, the book’s release marked an arrival after a hard climb at a station high enough to see how far she had come.
When you are wired the way I am and someone you care about is having an experience like that, you feel it so deeply, it’s like you’re absorbing it… Their joy practically hits your bloodstream. It’s an easy feeling to savor, and it makes it so very easy to be fully present in the moment whenever you have the chance to feel it.
The week of Valerie’s book launch was supposed to be one of those chances, but then my friend died the day it kicked off. My visit with him two weeks earlier had exhumed the trauma of my mother-in-law’s final weeks. His death had exhumed the pain of hers. I hadn’t time to process any of it. So, I did what I always do in a crisis: I compartmentalized. I simply gathered up the radioactivity with my bare hands and tucked it quite neatly into a tidy little box to be attended to when more convenient - as if that is a thing a person can do.
I thought I could. I felt like I did...
Heading into the week, I had been excited to be there for Valerie, to be there solely and delightedly for her during a week that was all about her. We were so busy; we had such a hectic schedule. Things were just going crazy, and the two of us were just… happy.
I was just locked in, focused, and happily so, on another person. I’m wired for that. It was easy to turn my attention toward Valerie. I wanted to, it felt good. It was her week and I could not have been any happier to be playing a supporting role in a production where that wasn’t even a speaking role. I loved the part, and playing it felt fucking wonderful.
It was just a fun, memorable week. We were exhausted half the time; it was a joy all of the time*.
At the same time, the week changed everything. Between Valerie’s appearances, the issue of People dropping, and the story of our relationship suddenly everywhere, the week brought a 10,000-megawatt spotlight of media attention on our relationship… and that then spiked a 120-decibel din of public reaction.
Contrary to how that may sound, it wasn’t overwhelming. It wasn’t even whelming. It was simply nice and felt good. We hadn’t expected it in the least, but it just felt like your own happiness gone national as a celebration. It felt like being happy to have found someone and having them being happy to have found you and then having your yard, your street, and then your whole neighborhood, fill up with people happy for you both.
I have often written in the past that this Substack community of ours is like a long table that plays host to noisy dinners. It is exactly that to me. It is a gathering hosted by someone hungry for the connection not the meal, and attended by people of good heart whose bring-a-dish always feel like love even when they bring the paper plates. This Substack has an intimacy to me despite it being a pretty long table now. That is my favorite thing about publishing here: you good people. I would rather sit at a table well-filled then stand before a crowd of any size.
This here, these little meet-ups, they’re tables well-filled. The news of Valerie’s and my relationship breaking felt like something different. It felt like an engagement party that somehow turned into Coachella. The sun was out; the beer was cold; and scattered on a million blankets were people who were just happy… and Valerie and I were maybe the happiest of them all. It was just very sudden and very unexpected.
As naïve as this sounds now, a month prior, Valerie and I had truly thought that she could mention at the end of an interview that she was seeing someone, and it would get some small, casual mention way down in the story. She did that in an interview with USA Today for a story that was supposed to appear weeks later. They pulled out the part about her relationship and ran it as its own story six hours later.
Things just… accelerated. The week was already going to feel like flooring it in a Porsche. It ended up being more like finding yourself in an F-16.
And I was just… happy…
…but then things would get quiet – Valerie would be out an event without me or be asleep next to me – and I’d go back to the same place I had been Saturday night. It was a state of unthinking wakefulness, alertness, but without my mind-racing - without my mind really doing much of anything – coupled with a restless need to be in motion.
Every time I was alone and that wave crept in, I did what I had done the night my friend died: I slipped away to be by myself and just walked. At the time, it felt… healthy, good, responsible. In a week when it would have been easy to block out something that hurt, I wasn’t doing that. It felt like I was taking the time to process something. How could that not be attending to one’s emotional work?
The problem was that I wasn’t processing it. I was… blank. It was like an alert sleepwalking. Music on, AirPods in, me walking around Midtown Manhattan with eyes forward, seeing little and thinking almost nothing.
I wasn’t processing a death that had just occurred or processing a traumatic experience that had just happened two weeks earlier… or processing the most painful experience of my life, which the two had just dredged up in traumatic full. I was just… going off on my own thinking I was ‘processing it’ because that is simply what I do and I’ve never done anything else. I deal with it on my own, even when I’m not doing any actual dealing with anything or than the ‘on my own’ part.
That first Saturday night when I slipped out of the hotel to walk around a lonely, deserted midtown to be alone in the rain, I thought it was a walk of wisdom. A ‘doing-different’ of what I do wrong… what I did wrong, got wrong, back in my prior Year of the Phoenix.
I thought I had learned and grown. I thought I had fully reconciled the experience of both my mother-in-law’s death and my stepfather’s death a month later. I thought I had shed the programmed four-alarm crisis response of perpetual fight or flight. I didn’t have insomnia. It wasn’t that I couldn’t sleep – although I was wide awake and didn’t even try. It was that I was finding time because I wanted to make room to hold my oldest friend in my thoughts on the day when he had just died.
That is what I thought. I thought I had it this time. I was choosing to engage because I was Very Resilient and could simply do that now. I could just take up matters of complex trauma on purposeful walkabouts so as to quite resiliently sort the related emotions into their neat folders for filing away quite rationally and healthily. Not compartments! Folders!
I realize now what that first walk had really been. It had been just another late-night bike ride like the ones after my stepfather’s death, only this time I was on foot.
I had learned nothing.
So very sorry for the loss of your dear friend! The older you get the more you lose! Moms, dads, friends even your beloved pets! It's a hard pill to swallow!
Humbled to be back at the table