I miss my deceased friend.

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

This is in no way ‘mundane’ or ‘pointless’ but tradition says that anything not suited to any of the other forums goes here even if it is not mundane or pointless.

In November 2006 my step-father and close friend passed away. It was a brain heamorage. He was 53.

I have overcome the grief. So has my mother (to some extent. She is not the same person she was).

But things have changed permanently. I no longer have the person who’s advice on all subjects I saught and respected. I am not just glorifying this because he’s gone: The advice he gave on any subject was invariably much better than I could hope to get from anyone else (including my biological father).

I have lost a friend with whom I shared time watching TV programmes that were mutually enjoyed and discussed.

I have lost the childlike and often unappreciated joy of letting someone else be the alpha-male, the decider of things, the person who knew how to make a day.

I have lost someone who was more dad-like to me than my real [weekend] dad.

I am (willingly) the person that my mum uses as a sounding board for her daily troubles. I am in many ways the replacement for my step-father. With the loss of the person who was the head of the family there inevitably has to be someone who must take on some of the duties, known and unknown that were once the responsibility of the head.

What do you most miss about people that you have lost?

2

I would sell everything I own and give up all but the love of my wife and children to spend five minutes with my father. He passed 11 years ago and, although the pain is not as sharp as it once was the empty spot in my soul is as big as it ever was.

My mother passed 2 years ago this month and as the only child I am the sage representative for my line. It is not a duty I ever wanted but will represent myself and my family with pride and honor. It is left to me to teach my children who they are and where they come from and, hell, I don’t even know half the story myself.

So many questions, so many answers I will never know. I have no personal regrets, I was close to both parents and told them as often as possible of my love and appreciation. I have only regrets for posterity, that there are things they will never know and I can never teach.

::sigh::

3

I’ll miss my friend Harry to the end of my days. He taught me everything I ever knew about art, cooking, photography, classical & blues music, airships, carpentry on a budget, painting watercolors, pottery, Vermont & New Hampshire and New York City, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bleeker Street, NPR, Art Nouveau, Art Deco, Bauhaus, Dali, DuChamp, pottery, shellfish, you name it…
I went out with him for a couple months when I was a teenager. I went to his wedding and babysat for his kids, we stayed friends and always stayed in touch. I would give anything to spend one more night just shooting the breeze about anything and everything…

My heartfelt condolences to you and your Mom, your StepDad will live on in your warm memories of him.

4

I’ll always wonder how you would have turned out Graham.

5

I posted about my main contribution to this thread years ago, when it happened (well, twice, actually - that’s how hard it was). He was, for a brief and shining moment, a Doper himself.

6

The thought that my Grandfather isn’t in the world anymore still makes me cry. I will miss him for the rest of my life.

7

My uncle was only 15 years older than I am, so he felt more like a big kid than an uncle. He played with us, did silly things to amuse us, and taught me a lot about thing he learned the hard way. I lost him when I was 18 in the slow, horrible way that AIDS takes someone.

What I wouldn’t give to listen to him talk about work or his friends or anything.

Lobsang, how old were you when he came into your life? Did you bond right away?

8

JoAnne and I met at the Nutcake Hospital. She was there for depression and alcoholism and I was there for depression. I was afraid of her at first. She came in the kitchen demanding “God-damned coffee!”

She was rough looking, weathered. She talked in a Pittsburg accent about spitting on her ex-husband’s grave. And she laughed with smoke filled lungs.

We were educated in different ways. She had street smarts and carpentry smarts and homemaking skills. She kept it from me for a long time that she couldn’t read or write. My book learning didn’t intimidate her. She knew that I genuinely enjoyed her company.

After we left the hospital, I helped to save her from suicide when she was locked in a hotel room. And I help to save her truck Nellybelle. It was still running ten years later. She would make the long drive to my house to keep me company and we would sit on the porch all day long while she drank liters of Diet Coke and smoked a pack of Dorals. We talked about her dead husband and the son who burned to death in a car accident. After the car had been cleaned out, she went through it herself to make sure there was nothing of him left behind.

Much of what I know of courage I learned from JoAnne. She gave me that son’s class ring. She wanted me to have it. It is one of my most cherished possessions.

A year and a half ago at Thanksgiving, her boyfriend called me crying. When he woke up, she was dead beside him. Her heart had just given out. She was my age – early sixties. She left all of her body to science.

I still can’t believe she’s gone. She was so larger than life.

9

On April 12th of this year I lost my 30-year-old Uncle. This is the first person I have ever known who has died. He was Bipolar and we don’t have the autopsy results back yet, but he either intentionally or accidentally overdosed on drugs after a big fight with one of his friends. He had been making significant changes to his lifestyle and I guess this was just a moment of weakness in the midst of what might have been a bright future.

I wish all I had of him are fond memories – we grew up together, so he was like a big brother to me, but not like a big brother you adore, more like a big brother who hurts your family and makes you feel conflicted. He was the sort of kid who called his mother by her first name just to be disrespectful and who would laugh at me whenever I talked about my plans for the future, telling me I would never amount to anything. He was in a lot of pain and I never really comprehended that… I was just angry at him for the drama he brought into my family. I tried to be the kid to my grandparents that he couldn’t be. He dropped out of school and became a drug addict who was utterly dependent on his mother and I got good grades, I went to college, married a wonderful man they love, and I do housework for them and try to take care of them and make them feel appreciated every chance I get. I’m not going to lie, I resented the hell out of him, and I believed he was killing my grandmother, who is very sick and was pretty much raising his kids for him.

When he died I helped my grandmother take care of his young kids and other nieces and nephews, and while cleaning out his bedroom I found the journal he kept. He had so much anger and self-hatred. I never saw myself as anything like him until I realized, too late, how much he was hurting. He hated himself for the same reasons I was angry at him, I guess. And he loved his kids – that was obvious from the day they were born – he never ignored them, always supported them, and was really proud of them.

One of his kids has a mother who can’t care for him, so my grandparents just became permanent legal guardians of my 9 year old cousin. My grandpa is 67, retired, and just inherited a kid. He was already living with them so it’s not too big of an upheaval for them I guess, but there is a sudden hole in our family where he always used to be, and I still don’t even really believe he’s dead. I keep seeing people who remind me of him superficially, and wonder for a moment if some horrible mistake was made and suddenly he’ll be alive and I can apologize for not being more understanding. I keep expecting to run into him in town somewhere.

What I miss the most about him was his sense of humor. He was the sort of person who could say the most rude and hurtful thing to you but it was so freaking funny you couldn’t help but smile even as your heart broke. Last year sometime, I was crashing on Grandma’s couch and he came home from work and we watched TV together and discovered we both found the same television shows hilarious. We talked about our mutual favorite artist (Dalí) and authors we liked. My grandma always told me we had so much in common but I never really believed her because I resented him so much for being so shitty to me when I was a kid. My attitude toward him was starting to change, and we were beginning to get along quite well as adults when he died. I miss the sound of his voice, his silliness. He used to sing in a falsetto at the top of his lungs up and down the hallway, and he would look at you and insert your name into the lyrics in some completely nonsensical way. I can still remember the familiar sound of his falsetto voice up and down the halls and coming from the bathroom and it’s crazy to realize I’m never going to hear it again.

I haven’t seen my grandmother since he died, and I used to spend most weekends with her. Now they are too busy dealing with my cousin (who is a really good, bright kid whose lowest grade was B- during the semester his father died.) to have time for anything else. I feel left out in the cold. They don’t like to acknowledge that they need anyone, but I need them to need me. They always took care of me and now I just want to take care of them.

It’s hard to explain, but my family used to be whole, then it got splintered and broken into a million pieces right around the time he had his first kid, and I worked very hard to accept the way things had changed, and I found my niche and I embraced everything my family was. While everyone else bitched about the way things were, I rolled up my sleeves and got my hands dirty doing the work and being there to make things better as much as I could. But when my uncle died, everything just got broken again. I don’t know if I’m ever going to find a place for myself there ever again.

Death sucks.

10

Andrea, I’m sorry. I’ll never forget. I love you.

11

I met Carole when I moved to LA in 1992. She was 20 years older than me, loud, crazy, and had the warmest heart I’ll ever know. She became more of a mother to me than my own mother was. She taught me more about living life than anyone else I’ll ever know.

When we moved away, she came to visit me in Georgia. After she left, my friends there would ask me how my “loud friend from California” was. They’d never seen anything like her and were gently horrified by her, but loved her, too.

She died on September 13, 2001, driving the sports car she loved to drive (too fast) when she pulled out from a stop sign, failing to see the truck that had the right-of-way coming down the hill towards her. She died instantly. Her son was on vacation in the South Pacific at the time, so I was appointed “notify everyone” person, and went through all her emails that she’d copied multiple people on, gleaning every email address I could find, and sending out a message. As it turns out, I was the one who ended up telling both her son and her brother about her death. Far from being upset at her friends just taking over while he was gone, her wonderful son was so grateful that everyone was there to do what he couldn’t do and watch his back as well as hers.

I flew out to her memorial service, and there were people there from every part of her life. The room was full of love and laughter and shared grief. Everyone told Carole stories, and we discovered something we all have in common. To this day, we all can still hear Carole talking to us, telling us what we need to hear. I ask her what I should do, and her spirit answers me. I should have known she wouldn’t be gone, just somewhere else but still in touch with everyone who loves her.