Before You Can't

Tuesday I got word another roommate from that house passed. Heart attack.

B was one of the sweetest guys I knew. Had a brightness to him, an energy, a thoughtfulness most twenty-something guys have to reach for. He didn't, it was instinct, the way he could turn the mood in a room, bring lightness. In Living Color was a show he rarely, if ever, missed. He loved to laugh, deeply, without reservation, without self-consciousness. He laughed in a way that surprised you every time, the rising pitch, and it made us smile.

The weight he carried for most of his life was shaped by the usual stuff. Relationships, family, circumstance. Also a kind of longing most of us Gen X felt but never fully identified, never talked about. The shape of it was different for everyone, but it seemed like we all carried some version of it. His showed up in the quiet moments, when the brightness faded just a little. The longing.

We had a blowout back in the day, over a beef with another friend. From where I stood, he picked a side. It was never actually the case, just how my twenties-something consciousness perceived it.

It took a couple years, but we eventually found our way back, a door cracked open by our friend G. Then life happens, the way it does, time passes and we catch up again. He'd finally landed in a healthy relationship, a real partner. I was so happy for him, we all were. Seeing him looking forward to the next chapter of his life.

Then no chapter.

The news dropped me. It also pulled me straight back to 1995, to the house we all shared, to a morning I never really left.

I didn’t go on that motorcycle ride much. It was generally a good time, but I did my own thing most of the time. The night before, J told me I should go.

He knocked on my door that morning, said it was time. Girlfriend was over, she said don't, it's too early. So I didn't.

I would've been behind by a good margin, but close enough to be there within a few minutes. Another rider ahead of him drifted into oncoming. J came over the crest and a car was suddenly in his lane. Nothing he could have done, nothing I could have done if I'd gone. Just would've seen it instead of hearing about it.

The phone rang later that morning. Nobody calls on Sunday unless something happened, my stomach knotted before second ring. It was our friend A, she was on the ride, voice trembling, I knew before the words got out.

J was gone. My roommate. Friends since high school.

I didn't call his family at first, I drove over. Nobody was home. I went back to the house and called his sister, mom was there and they were all expecting J after the ride. It was Mother's Day.

I don't have a way to describe the sound a mother makes when she understands that her son is dead. I've heard it exactly once, it didn't break me that day, that happened much later. Showing up the second you think it's behind you, the way these things do.

She didn't believe me at first. Asked how I could say something like that. Asked why I would lie to her. I understood it even then. The mind closing the door before the thing on the other side can get in.

I listened to her pain, took it in, then heard the receiver hit the floor.

The silence that followed was deafening.

I hung up the phone, just as people were filtering through the house. The friends who were always around. I told them.

Nobody said anything. It landed like a data point, like a weather report.

Without missing a beat, we started talking about where we were going for lunch.

We rode to the spot by the arcade. Ate. Played Suzuka 8-Hour like it was any other Sunday.

It was not any other Sunday and none of us said that out loud.

Hours later, I went back home and stood in his room. Sat on his bed and looked all around. I got up and closed the door behind me.

I went straight to the garage and started prepping his tools that night. Pieces of him to hand out at the memorial ride...

People spoke, I waited and almost said nothing at all.

I stepped up, said who I was, and who he'd been to me. Told the crowd there was gap between us, over something that hadn't even mattered.

I told them not let the sun go down that day without sorting things out, before you can't.

There'd been a wedge between us for a couple years and we never talked about. It just froze in time exactly where it was.

The funeral was mid-week. A, our friend who'd called me that morning, she went up with me. We saw him. I wailed, hard, gasping for what felt like an eternity.

I reeled it in and composed myself. Walked out past his mother feeling like a criminal. Not because of anything she said, but because of what I already believed about myself.

A and I went outside, we went our own ways. Neither of us said a word about what had just happened in there.

Two wedges. One never got the chance to close. The other one did and then ran out of time to enjoy the other side of it.

We rarely get a say in how we go. Things left unsettled tend to cost more than we think.

A few years back, I was helping B with his Ducati. We talked while we worked. He was going through something, a lot. Deeply heartbreaking family stuff, the kind that doesn't have a clear fix or exit. The kind of things there would never be enough justice for. I could see the weight of it on him. Less bright. Less light.

Then, out of nowhere, in the middle of all that.. He looked up and told me I was one of the best and strongest men he'd ever known. At the time, I believed him about as much as I'd believed J would've forgiven me.

I've spent my whole life more willing to carry debt than take credit.

It's been four days and tomorrow would've been B's 57th birthday. I only just remembered that, in all this senselessness.

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* peer reflections: not medical or therapy advice. *