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. Carried a weight for most of his life, shaped by the usual stuff; relationships, family and circumstance. We had a blowout back in the day, over a beef with another friend. From where I stood, he picked a side. It was actually never the case, just how my twenties-something consciousness perceived it.

It took a couple years, but we eventually found our way back, a door left 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 a house I hadn’t thought about in years, to a morning I never really left.

I didn’t go on that motorcycle ride much. It was generally a good time, but the social part of it was uncomfortable for me. Slightly introverted but pretending not to be. So 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. My girlfriend was over, she said don't, it's too early. So I didn't.

He was a better rider and I would be behind by a margin. I wouldn't have seen it happen. But close enough to be there within a couple minutes.

Another rider ahead of him drifted into oncoming. J came over the crest and the road wasn't the road anymore. A car, 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.

Mother's Day. 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.

So I went back to the house and called his sister, mom was there, they were all expecting J after the ride.

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. People were filtering through the house, the friends who were always around. I told them.

Nobody said anything, not really. 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. None of us said that out loud.

Hours later, I don't know how many, I went back home and stood in his room. Sat on his bed and looked all around. Got up and closed the door behind me.

I went straight to the garage.

He was a mechanic and machinist by trade, real training, the kind you get in a shop, he went to school to raise his game. He was the guy who got up before everyone else and went out alone into the dark. He was pre-riding the route to check conditions, before anyone got to the gas station meetup. He was that guy, the one looking out for us. If you were stuck on the shoulder somewhere, he was the one who pulled over.

I started prepping his tools that night. Pieces of him to hand out at the memorial ride, to anyone who wanted one.

There was a tension between us for a couple of years before that. I was getting somewhere in mechanical work and he saw what little success I had as unearned. He wasn't wrong. He put in the years, gone to school, done it right.

We never really talked about it again, but it became a wedge. It got frozen exactly where it was.

The memorial ride came first, before the funeral. People spoke, I waited and almost said nothing at all.

His mother was there. In my mind, I was convinced she saw me for the shitbag fraud I believed I was.

I stepped up anyway, I said who I was, and who he'd been to me. Told the crowd we'd grown apart, over something that hadn't even mattered.

Then I told them: don't let the sun go down today without sorting things out, before you can't.

I meant it for all of them. I didn't tell them I was the one it was already too late for.

In between, I went to his mom's house. Brought over some CD liner notes from his music collection, something to go in the casket with him.

She hugged me. Told me how he talked about our friendship, the good times, the way I remembered them too. Then she hugged me again.

It made it worse. I didn't feel like I deserved it.

The funeral was mid-week. Open casket. A, our friend who'd called me that Mother's Day morning, she went up with me.

We saw him. I wailed, hard, gasping for what felt like an eternity. Then I reeled it in.

I knew I had to walk past his mother and the rest of the family on the way out. I composed myself. Walked out past her 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. Out of the blue, 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 the debt than take the credit.

It's been four days and tomorrow would've been B's 57th birthday. I only just remembered that, in all this senselessness. The universe is not fair.

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* peer reflections: not medical or therapy advice. *