When Your Oldest and Bestest Friend Dies
A Poem and a Picture
When your oldest and bestest friend dies, it’s a strange thing
to walk around in public, going about your day
with the weird misplaced floating bumping
knowledge that they’re gone
and no one seems to stop and care
or listen to what you’re not saying or look at you
with anything but blank uncomprehending gazes.
Are you invisible now in your grief? Was a cloak
put on? Did you utter a magic spell?
No, it’s just isolation in emotion, just like your
friend had, just like they felt perhaps while
dying alone
even in company, holding hands and chanting
remembrances or yea though I walk through the
valley of the shadow of death, we all die alone.
My friend alone
in the end parting ways, we parted ways before
but never minded the distance, the geography,
the relationships, the retelling, the out of touch
never falling out of touch.
Your oldest and bestest friend does not fall out
of touch.
They knew you before you became this.
This you you’re performing now.
They know your story down to the child’s blink
and the commiserated dug up dusty memory.
Oh shit, do you remember that?
Yes, I remember. I remember it all.
Or if I don’t, my friend does,
and sometimes our memories get confused
and intertwined with each other and we don’t remember
who it was that passed out on the airplane mixing
gummies and Dramamine, or
who it was that let that Geoff guy lick their boob.
But when your oldest and bestest friend dies
it’s like the game has ended and it’s time to
put the pieces away.
Loser puts the game away, we used to always say,
when shaming children was part of the deal.
Yes, I’ll put the game away.
My oldest and bestest friend and I were relentlessly
tidy.
We lent order to our swirling motherloaded universe
trying always to please the unpleasable,
defuse the explosion, sneak by unnoticed,
but when you’re all grownup
you might want to be noticed.
You might want someone to say hey I’m sorry your
friend died.
I’m sorry the keeper of your history, stories and
secrets is buried when you didn’t want that
stuff buried. I’m sorry
that’s the way the world works
when your oldest and bestest friend dies.
It’s like you’re a stranger again
in a strange land
where the phone won’t be ringing
and you have to sing your campfire songs
all by yourself
because there is no campfire and
there is no sleepover and
there is no coming of age
because you are aged, you’ve arrived.
But, of course, you’re really nowhere at all
just an invisible emperor’s outfit
and a breather user abuser of the free oxygen cycling
through the ever-changing and ever-constant
atmosphere of life, death and dichotomous thinking.
When your oldest and bestest friend dies,
you feel you’re coming of age again
and this last bit, this transformation, time and
trepidacious next step
is all yours and God’s,
the reason you ever found, had and held
your oldest and bestest friend in the first place.
A gift from God every second of all those decades.
Earthly matter only animated
by spirit, by love.
When your oldest and bestest friend dies,
you see the gift that you have
and you just want to share it.
