gone

My friend Dave was taken off life-support late Friday afternoon and died that evening around 5:30pm.

It’s a peculiar feeling to know that someone isn’t in existence anymore. It’s not like a breakup where they are still on the earth, but you just aren’t in touch. Instead, the person you once knew doesn’t exist. There is no possibility of running into them at a party or randomly at a cafe in a couple of years.

I have that feeling with my dad still. Less, but it’s there.
I often have a desire to call him, but there is nowhere to call, no search string on Google to look, no dark bar to scan.

Gone. Completely and utterly gone.

My pop used to call that unexplainable feeling the “existential heebie jeebies.”
It’s uncomfortable and ungraspable. There is nothing to hold on to.
That’s what I am experiencing.
And I do not like it.

dammnit

I just found out that a very close friend of mine shot himself in the head yesterday.
He is in ICU and there is nothing I can do; I’m not family, I’m just a friend who lives 70 miles away.

He lost his job the other day.
We talked about it. I reminded him that everything changes.
The trick is to let yourself be down for a reasonable period of time, then brush yourself off, get back up and go do what you need to do.
It’s just a job.

Dammit.
What’d you go and do a dumbass thing like that?

Why didn’t I hug you more when I last saw you?

r.i.p.

On the evening of April 8, 2006 I got a call from my grandma that my dad was in the hospital. Because it was late in the evening, I had to wait until the next morning to catch a flight to Brooklyn, NY. Upon minutes of my arrival at my grandma’s house, we got the call from the hospital that my dad had died.

He and I used to sing this song together, off-key and loudly.

I miss him so much.