“It seems fitting that you view Eight is Enough as a form of erotica,” Best Friend recently joked after I mentioned that Nancy, Dianne Kay’s character, attracted saucier subplots — and occasionally wardrobes — in season three. We moved on to other topics and a week later, he was gone.
As you probably deduced from what I wrote yesterday, his death wasn’t entirely unexpected. In a largely epistolary friendship that spanned more than 25 years, we’d white-knuckled our way through previous mental health crises. His depression was unyielding and I knew how depleting it was sometimes for him to merely exist.
When he suddenly went silent, I entertained several scenarios. Perhaps he needed time alone, as I had for a good chunk of 2014, but he typically announced when he was going off-grid. Maybe he’d checked himself into an inpatient facility, a treatment option he’d rejected in the past and now openly considered. He might’ve been placed on a psych hold against his will, which turned into a longer hospitalization.
Death was a possibility, of course, but I’d searched twice for an obituary and found nothing. That changed yesterday morning, when it showed up on a delay. He died not long after our last exchange, which was about tennis, and was already buried by the time I sent him my last audio message, an ode to his friendship that began, “Joseph [Middle Name], did you ever know that you’re my hero? You’re everything I wish I could be.”*
Just a few short hours before Ex ended our relationship, I’d penned a journal entry with an earnest resolution — it was New Year’s Day — to show her every day just how much I loved her. That time-stamped note is digitally archived and serves as an enduring reminder that you never know what tomorrow will bring. Alongside it now, in the pantheon of my most oblivious and poorly timed gestures, is that final voice memo to Best Friend.
It was nothing out of the ordinary: I recapped some current events and apologized for how busy I’d been with medical appointments. As we often did in trying times, I told him how much he meant to me. It ended with, “You remain the wind beneath my wings and I don’t want you to think I take your friendship for granted. I hope you’re doing well, though I suspect you’ll remain a man of mystery. That’s all I have to say for now. Sorry for rambling. I love you like a sister.”**
His death, while not surprising, is still an extraordinary shock to the system. It will take a long time to adjust to this new reality and shake off the overwhelming feeling that I don’t want to live in a world without him. Of all the losses I’ve mourned in the decades we knew each other — Felix in his original form; Papa; my former partner’s sanity; the deaths of my grandmas; painful goodbyes to two dogs and four cats — it’s Joe’s that feels the most final and leaves me the loneliest.
Despite everything I’ve just written, and everything still to write, I don’t want to discuss this tragedy with other people right now; I only want to discuss it with him. Absent the mystical ability to do so — neither of us believe(d) in an afterlife — I will read his favorite poets and authors and watch his favorite films and find solace in the music that reminds me of him, beginning with “Do You Realize??”, which was hopefully played at the last Flaming Lips show he attended.
* He was very private and I’d be shocked if his family knew anything about our friendship. Nevertheless, I contacted his brother to extend my condolences, which he graciously accepted.
** I doubt any youngsters will read this, but if they do, that was a stupid joke. When I was in middle school it was common for girls who wrote in pink and purple ink and dotted their ‘i’s with hearts to scrawl “LYLAS” in everyone’s yearbooks. It stood for ‘love you like a sister.’ You’ll be shocked to learn that neither Joe nor I were LYLAS girls.