I met her in the 6th grade. I was quiet, self-conscious, awkward and introverted. Painfully aware of the changes my body had begun going through and finding nearly all of them appalling and mortifying. J was my polar opposite. She was comfortable in her own skin and completely at ease with people. She had a quick wit and a winning smile. We became fast friends.
In the next six years, we were practically inseparable, sharing secrets about boys and life, sorrows and fears, shits and giggles. We became the best of friends and thought we would be our entire lives. But right around graduation, J found a new best friend to take my place; alcohol. Her new friend listened to her problems much more intently than I ever could and understood and eased her pain much better than I ever did. Her new best friend was also much more fun that I was. Her new friend made her laugh and smoothed out the extremely rough edges of her life in ways no other friend could. From that point on, she lived her life from the inside of a bottle and from that point on, I lost my best friend.
Yesterday she died and I’ll miss the friend I used to have.
J and I shared much in those six short years. Good times always interlaced with the bad. Separating the two is impossible. I suspected early on that there was some mental or emotional disorder going on. As the old saying goes, "If Mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy." This rang all too true for anyone that was ever close with J. If one spent any time with her, they’d soon find out that the mood of any given time spent with J was dictated solely by her mood. This made things difficult, to say the least.
When she was "up", she was charming, flirtatious, warm, intelligent, and unbelievably funny, with a remarkably quick wit. It wasn’t until further into our friendship that her wit would turn mean spirited, mordant, and darkly sardonic. When J’s mood was "down", she would pull you into the depths of hell with her, voluntarily or involuntarily. I knew something was wrong, but I didn’t know what and I didn’t know how to help her. Over the years, this became more and more difficult because, as I said above, the closer you were with J, the more likely you were to become a casualty in her struggle to find something salvageable within herself; at some point we all got caught in the crossfire between J and herself.
Close to or not long after graduation, I severed my ties with J. I could no longer tolerate her verbal cruelty when she was down. As I said, she’d discovered a new friend who seemed to understand her much better than any of her human friends could. I was never a fan of alcohol. I’d seen and lived the devastating effects it had in my parents’ home and saw, firsthand, how sometimes it made people happy, and in seconds turn them into a monster, spewing bile and shredding the dignity of anyone it targeted. I knew early on that alcohol would never become my friend because, in my life, it was nothing more than a liar.
In the years after I turned my back on my friendship with J, stories would filter around town about her antics while drunk. Nearly all of them, horribly embarrassing tales of J, juiced up and sloppy, and it made me sad for her. I desperately wanted to help her, but how does one help someone who doesn’t want help? How does one save another from their own life? One doesn’t.
I ran into J only once since that time. It was 19 years ago. Our children went to the same school and we happened to be picking them up at the same time after an after-school event. J was drunk and I was embarrassed for her. She clumsily hugged me and with tears in her eyes lamented our lost friendship, telling me I’d always be her best friend. My heart broke for her that she’d even thought about me after all the time that had passed between us. I wanted to tell her that maybe we could pick up where we’d left off, but I knew that wasn’t possible. I knew I couldn’t sit back, watch and enable J while she slowly committed suicide, drink by drink. Her best friend was now a part of who she was. She couldn’t survive without it and it tore me apart to see the shadow of the friend I once shared my life and my heart with. Her new best friend was now slowly killing her.
Late last year, news was brought to me that J was having circulation problems in one of her legs and that she’d had a vein replaced. The replacement vein became infected and gangrene set it. By the time she saw the doctor, two of her toes were black. Before Christmas, the only alternative to dying was amputating her leg. I was told that things had gone well and that J had done well adapting to her prostheses, so well in fact, that she’d been released early from her rehabilitation.
Well, as is the case so often with idle talk, nothing could’ve been further from the truth. J wasn’t released early, J never attended rehab at all. Her friend was calling her, telling her that only it could help and her addiction to it was too strong to deny. When she was taken back to the hospital nearly three and a half weeks ago, she weighed a mere 80 pounds. The stump that was once her leg hadn’t healed and was still raw and oozing. Her blood was infected with several types of staph and the doctors agreed that chances were slim that they could save her life. On March 20th, while hospitalized, she suffered a heart attack and fell into a coma. The following day, her brain scan came back showing no activity and she was removed from life support, as per her request. The next day, she began having seizures.
Her poor abused body hung onto life until yesterday morning. And I’m struggling. Far too many will remember J as a drunk; a wasted life. While she was struggling to part this life, talk had already began filtering through the community grapevine, "Don’t you think things would be better now if J would have led a better life?"
My answer is this: It’s not for me to say and I refused to stand in judgment. I’m just like everyone else, J included, struggling to find my way in this life, trying to do as little damage as I can along the way. And I’ll miss my friend. The friend I met back in the 6th grade. The friend who was an amazing gymnast and dancer, the friend who was remarkably intelligent and dreamed of working with wildlife in some degree because of her love of animals, the friend who could make me laugh at the drop of a hat, the friend whose smile would light up the room.
I miss you, J. You lived hard and you died hard. I hope you found the peace you so desperately sought in this life, the peace that so eluded you. Be well, my old friend.©