About seven years ago, I went to an Octoberfest party with some of my friends at an apartment complex on the edge of downtown Fort Worth. I got decently drunk and took an Uber home. When I got home, I got some chicken tenders from a place near me, walked into my apartment, watched the end of a baseball game and nibbled on said tenders, and passed out. When I woke up, about seven hours later, I had word that one of my best friends from college had passed away overnight.
Here’s what I wrote at the time.
Post-college male relationships are weird. If you end up near each other physically, or in similar industries, or with kids the same age, or with wives who know each other/are friends, you can keep it going for 20+ years pretty strong. If not, it’s hard. I’ve been out of college about 21 years now. (Wow.) I’ve had periods of 8–12 strong friends from then, and I’ve had periods of 1–2. Nowadays it’s closer to the lower side. Some of that I’m sure is on me; some is on how life plays out for people with proximity and kids and work and other commitments.
When my friend passed away in 2017, I had an active text relationship with him, but by “active” I mean sometimes once/twice a month, if that. I didn’t know everything he was going through. He died of medical complications/causes, so nothing severe or drastic. When I went to the funeral, because our friend was 37, a few people initially asked whether it was something drastic, like suicide or what have you. (Again, it was not.)
But, at the time, I had just gotten divorced. I had met my current wife by then, but we hadn’t gone on dates or anything. That summer of 2017, my life was a little “spiral-y.” I had a few rough nights in there, absolutely. There were a few times I probably made some unsafe decisions about where I was, who I was with, what I was doing, etc.
So on that flight to his funeral, I kept thinking to myself:
“What if it should have been me?”
That's a tough way to think, because life — and with it, the timing of death — is completely random and scatter shot. You’d like to think everyone gets to 94 and passes away quietly, surrounded by loved ones and confident in their legacy and what they accomplished as a physical being, but that’s just not the case for most people. This shit (life, and with it death) is hard.
Well, on Monday morning I found out another college friend died.
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