On a wave of anger, I return.

I am angry tonight.  I don’t do angry very often, but I’m certainly doing it right now.  Why am I angry, that’s the question that I can almost painfully hear absolutely no one on the internet asking?  That’s easy.  My friend died this morning.

Let me say that again really quickly – my friend died this morning.  He was a good guy.  He was silly when it was required and grave when needed.  He could laugh with you, cry with you, and encourage you to drunkenly teabag a mutual friend when all three of you were blitzed during a hurricane party.  That last one, no matter what Ladytoa might tell you, is an important skill to have and a valuable trait in any human being (or dog.  Not cats, though.  Never trust a cat with testicles) that you might have the privilege of calling a friend.

How, exactly, did my friend die?  I’m not sure yet – it was fairly sudden and more information will come out when the medical examiner does his/her thing.  At that time, I suspect that we’ll find out that he got himself sick; while he was a great person he wasn’t always very good at taking care of himself.  I suspect we’ll find out that he had pneumonia and decided it was just a cold or that he had a heart attack a few days ago and was too stubborn to admit that he needed help.

There are a lot of questions that I don’t have an answer to quite yet and a lot of things that will be in flux probably for weeks into the future.  You know what I do know, though?  I know who I’m mad at and I know why.

Who am I mad at?  Damned near everyone, thank you for asking. 

I’m mad at my friend.  He was intelligent, he was wise – he was far too worldly to take as bad care of himself as he did.  While I’m not going to stand here on my invisible internet soapbox and blame a dead man, I will tell say that, Buddy, you didn’t do yourself any favors.  The last time I saw him face to face was just a little bit before he moved halfway across the country from me.  I was genuinely afraid that our friendship was about to end because I took him out for coffee (people like me do that sometimes.  We have coffee.  We go out in public where no one feels threatened and then we hash some shit out).  I bought him a ridiculously priced drink at our local Starbucks and I said to my very good friend, “Friend – I am concerned about you.  I love you and you don’t treat yourself, physically or mentally, as well as you deserve and someday soon you won’t bounce back from that.”

On April the 11^th, 2013 the world proved that it had a harder surface than my friend and his journey came to a stop.  I spoke to him yesterday – we BSed a little bit about video games and then said our good-byes.  I expected to talk to him again on Saturday.  He didn’t say anything about serious illness or hospital time.  He didn’t say anything about anything serious.  Just video games for 5 minutes and then he was gone.  I didn’t get to say a proper good bye.

On whom else does my ire fall?  Well, I’m glad you’re curious because I’ve got a million of them.  But there’s two, in particular that I’d like to hit on now.  Don’t worry, gentle reader, I’m not going to rail against the cosmic injustice of it all and beat my breast to blame Deity in any form or random cosmological events.  Those are beyond the scope of this blog, and quite frankly, I don’t get angry at entropy or Deity.  If one or both of those things was involved, well, there’s either a bigger picture that I’m not really qualified to speak to or it was all completely unrelated to any causal instance and so there is nothing to be upset over.  There – no being mad at God.  You religious types can file that away in the great tallying book as a plus sign in the 

Markatoa chapter.  One of the few, but it’s there.

I’m mad – furious, even.  Possibly blood boilingly bellicose (I warned you of my love of alliteration.  I’ll make it fit even when it doesn’t want to.  With enough patience and lubricant any sentence can be made to have alliterative elements) when it comes to his Wife.  I know how awful that makes me sound.  It’s ok, you don’t have to tell me.  And you know what?  I don’t care because it’s true.  There’s a reason when your buddy starts dating a new girl, or your sister finds herself a mate that you say to them “you take care of him/her/it.” And the reason isn’t because you like hearing yourself talk – usually- it’s because once two people get together like that they become, in many respects, each other’s responsibility.  Not solely, of course, but it happens.  I expect that if I’m acting like a moron that Ladytoa will remind me of it (and she does.  It’s her job, after all).  When Ladytoa says things like “I don’t want to take my medication today because I’m a willful bitch” I’m there to put her in line. (Note: Ladytoa does not refuse to take medication.  She is sometimes a willful bitch, but I dig that about her) 

In fact,  to even further digress, not too long ago when Ladytoa and I were putting together our move I was being a stubborn manshaped lump.  I had been sick for a couple of days and said “Meh- it’s just a cold, I’ll kick it soon.”  My loving wife gave it two days; when I still had a fever that she could feel from the other side of the bed (apparently not a hyperbole) she trickily drove me to a walk-in medical clinic and made me see someone.  Four prescriptions later it turns out I had the flu, and a respiratory infection and it could have gotten much worse if I let it go longer.  I was ready to let it happen, I thought I’d be fine.  But Ladytoa essentially gave me the “if you won’t  do it for yourself, do it for me” moment and it ended up having a vastly positive effect. 

And, sometimes, that’s what you gorram do.  You remind your spouse/significant other that there are other people than themselves to consider and that they owe it to themselves and their families to be as well as it’s possible for them to be.

Before I go completely off track, let me wander through the tulips back to being mad at the FriendWife.  She failed at the above duty.  The one of keeping people grounded and connected to the world.  The one of making sure that they take care of themselves.  She was never great about it – my friend and his wife in many ways enabled in each other their worst impulses and character traits.  I saw it and had spoken with both of them individually about it.  They made excuses for their own failures and each other’s.  It’s something I’m intimately familiar with as my own ex-wife and I had the same tendency.  Nothing was our fault – it was the world, it was that company or this other in-law.  Never us.  What we were doing was fine.  Of course we weren’t fine, but we couldn’t see that; neither of us would allow the other to see it until we split up.  It’s an amazingly hard thing to realize and because of that it was one of the things I mentioned to my friend when he moved away not too long ago.  I wanted to help him and get them the perspective to make a change because it was so obvious that they loved each other deeply.  It was a thing he said he realized and that they were working on together.

I’ll never know for sure, but a bitter little part of my soul expects that they didn’t work on it as hard as they could have.  And though I love her for being a part of my friend’s life - though I will always love and cherish the memory of my friend, for that fact, I think I could hate them both.  At least a little bit.  I’ll help her however I can from this day until the end of days because that’s what my friend would want and what his memory deserves.  I will never, ever mention this out loud, not even in a whisper, for fear that it will open the flood gates and start a real fight – the kind that you never make up from until someone else is on their deathbed.  But that doesn’t change a thing.  I am so mad at her for not doing her job.  She had two jobs.  Take care of him and take care of their children.  She’s failed the one and I hate her for it.

I hate her.

There.  It’s said, and now it can go away.

Who’s last, but hopefully not least?  Well, if you stayed this long you deserve to find out.  It won’t come as a surprise, of course, because so few things do in these days of investigative journalism and mindreading.  Ever since that damned Ambassador G’Kar brought dust onto my station.

Anyway, Babylon 5 reference aside, I’m mad at myself.  There, I told you it wouldn’t come as a surprise.  It’s probably even one of the stages of grief or some other hippy-dippy New Age crap.  I’m mad because my friend moved away and even though I tried to keep in touch via text and email and the occasional phone call it wasn’t enough.  I never really let myself work up the courage to ask my friend how things were going in the “taking better care of yourself” department.  It was such a hard moment to get myself to even bring it up the first time that I assumed, or hoped, or whatever, that he was obviously getting better.

I’m mad at myself because it was incumbent upon me, as a friend, to really do more to reach out and see how he was doing.  What his situation was like – if he was happy and healthy or if he just even needed to talk.  Sure, I said some things to that effect.  I went through the motions, but I don’t think anything will convince me that I ever went quite far enough.  I let trivialities of conversation and acquaintance lull me into thinking I was doing my job.

Nothing will ever be able to make up for that fact.  Nothing I do for my friend’s family and nothing that I do for those of our friends who are left behind will change the fact that I could have done more.  And not in that idle way that everyone could have done more.  I could have, and I knew that I should have, and I let myself be convinced not to.

Good bye, Friend.  I’ll miss you forever and that’s really the only thing that needed to be said.  I'm glad I got the rest off my chest, though, too.