When I was 13 years old, I made a friend. I am not someone who does so easily, or with great frequency. I don’t remember now how we drifted together, he and I, but we were both outsiders attempting to navigate the deep and dangerous waters of high school. We shared interests in military themed board games and heavy metal music.
He went on to join a band when he was 18. My second girlfriend hated him (and, actually, everybody – it took me some years to see that) and isolated me from him when we were in our twenties. I did not see him for many years, then once at a mutual friend’s wedding, where we were as awkward and strained with one another as we had been when we were thirteen. I heard through the grapevine that he left the band and went to work in a wine store. He was living with a woman who seemed to have got him straightened around.
I left my second girlfriend – who had in the meantime become my first wife – some time after that, but I did not reach out to him. Nor, to be fair, did he to me. But we are all responsible for our own actions in this life. I heard through the grapevine that he had left the girlfriend and was now living in some degree of diminished circumstance in a town near the small one we had grown up in.
Last summer news reached me that he has been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. My wife and I stopped in to visit him on our way through the town where he lives, some two hundred miles from us. He was thin, but cheerful. He had hopes – the doctors had said that it was possible, if the treatment worked, to live with this for some years. We parted as friends again. Not as we had been, but friends nonetheless.
My wife and I visited again earlier this year just as ski season was about to be ended by a pandemic. We spent a gentle afternoon in a pub, drinking sour microbrews and talking. He was on a little break from chemo – they were trying a new one, as the previous ones hadn’t worked well.
I talked with him again recently, and he is, as they say, out of options. I’ve been meaning to go up to see him, but there is always so much to do. Things to maintain, people to talk to, waste to be gotten rid of, things to be improved. There’s writing to do if I am ever to get this hopefully final career off the ground. Writing and editing and planning…
His palliative care nurses have been saying that he may not make it to Christmas. So tomorrow I will put aside all of the other things I have to do and drive two hundred miles to have lunch with him. I will do this as often as I possibly can, given that storms may close the mountain passes and fuel for the truck is pretty steep.
I will do this because the end really is near. Because this, finally, is the reality of being the age that I am: if I don’t do it now, I won’t do it at all.