“You don’t understand, “ he said. “It was my dream and it’s over.”
The drunk bespeckled college boy swayed at my doorway, a tiny Swiss army knife in his hand. To what end, I thought hazily, having been awakened from a deep flannel-clad sleep. I squinched my eyes against the bright hall lights at Jamie the now dreamless fellow student with whom I had gone to the campus movies several weeks prior. We had watched The Right Stuff, a movie about the early space program. At 18, I was purposefully disinterested in the space program and astronauts and frankly Jamie.
“I’m never going to be an astronaut!” He sobbed as he poured himself into my room. “Did you really think that was an option?” I was cranky at being disturbed, my brain awake enough to be logical but not yet capable of tact. “I mean, I can see a couple of obstacles right off the bat” No no no, his sobbing morphing into moans as he slumped over on my bed. “I need to prove to my dad I’m not a loser.” Gentle snores rose up in the dark. I tucked him in and laid myself carefully onto the covers of my absent roommate’s bed and tried to sleep.
Jamie woke up several hours later, disoriented and apologetic. He scurried out the door and my life until a semester later, he happened upon me crying (soberly, I would like to state) over a romantic mess I had gotten myself into. He brought me back to his room and gave me a soda – pop, he called it. “Pop?” I stared at him in distaste. “This is New York, son. Sugary, carbonated beverages are called soda. You’re not in the Mid-West anymore. “ “I’m from Buffalo” he reminded me. Same thing, I had responded. Heartbreak did not dampen my sarcasm by one drop.
Thus began one running gag among many for over 40 years of friendship. That night, he put his arm around my shoulder, listened to my tale of woe, and made me listen to bad ‘80’s music. He walked me to my bus and saw me safely home.
I had found myself a big brother.
In my many iterations of pretend families as a lonely only child, there was always an older brother. My actual parents were responsible adults – they had important things to do!- and no time for playing around. Amuse yourself was the response to my queries about possible interaction. So amuse myself I did with fake parents and siblings like so many characters in a play. Among the siblings there was always the one close in age who tormented me while looking out for my in teasing, conspiratorial manner. A partner in crime, unfailingly male. A brother. I wasn’t fond of girls my own age; besides boys were supposed to protect you.
This was a notion that caused me no small amount of pain in the future. But never with Jamie.
Over the subsequent years we remained in close contact as friends. He married. I married. We both divorced, his more acrimonious than mine. We raised our children, struggled through their teenaged heartbreaks, struggled through our own. In later years, he remarried and found a measure of joy in his new family. Through all that we grew as friends and as people. He came for Thanksgiving to my home, I drove 7 hours each way to western New York when he was hospitalized with a rare spinal infection. The man was a medical marvel, suffering multiple surgeries, bouts of pneumonia, bronchitis, varied infections. If someone sneezed in Boston, we joked, he would catch a cold in Buffalo.
When therefore he left working at 60 on disability, it was no surprise. His weight impacted his mobility; his joints unable to bear the pressure began to crumble. He was waiting on knee surgery when a routine colonoscopy revealed a mass in his lower intestine. Doctors quickly scheduled surgery.
“I’m scared,” he confessed in a bourbon-laced late-night text. “I have a bad feeling about all this.” Stop being such an old woman, I chastised with my characteristic sarcasm masking my own concern. You’re going to be fine and you won’t be alone.
He wasn’t fine. After the surgery,which showed that he didn’t have cancer, he developed an infection and died having never regained consciousness. He also wasn’t alone; his wife and grown daughter stayed with him. But he died before I could get there; he died before I could say good-bye.
I know there were 43 years of hellos and this one last good-bye was not going to define our relationship. I had shown up for him at his loneliest moments when he needed someone. I had shown up when he needed a little sympathy and a little tough love. He showed up for me too. He never criticized my choices even when he disagreed with them. From him I got full-hearted love, never tough. For four decades he was my most consistent cheerleader, not doubting for a moment that I would do something amazing with my life without caring whether I did or did not – because all my doings would never dampen his love for me. Every call he ended with “Love ya, honey.”
In a world where we set conditions on human interaction, where friendship is commoditized and love needs to be Instagram-worthy, Jamie understood the unconditional nature of truel love. He warmed those in his inner circle with his light and let us light his way in return during his darkest moments. We don’t always acknowledge the gift of trust such vulnerability bestows but Jamie was as open with his pain as he was with his pleasure. He showed me what real family meant so that I could grow as a friend and a person. For what time remains to me without him, I hope I can honor his life by loving more unconditionally than I have and thereby keep him alive in some small way.
Love ya, honey.