cw: death, cancer, grief

I lost one of my closest friends to cancer last week. Our friendship did not really exist in the context of a group, like many of our friendship do, and I haven’t known who to comfortably talk to about how I feel about this loss.

So on the off chance you find a chance to read this blog post in Heaven in between check-ins on your loved ones, here’s everything I’ve been wanting to say since you passed. It doesn’t feel real that you’re gone. I miss you so much.

Five years ago, I was having a conversation in the kitchen with a coworker about something really inane, like what the least popular items in Chex Mix are. (Pretzels.) You were a friendly face in the room chuckling at what must have been my loud enthusiasm on the subject, and I was eager to make more friends at my new company, so I took a gamble that you were maybe as friendly as you looked and shouted you into the conversation, “Right???” Luckily for me, you were somehow even friendlier than I thought, and you good-natured-ly joined the conversation. I didn’t even know your name until I looked you up on the office seating chart, and I checked if you preferred being called by your last name, as everyone else did, or by your first name, because I know we don’t always prefer our nicknames. You said you preferred your first name, and I’ve honored that choice since in spite of the confusion from our coworkers.

I think a lot about how much you could always make me laugh, and how much I made you laugh. You learned early on that I startle very easily from the many times you tried to chat with me at my desk while I had headphones on and would jump 5 feet into the air, and it cracked you up every time. When I’d catch my breath, I also would be laughing right there with you, leading to some confused looks from my deskmates and your division president as she walked past the two of us cackling in the middle of the workday. Something that really sticks with me is the many attempts you made to not startle me. Stomping as you walked up behind me in the hopes I would hear you coming. Slowly entering my line of sight from behind the corner and behind the computer monitors in front of me. Sending me a message to alert me of your impending arrival. I’m grateful for all the ways you tried to keep me from yelping in the middle of our open floorplan office, and for the many visits you paid me while we shared an office space to brighten my day.

Video games became something we spent a lot of time bonding over. We often played together on Friday afternoons on the office Switch with our dedicated (if unproductive-after-3pm-on-Fridays) crew. After the office was closed in March 2020, you helped me move our video game gatherings to be virtual ones, and I was glad to still be able to laugh with you playing Overcooked and MarioKart and Smash. You even convinced me to start streaming, and I went from pointing my phone at the TV during a Discord call so you could laugh at my bewilderment while I played Kingdom Hearts to getting a capture card so that I actually started streaming KOTOR and God of War to Twitch. Even though I often wondered why I bothered broadcasting to the public when the only audience I really cared to stream for was you, it was a relief to know you enjoyed being able to watch my gameplay when you weren’t able to catch it live. I loved the thought of you watching along during your sleepless evenings with your babies, that me bumbling along at video games could bring you any modicum of joy or comfort during those difficult nights holding your little ones. It’s become a bit of a cliché for those that the deceased leave behind to have regrets, but I do regret not being able to stream more for you after I got pregnant, and especially after you got diagnosed with cancer. It’s one of my biggest regrets now.

You were so excited to welcome me to parenthood, and I loved that this was yet another thing we could share and talk about. I appreciated your insights as a father, since many of my parent friends are moms. You have two amazing toddlers who I have been able to see grow up in your photo and video updates, and I was excited to learn what I could expect — the highs and the lows — in my own parenting journey from you. In fact, I often went to you to get a male perspective on things. Even though your responses never surprised me, it was always helpful to get that confirmation. I could ask you if you agreed that a male celebrity was gorgeous (yes, James Marsden is beautiful), if you considered a TV show plotline to be as sexist as I did (unfortunately almost always yes), if you thought I handled a situation with another male friend correctly (sometimes).

You and I also bonded over simply our shared nerdiness. You are one of my most often-texted friends, and definitely the man I text most regularly after my husband, thanks to our conversations about everything from Star Wars to Marvel to anime to video games and more. The last thing I texted you was a movie trailer, the day you passed on before I knew. The last thing you responded to was about the Suicide Squad anime. The last thing you reacted to on Instagram DMs was a video of a Stormtrooper balloon terrorizing the streets.

The pain of your loss felt fresh again when my brother told me there was a new Marvel trailer and I immediately wanted to talk to you about it but couldn’t. I know it’ll hurt anew many more times in my life, like when I finally put my baby in the gift you kindly sent, when Kingdom Hearts 4 is finally released, when a new season of Demon Slayer comes out, when I finally play Final Fantasy VII and do a cosplay from the game. You’ve become such a fixture in my life by fully accepting and so earnestly encouraging me being myself. There was a solace in knowing that when we didn’t quite feel like annoying our respective spouses about fandoms they knew too little about, we could go to our phones and find an enthusiastic person ready to dive in on the other end. I’m sure our spouses remain grateful and blissfully unaware of how often they were spared these nerd dumps.

I look back now on our interactions during the weeks following your surgery, the weeks that you knew you weren’t getting better, the weeks you were waiting to start a treatment that would allow you to be able to put this scary and hard and painful and terrible time behind you and focus on your two beautiful children whose photos I always loved seeing in your updates. I wish I had been a better friend to you during that time, even though I know that constantly inquiring after your health would not have been being a better friend, but I hope our friendship gave you even a fraction of the joy and comfort that it gave me. I want to say that I wish I knew you were dying while I sent you frivolous memes and asked you questions about the Gladiator movie, but you probably understood it was best that I didn’t know. I think also about the weeks before and after your surgery, when I was going through a hard postpartum adjustment, and you told me you felt guilty for… something I can’t even imagine what. For not reading my mind and being overly present to the point of pushy while I drowned in postpartum hormones and the reality of newborn life? While you were fighting for your literal life? And the weeks before I found out that you had cancer, while I was struggling with pregnancy and leaving the city I loved and moving across state lines. I hate the thought that you ever felt an ounce of guilt that your huge life events made you feel that you didn’t give me enough attention during mine.

It’s weird to think about how much I learned about you from your obituary. There’s a joke here about male friendships but I didn’t know your middle name before I read it. I didn’t know that you loved writing, and I lament that I never got to read your words outside of some text messages that, looking back, honestly can be called poetry. I didn’t know that you love Billy Joel, so now I cry listening to “Piano Man”, the song your family chose for your obituary website. At the same time, I think about the things I know that are not in your obituary. That you hated parades. That you spent your last weeks not only fighting cancer but fighting a video game boss on the hardest difficulty because you insisted on achieving Platinum. That you could sing the Attack on Titan theme song in Japanese.

I realized the other day that we have perhaps no photos together. There is no physical evidence left behind of our friendship, despite the fact that ours was one forged in person. I have the anime costume you gifted me after I had my baby, that you’ll never get to see worn. In the ephemeral digital world, I have moments in saved Twitch streams where I respond to things you said to me in chat. I have memes we sent each other on Instagram. I have saved voice memos and live photos and videos and gifs among years of text messages. And because our friendship doesn’t exist in the context of a friend group, our inside jokes and our memories are exclusively ours. I don’t even know how many people know that we were friends.

But I have our memories and I cherish them deeply. Discussing “da business” at work. Finishing the lyrics when one of us started singing/texting “Simple and Clean”. Yelling at our colleague for being too good at Towerfall. Watching incredulously as Kraven groaned “Harder…” in Spider-Man 2. Seeing you slowly emerging from below a computer monitor in my line of sight in the hopes that I wouldn’t be startled.

I’ve found myself looking at the photos and videos of your beautiful children a lot these past 4 days, and replaying the voice memos you’ve sent me over the years. I don’t know if I’ll ever stop crying about losing you, or thinking about the profundity of your family’s loss when I think of your wife and your daughter and your son. I think about them watching videos of you and your laughter. I think about them listening to your voice. I think about how your children are so young that they likely won’t have memories of you that don’t come from these videos and photos and voice recordings, but I’m grateful that they’ll know your face and your voice from those. I wish I could have met them under happier circumstances, the people you dedicated your life to who made you so so happy. I wanted our families to grow together, but since I never got to meet them while you were here, I’ll likely not get to meet them as they grow up and it devastates me thinking about how you won’t get to meet my family or see it grow either. I’m sorry I couldn’t make the trek to your home when you invited me 2 years ago. The long trip there seems so trivial now, especially as I take the long trip home from your funeral, where I was lucky enough to see how many people you left behind who love you so much.

I don’t tell friends this enough, and especially not my male friends, but I love you. You felt like family to me. I am so thankful that an office friend became such a huge part of my life, that I can credit you for so many smiles and laughs during some of the hardest years our world has encountered, that I have the privilege of having known a friend so wonderful that his departure leaves such a gaping hole in my days. I will always, always, always be so grateful that you were so kind to me that day I roped you into an inane office lunchroom conversation and for all of your kindness in the years since. I could never repay you for the joy you have brought to my life over the past 5 years, and I will never not grieve the years of joy we were supposed to share that were taken away.

Thank you so much. Rest in peace, my dear friend. I love you and I miss you and I always will.