We Truly Know Every Skeleton in the Other’s Closet...

...and yet love each other, bones and all

Thank you for staying here…

For catching your breath for a moment through the somewhat-dying-art of writing (and reading anything longer than a 2 sentence caption)…

And for caring about the freelance weirdos of the world who sometimes need to survive, but who’s bodies sadly can’t yet fit into the 9 to 5.

Below is an extra long, non-diluted piece about this last week that’s being shared fully here… So thank you for caring about the archives and the uncuts!

Trying to share extra long ones these first couple of days back as extra thanks for your patience lately!

xo

My dead best friend’s dog, that is my alive best friend’s dog… just died.

A long time ago now, I had a friend named Zachary.

He was sort of like my “digital pen pal best friend” whom I told everything, but of whom I’d only met once. We both had our own spins on lung disease, and thus … were technically not “supposed” to be closer than 6 feet apart.

We drove from Virginia to Ohio in one day right after Zachary passed, to try to make good on some of the dreams he’d told me as his own health had declined from Cystic Fibrosis.

I’m going to talk about the sitcom cast of friends more tomorrow because there is no way this is going to be under word count right now (grieve very often isn’t), but the first thing I’m going to ask you to do is leave your condolences to my long time, “soul pair” Jonathan, who lost this pup very abruptly at the start of the week.

“Zachary cared so much about what happened to Vincent… That he’d be the happiest to have known the life he lived with a dad who has Zach’s spirit and spoiled him in the same way.”

We loved and spoiled “Vinnie” too, sure. But once he became attached to Jonathan’s other pups and formed a pack - we felt guiltier and guiltier tearing them apart, taking him from his fenced yard, just to prove some sort of proprietary point. Jon was with us when we first met Vincent in Ohio in the wake of Zachary’s death… and barely parted thereafter.

“You had visitation”, he teased… but really: The focus should be on these men of kindness. This was Zachary and this was Jon. And this was their long distance love story of sorts.

“I want to let him know Vinny is coming up for some snuggles,” Jonathan said in his true selfless, compassionate, Zachary-like way.

The perfect dog Dad for him all this time. The most profound friend to so many. One of the reasons I have “my goodbye sweater” tattooed on one wrist, with Zach’s boomerang on the other.

“At least we know he's got someone waiting for him up there,” he said.

“He's coming home”.

▪️▪️▪️▪️

One of the things I’d like to (hopefully?) pride myself on in this life- in which I mostly feel self loathing and shame towards myself - is that I can count my true best friends on one hand.

That might seem a weird thing to be proud of, but considering I feel that life-long friends require both time and trauma to stand the test… maybe it isn’t.

I have two female identifying best friends whom I’ve been through almost everything with. We’ve had to talk out the hardest things. We’ve had to love each other for who we really are and not who the world thinks we were. And, in many ways, those two friendships can be more intimate than a typical marriage can be marketed to be.

We truly, truly, truly know every skeleton in the other’s closet, and yet love each other, bones and all.

But I only had two best dude friends over the last couple of decades. One I wasn’t supposed to be near (he had Cystic Fibrosis)… and the other, ended up helping me adopt his dog.

“We almost made it 10 years with him,” our afore noted best, Hepburn, said upon reading the news.

She was on the cross country road trip to adopt Zachary’s dog Vincent…and was actually the one to arrange the whole thing in the form of a “funeral” to try to grieve Zach’s passing too. She made plans for us to go see a comedy show while there because he loved stand up (and then died a little herself having to interpret for me the most crude things whilst still being one of the most innocent of humans back then).

“10 years with,” Hep (someone whom Zachary loved watching dance ballet and connected with in his own right, but also the person who helped me say goodbye to him for the last time on the phone) said.

“And… 10 years without him.”

The first for Vincent. The last for Zachary.

She kept his soul alive on our goodbye trip, mile by mile, despite the fact she’d just lost the great love of her life sometime shortly before.

“It’s like an extra deep grief thing,” she said as we worried about Jonathan’s grief over Vincent, “Because [her first love]… and then Zachary was 2 weeks before my grandfather and now we have Robbie [her baby with her now love] who was born on that day and just… What a lifetime ago to remember and grieve.”

I relied: “It’s like the funeral of these few profoundly loving men, who had a butterfly effect overlap somehow and … feel almost like bracelets on our arms.”

“Each one individual. Each one always with us. Each one caring more about other people in their lives - the women in their lives- than themselves. It’s like a last breath we didn’t realize hadn’t been exhaled until like… now.”

Grief never stops breathing.

“I’m proud of us in a weird way,” I said to her though, as we parsed through it all; A road trip that still drives onward.

Time, trauma, distance.

“Because…

F*ck, have we loved people along the way.”

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