Preface: I recently sent this piece of writing to the man it was originally written for and about, hoping he would like it, asking him if it was OK for me to post it here. He wrote back giving me his permission, telling me it had made him cry. The next day I opened my inbox to an email from his father, whom I’ve never met, thanking me for writing what I did and sending it to his son, who had then sent it on to him.
“My son forwarded to me the nice things you wrote about him…Your thoughts made a dad very proud of his son” is maybe the best compliment I’ve ever received as a direct result of my writing.
All of that to say: If you’ve written something for someone, about someone, in memory of someone, share it!
With them if you can, or with those who love them. I can guarantee you’re going to make their day when you do. Unless maybe what you wrote about them is a biting diatribe. Maybe keep that to yourself.
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He was the first adult male friend of mine who didn’t talk in circles and called me beautiful and worthy on a regular basis. He was also the first mental health professional who had ever befriended me. He was hilarious and outgoing. Friends with everyone and yet he always seemed to walk alone. I would have spent all day with him, every day. I wasn’t the only one.
He was also the first relationship I ever had with a male friend that would never turn even slightly sexually tense. He was attracted to men, and had been all his life. The son of an evangelical minister, his sexual and personal freedom had been hard-wrought, and hard-won. He still maintained a working familial relationship with most of his family members, though sometimes he spoke of them the way you might speak of a pebble you’ve been forced to carry around in your pocket, something familiar and light enough, but slightly annoying, inescapable.
He was bright, intellectually razor-sharp, and deep-feeling, perpetually and intentionally burdened by the weight of his own decisions, and the weight of those he listened to for a living. I never paid him to sit in front of me, although I could have for the invaluable advice he bestowed upon me almost accidentally whenever we spoke.
To this day he remains the most honest person I have ever met. The type of honest that routinely knocks you into your own subconscious when you’re not paying attention, while you’re sitting there laughing with him, amused and engaged and merely attempting to keep up with his wit and verbal banter.
When I miscarried and was subsequently dumped by a man who the week prior had proposed marriage, he didn’t hesitate to warmly embrace me, and then moments later offered to drive to Montana to vandalize his house. I laughed through hot tears, my face buried in his shoulder, my mascara splashing quietly from my eyelashes to his dress shirt. I knew he meant it. I knew he would have driven the three-and-a-half hours across two mountain passes just to spray paint profane and holy things on the weathered sides of walls that weren’t his. Because within those walls something that belonged to him–something he understood and appreciated and loved–had been soiled. A friendship, and a woman who was once strong and self-assured, now lying in shattered pieces on an embarrassingly dirty floor.
He saw a portrait of who he wanted me to be, and saw the mess of paint I had allowed myself to be reduced to, and he never for a moment judged me on either canvas. I don’t know how he did that, how he managed to be so completely and consistently unbiased. I just know I am forever grateful for his color blindness, for his inability to see me for the wreck I was. He saw me shattered, yes, but he always believed I would rise.
I believed because he did. And for awhile that was enough.
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*Post title from T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, and “Little Gidding” specifically.