Grief
Today’s column is free to all. Please consider becoming a subscriber to this page.
I lost a good friend about a month ago. I still think of Joe DelRosso often.
I wrote about him once. I feel the need to do so again. I’ll try not to repeat myself.
Grief manifest itself in so many ways. It hits me at random times. There’s parts of me that still expects to see him walking into the room. I still raise a glass to him when my lips are dry. I still sing one for him each time I play. That’s the closest I get to praying.
I can move on for a time, and get on with the business of getting on. A few days. Things feel normal. And then they don’t. Missing someone is like having an itch you can’t quite reach. In time my memories of him will bring only smiles. For now, there’s still some lumps mixed in. I hope he can’t see this part. I feel like he’d be embarrassed.
As we get older friends tend to fall away. Time and distance and maybe just running out of things to say. The bonds we’ve managed to forge and hold onto into our 50s tend to be the strongest ones. They stay. Everybody knows what’s what and who’s who. Nobody has any time to waste anymore. There’s no more agendas. Nobody is going to suffer fools any longer. Our circles might be small, but they are now tightly drawn. All that’s left is quality. But when somebody from that circle is gone, they don’t get replaced. There’s only so many lights in each world. As they are extinguished, things just grow dimmer. That’s as good a definition of grief as I can come up with.
Joe was inside that circle. It could be a week or a month…..and we’d just pick up where we left off. Nothing was ever forced. I never once was not happy to see him. There was never a time when he walking into a room didn’t make that room a more comfortable place to be. I believe he charmed everyone who ever met him.
Joe never made loud noises, so you might not even know he was in the room for a while. When he did speak it was in a near whisper, so you had to pull yourself in to not miss anything. He never talked shit about anyone. He never complained about what he was going through. He wanted to know how you were doing. If you were frazzled or pissed off or exhausted and perched on the proverbial ledge, Joe could talk you off it in 30 seconds. I’m not sure he was even aware he was doing it. He wore empathy the way others might strap on a guitar. He called attention to himself by never calling attention to himself. Somehow, at 5 feet and not much else, he was always the tallest guy in the room.
We don’t grieve for the departed. They’re not here anymore. We grieve for ourselves. We grieve for the things we should have said but didn’t.
There’s a saying about books. We love to buy them because we believe we're buying the time to read them. Friendship is the same. We grieve for the time we thought we’d have.
I should have reached out to Joe when he was alive as often as I think about him now that he’s gone. But there was always tomorrows for that. Next week or next month. I would never have said goodbye to Joe. Ever. There was never a time when I didn’t think I’d see him again. No matter what the doctors said. There would always be one more day. One more song. One more Miller High Life bottle.
It’s folly to think this way, of course. Maybe it’s a guy thing. Some sort of bro-defense mechanism we build around ourselves. Guys are dumb. The evidence is all around you.
So yea. This was on my mind today. His family. His feast of friends. All those nights we spent playing music and clinking our glasses and saying “I’ll see you soon”. We take the best things in our life for granted. We exert way too much effort trying to get the shit off our shoes. We waste so much time, forgetting that it’s the time itself that’s so precious.
Hopefully we can all gather soon. We can bring out the guitars and keep the bartenders busy at the same time. I think Joe would like that. Maybe all the things we didn’t get a chance to tell Joe, we can share with each other.
What a night that would be.
In a bit….
—tf