dead friends

Been about a year since the passing of both my grandmother and my best friend Matthew.  I’ve been thinking about Matt a lot lately, because Scout summer camp is coming soon, and one of my fondest and clearest memories from when I was a kid (I have mild brain damage, so my memory is wobbly at best) is sitting on the steps of the canteen at Katahdin Scout Reservation, splitting a pint of Ben & Jerry’s Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough (Matthew’s favorite flavor, and mine until it was unseated by Phish Food) and watching the world go by.

Matthew was my best friend in every way possible – we had no shame or secrets from each other, we frequently completed each other’s thoughts, and we both stayed sane through the vagaries of adolescence in rural Maine by venting our frustrations and puzzlements at each other.  He was the brother I never had.

He turned me on to David Lynch films, I turned him on to a few genres of music.  We would stay up until the thin hours of the morning sending endless Links to their doom in search of the elusive Princess Zelda.  We shared everything.

I miss him.  My personal faith, which I don’t talk a whole lot about and doesn’t really fit 100% with most established religions, is comforting – sort of a cafeteria Hinduism – because I know (as much as it is possible to know such a thing) that he is a part of you and me and everything and that we are all part of him.  It still doesn’t make me miss him less, though, or wish less that I could call him up.

I made the common and terrible mistake of letting contact slip between us – we hadn’t talked in a while when I heard he had passed.  I don’t believe in regret, but I definitely wish that I hadn’t let contact go by the wayside.  It wouldn’t have changed anything, but.

Treasure your life.  Treasure the lives and love of those around you.  Recognize and hold sacred the relationships – spoken or otherwise – you have with others.  To do otherwise is the only real blasphemy, the only truly mortal sin.