More Years Behind Me Than In Front of Me

Today I went to a funeral.

I generally avoid funerals whenever I can, but this was one I couldn't miss. The wife of an old friend—someone I once worked with, spent countless late nights gaming with, drank with, laughed with, and came to think of almost like a brother—passed away from cancer at just 54 years old.

Seeing him again opened a door to a part of my life I hadn't visited in a very long time.

We met more than 25 years ago, when I was helping build CityNet, the City of Tifton's broadband network. Our friendship actually started because he called to tell me our network was configured wrong. Naturally, being an IT guy, my first reaction was basically, Who the hell does this guy think he is? The problem was, he was right.

That phone call eventually became lunch, then a job, and ultimately a friendship. Along with another guy on our team, we spent years building networks, solving problems, playing World of Warcraft until ridiculous hours of the night, drinking too much, and generally having the kind of fun you don't realize you're going to miss until decades have passed.

Life eventually moved on. I left the job. They eventually left too. Careers changed. Families changed. We stopped seeing one another. A friendship that had once been part of my everyday life gradually became an occasional phone call or text—and eventually not even much of that.

Then last week, his wife died.

Standing at her funeral today with people I hadn't seen in roughly fifteen years brought all of those memories rushing back. And when my old friend finally recognized me after the service, we shook hands, hugged, and I realized just how much I still love this guy.

I'm an emotionally guarded person. I don't throw the word love around casually. But I love him. He's like a brother to me, even if somewhere along the way we allowed life to turn that brotherhood into distance.

His wife's death made something painfully clear to me: an era of my life is ending. I'm 56 years old. She was 54. My friend is around the same age. There aren't unlimited tomorrows anymore, and there's no guarantee that the people who mattered during one chapter of our lives will still be there when we finally decide to revisit it.

So I'm giving myself some advice that I'm probably going to be terrible at following.

Call your old friends.

If somebody once mattered to you and you've drifted apart simply because you don't work together anymore, don't play the same games anymore, or life just got in the way, don't wait for a funeral to get everybody back into the same room.

Send the text. Make the phone call. Go have lunch. Sit around and tell the same stupid stories you've already told a hundred times.

Because one morning you may wake up to a text telling you that the opportunity is gone.

I don't know that there's some profound lesson beyond that. Today I'm nostalgic. I'm sad. I'm thinking about people I love, years that disappeared much faster than I expected, and a chapter of my life that suddenly feels much farther away than it did yesterday.

Maybe I just needed to talk it out.

So hug the people you love. And if there's an old friend you've been meaning to call, call them.

Don't wait until the next funeral.

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