Well, I promised a real update "soon" a month ago, and then got hit by the month from hell, so. Among other things, one of my best friends passed away at the beginning of January. Every time I've tried to write about anything else or make a life update since then, I end up thinking about my friend. So. Life update eventually. But in the meantime, I'd like to tell you about my friend Justin.
Justin had cancer, and has had health issues in some form or another for the entire 15 years we've been friends. So his passing was both…expected and not. He was diagnosed with Fanconi Anemia as a kid and wasn't expected to live past young childhood. And then when he did live past his initial diagnoses, they didn't think he'd live to adulthood. But he did live, again. Despite surpassing his life expectancy, Justin's had ongoing complications and health issues from the childhood illness.
This made him occasionally a complicated and difficult person to be friends with - what parent says no to a kid with a terminal illness? How do you then parent a kid who was supposed to die but didn't, and has never been told no? How does that affect their ability to mature or relate to other people? But it also made him a wonderful person to be friends with. The deep empathy, the humor, the desire for connection, and a determination to always live life fully and true to himself. And, it feels wrong to describe someone who has died as "complicated and difficult," but I think it's important. Justin could be alienating - when we met, a lot of people either loved him or hated him. There was no middle ground. It feels disingenuous to pretend he wasn't who he was. And, more significantly, who he was was very important for me. Justin was loveable despite being difficult, but also often loveable BECAUSE he was difficult. And it was very pivotal and important for me to learn that people could be complicated and difficult AND loveable, which really wasn't something I understood when I was younger.
So Justin could be difficult. But so are a lot of us. We met in 2009, and Justin quickly introduced me to others in his impressively broad friend group. A lot of us were difficult. Complicated. Justin and I bonded over anime and yu-gi-oh cards and pokemon and music and cats. But we also bonded over less-than-ideal relationships with our parents. Hard childhoods. Not always finding it easy to connect with others. Struggling our ways into adulthood. My own childhood is another story for another time, but due to a lot of circumstances I used to joke that I never REALLY learned how to be a person until I was 19-20. I struggled with a lot of things and spent most of my life feeling "other." Justin understood that, and he had a way of asking personal questions without being intrusive - he was always genuinely interested in everyone. He wanted to really know you. Another friend speculated that Justin was so interested in learning about other people because he was trying to learn about and live as many lives as possible, knowing his own years might be short. To this day, there are things Justin and I have spoken about that I've never shared with anyone else. It's hard to get into conversations about those things with people. I'm generally pretty open about the fact that my relationship with my mother was especially poor and that we've since been estranged for all of my adult life since her abuse during my childhood, but I rarely get into specifics. Most people don't want to know. Others don't know how to ask. It's hard to bring it up yourself without feeling like you're trauma dumping on someone. It can be isolating. Justin created space for me to share and helped me learn how to be vulnerable, and both of those things were cathartic and helpful, necessary even, to be able to start moving towards healing.
It was also impossible to spend time with Justin and not learn how to lean into being yourself. To embrace the quirks and all the weird things you like and do, and accept that that might mean some people might not be interested in you. And that that's okay, because the people who do resonate with you will find you that much more easily.
The friends Justin introduced me to have remained in my life. They are people I consider family. They talk to me and visit me more than my “actual” family. They are the biggest and best gift I've ever gotten, and I've had many gifts in my life - including many others from Justin. When my ex-fiance abruptly ended our relationship in a fairly traumatic manner, Justin bought me a giant stuffed animal turtle so I'd have something to hug when I was sad. When I moved out of New York, he gifted me framed butterflies to hang in my new place in San Diego. The butterflies are the first thing everyone compliments whenever they come over to my place, and I've since started collecting more. I still regularly hug the turtle. I have board games we've bought together, games we've played together. Prints he's sent me. And so so so many photos and stories and memories. As I've been packing for my upcoming move, it's increasingly obvious how much of my life and the things in it are because of Justin. My life would literally be significantly different in so many ways if we hadn't met.
I've struggled with a lot of long distance friendships since moving out of New York. I miss a lot of people a lot of the time. I think often about people I've fallen out of touch with, whether through the inevitableness of time and distance or otherwise. Some of that is just my lot as the person who moved away from home. Leaving New York was absolutely the right choice for me - but it also was, and continues to be, hard. Especially over the past month, I've struggled with not being physically closer with people who have known me for a long time. I am very blessed with the friends I've made in San Diego, LA, and Utah since leave New York. But the version of me I was in New York is so fundamental to the person I've become. In a lot of ways I think I hoped to leave that person and their problems behind when I first moved in 2013, but I've since realized there are actually things I miss about that person. And that I didn't actually leave that version of myself behind. Obviously the old version of myself is part of the version of myself I am now, but I also left a good part of that person in the care of friends who knew that version of me best. But now one of those friends, the friend who in some ways knew that version of me best, is gone and part of me with him and I feel like I should have known to take more care with Justin, to find the time, to talk through the things that needed to be talked through, and to be better about understanding and expressing how much he means to me and the life I have now. But, I can only move forward - and I am trying to do so with gratitude for all the good things…and for the significant number of stories and photos with Justin that continue to make me laugh and grow, and I'm glad I was able to make it back to New York for his services to share those photos and stories and laughter with our friends.
In conversation after his services, Justin's mom mentioned wondering what greater good God kept Justin around for by helping him survive his childhood illness. I am not really religious myself and tend to lean towards not believing in higher powers, but I think about all the people who showed up for Justin, and all the stories we shared about Justin before/during/after his funeral. And I think about how many of us loved him and loved each other because of him. How many of us grew to become the people we did because of Justin. I think about how much laughter and joy he brought us, how much we re-lived that laughter and joy just sharing those stories together in remembrance of him. I think about the sun breaking through the rain during his burial in one last act of warmth and brightness. And I think that if there is a God, then God made an excellent, impactful, wonderful, incredible, perfect choice to keep Justin around for as long as we got to have him. I love you, Justin.
