We’d all grown up together from small-kid time, most from age three or four. So far we’d survived all kinds of school and work, bad relationships, and a few former marriages. We got together often, more of a family in some ways than we were with our blood families.
Given our aging, this was one of our typical “wild” parties, for a while. But the mood shifted, with Barry saying, when we were nearing the peak of the evening’s celebration, that he’d been diagnosed with cancer, terminal, his time now very short.
Why he chose to say it then, I had trouble understanding, the moment so strange. How he was talking only to Joseph, but what he said cut right through the laughter, caught everyone’s attention, quiet falling like a storm of silent rain around the room.
Everyone stopped still, everyone focused on what he was saying, all of us trying to wrap our heads around the idea that he would be the first, we realized, who would lead us into whatever lay beyond.
All of us, getting on now, sat down, collapsed in our seats, staring at each other, moving from face to face, while Joey sat cross-legged on the floor, head bowed. Would this be it? The last time? The way we’d remember him?
All of us wondering about the end, our heads falling back, exhausted more than we’d ever been before, some maybe scared, some maybe not, all staring at the ceiling, our breathing slowing, the adrenaline draining, trying to see through it, everyone speechless, searching beyond for something . . .
Lanning Lee 