To My Friend Chris

As silly as it is, the four letters that Drake decided would become the motto that would ruin social media and t-shirts and society as a whole for about a year are actually really meaningful. I’m talking about “YOLO” for those of you who were like born yesterday or don’t follow trends. YOLO. You only live once.

It’s true.  You do only live once. And we hear this crap all the time: “Yeah, this may be your only chance…” “Only got one life to live, why not…” “Life’s short, eat  dessert first,” etc etc. A lot of times it sounds silly or just an excuse to like eat a lot of chips (yes, I do eat a LOT of chips) but there are always those times in your life that you stop and realize just how ridiculously minuscule our time on earth is.

Chris was a friend of mine. I wouldn’t say we were very close. I only knew him for a short amount of time before I left home and moved to Philadelphia.  But I did know him, and always liked him, and my best friend since 9th grade (Sam) was very, very close to him.  She tells me just about everything, so I heard story after story about this ridiculous guy who was always goofing around and having a grand old time.  So, when we hung out I felt like I knew him for so long, since I knew so much about him.

Seriously, he was hilarious.  The quick witty stuff he would come up with sometimes went over my head until hours later and I’d laugh to myself.  He just had this way about him that you could joke around and laugh and say anything and he would have a response.

He was also such a generous, kind, and polite person.  Many times we would go out, a “night on the town” and he would pay for drinks and food and wouldn’t listen to us when we tried to give him money.

My favorite memory with him was when we went out for Sam’s birthday.  Her birthday is in February, and we lived in upstate New York, so you can imagine how cold it was.  Well, we waited outside to get a cab that night for probably longer than we needed to, and by the time it came my feet were pretty numb. Chris and Sam and I all squeezed in the back of this cab and tried to get warm.

“Ohhh my gosh”–I was pretty dramatic–“I can’t feel my feet. I think I have hypothermia.”

“Well, we’re gonna have to chop off your toes,” Chris stated in his deadpan way.

“No! Please don’t.”

“We have to. It’s the only way.”

Minutes later I was warmed up and I proudly announced that to everyone in the car, but Chris shook his head.

“It’s too late. We have to chop them off.”

“But I can feel them now!”

“Nope. We’re choppin’ them off.”

I know it’s just a silly story. But that’s how he was, and that’s one of the few memories I have of just the two of us being silly and light.

But anyway, he passed away very suddenly and unexpectedly, and my mind is still trying to grasp what this all means. I was blessed to have been able to travel back home and mourn with his friends and family at his memorial service, where we all told stories like the one I gave to you. What I love about funerals and the like is the ability to celebrate someone’s life. It’s not about the death but about what they did while they were alive and how it affected us.

The reality is, I’d been kind of depressed the last previous few weeks.  I struggle with things now and then, just getting really bogged down by work and relationships and money, etc. But then this happened and I had to change my perspective on my situation.  Life is short, as lame as it is to say this overused phrase.  So often we get upset and discouraged because not everything is exactly where we want it to be–that if we figure those things out first, then we can be happy. But why not be happy now?  Why not go for it and have coffee with that friend you may otherwise never get to really know?  Why not take a walk when it’s 75 degrees out?  Why not just take a deep breath and not lose your cool?  I don’t know, I guess it’s easier said than done, but that’s what I want to take away from this.