Note: This article was originally posted on Medium under The Taoist Online publication. Around spring 2025, that publication removed itself from Medium and my article with it. Below is the article as it was published.
December 22, 2022
You Have No Say in a Friend’s Death, but You Do in Their Life
When you’re given a page to write in someone’s story, seize it before the book closes.
Before he retired, Stanley Clark was an AutoCAD engineer at a plant in Asheville, North Carolina. We were co-workers there for three years, and he was one of my favorite people at the company.
I’m a snarky little shit, so I quickly took to Stan’s sarcasm and dry wit. Though he stayed with the company for many years, he complained about his job, and every time he stopped by the receptionist’s desk to see me, he opened every conversation with “Still waitin’ on someone to invent that disappearin’ act”—his favorite running joke.
While we worked in a town overrun by New England and Midwest transplants, his sprightly Southern drawl made me feel at home. I felt safe to show my own Southernness around him and turned my accent loose when we gossiped.
We had both amassed our own collections of state quarters. Coins from the Denver mint were hard to come by on the East Coast, but during my family visits to Mississippi, I raided the cash register at my mom’s grocery store and scored quite a few to give him as a surprise.
After I quit my job at the plant, Stan and I stayed in touch through Facebook and email. I invited him to my boyfriend’s birthday party at a downtown restaurant. Because some of my friendships were rather flaky, I wasn’t sure if he was going to show up, but he did.
After driving thirty minutes from the town of Canton in frigid temperatures, he strolled in sporting a bomber jacket and a black cap emblazoned with “RETIRED ARMY” in gold letters. His crew cut had grown into streams of gray locks, but he was the same cynical yet spirited fella. He had been staying active as the unofficial photographer of his granddaughter’s soccer team, and that night, he entertained us with Vietnam war stories until it was our bedtime.
Shortly after I moved to the West Coast, I mailed him a dozen or so quarters stamped with “D.” He gushed about the package to his Facebook friends, punctuating his joy with a smiley face surrounded by hearts. I was tickled.
Eventually, I got tired of social media and quietly deactivated my Facebook account. I didn’t stay in touch with anyone, not even Stan. By then, I had ignored his email blasts because they were filled with corny dad jokes.
In February 2022, I reached out to Stan on Messenger after I reactivated my Facebook account. It had been four years since we last communicated. A few days went by, and he hadn’t replied. The message’s status icon indicated that none of his devices received my message. That was not a good sign.
My heart quivering, I went to his profile. The latest update on his timeline was posted fourteen months earlier by his niece. She announced that he had died from cancer. I broke into tears.
Over the next few days, I thought about all the opportunities I had to send Stan more quarters or even just a simple email, anything to let him know he was still important to me. For some reason, these things are so hard to do but suddenly seem easy when our dear ones are no longer able to receive them. Yes, life gets busy, but if we stopped complaining about everything on our plates and started doing them, we’d get much more done than we thought.
For years, the universe had been dropping me hints about mortality. The worst thing about getting older is not getting older. It’s that we start losing the people important to us. The universe was easing me into that reality by starting with some of my childhood icons, as if to say, “If you’re crushed that Betty White is gone, imagine losing your childhood best friend, your favorite teacher, or your sister.”
I was well aware of that reality, but it didn’t hit me hard until Stan died. He was one of the few people who cared enough to share details of his life, like his granddaughter’s road trip to the women’s World Cup in Canada and the tragic death of his daughter. For someone who’s always felt shunned by people, I should have embraced his friendship more dearly. Apparently, I’m just as thoughtless as the people I accuse of tossing me aside.
I’ve always had reasons for not being a good friend, and I used those reasons to protect myself. There is a cost, though. It’s called regret. Regret is the stain of our mistakes. In my case, I had two choices: either endure the anxiety of social situations in the short term or live with regret for a lifetime.
Lately, I’ve been reaching out to people. For the first time in a decade, I sent Christmas cards, and I visited people I hadn’t seen in years. Did I tremble under the crippling social anxiety that has plagued me since the fifth grade? Yep. But I’m still alive, and it was worth every frightful moment.
December 2023 marks the third anniversary of Stan’s death and his 77th birthday. His niece told me he was cremated in Texas, where he had been living with family. Since I can’t pay my respects in person, I plan to honor his memory with a charitable donation. It’s not exactly the way I wanted to close the circle with Stan, but I can’t control everything. But I now know that I have the power to write the stories of my friendships as I like. Maybe it’s not possible to be in everyone’s life all the time, but we can easily let them know we haven’t forgotten them through a card, email, text, video chat, social media, or even an old-fashioned phone call. We are lucky to have so many options, but after someone’s gone, we have none.