Always Have An Open Door
Subtleties are nearly impossible to detect in a text message.
Subtleties are nearly impossible to detect in a text message. Long-term couples and close siblings may have an advantage in reading between the lines of what’s been written by the person to whom they’re the closest. Even seemingly close friends, however, tend to struggle here.
Such was the case in November 2016 when I received a text from my buddy Cash. I lived in Denver at the time, and he in Grand Junction, about four hours away. Hearing from him wasn’t uncommon — we were both involved in the music scene and Cash frequently came to Denver for shows.
But on this occasion, his text contained no show poster or inquiry about this band or that. Instead, he noted that he was in town and hoped to stop by my place for a quick beer.
Caught in the hectic rhythm of work and relationship life, I told him it wasn’t a good time. Perhaps we could meet the next day.
The next day wasn’t doable for him.
It was music that brought Cash and I together in college a decade prior. We had film class together during the fall semester of my senior year. Assigned at random into small groups to create a short film project, Cash, myself, and two others hopped into his Jeep Grand Cherokee to head to our first filming location.
We’d known each other just 10 minutes but our friendship started the moment he turned the car on. “B-Side” by the Mad Caddies pumped loudly from the stereo. I was taken aback. A random occurrence of musical synergy was, for me, rare in the mountain town I lived in. There, Jerry Bears and twangy bluegrass dominated nearly every stereo system. But on this day some invisible spirit of punk rock bro’dem had deemed that we meet.
From the back right seat of the vehicle, I looked at him. He caught my gaze and held it a moment. No words were spoken.
Thus began a friendship that spanned 10 years, multiple cities, dozens of shows, and one traumatic brain injury that I failed to recognize the extent of until it was too late.
Cash caught some trouble with the law a year or so after we met, and ended up moving back home to Grand Junction. After clearing his name from the court dockets, he moved to Seattle to attend film school. I never learned the full scope of what happened there. One night shortly after he moved back home from the Pacific Northwest, he told me over the phone that “some shit had gone down” in Seattle and his outlook on life had shifted drastically.
I never saw Cash sober after that.
He brought my band to Grand Junction for gigs on a few occasions, and we met up in Denver for shows at least as many times. He’d gained weight and stopped mountain biking, an activity that had been a strong passion of his since long before we met. Other than that — and the substance use, and the meds his doc put him on — he was still Cash. I knew he struggled with mental health, he wasn’t shy about discussing it, but he remained largely positive and an excellent person to be around. However, he wasn’t content and frequently seemed like his head was clouded — that he was in search of a piece of clarity that consistently escaped around the bend, just out of his grasp.
Living in different towns, we only saw each other a few times per year after college. In the fall of 2016, a mutual friend told me that Cash had stopped taking his meds, and that since doing so he’d undertaken a heavy regimen of soul-searching.
The night he texted me about stopping by for a beer, he was engaged in what, in retrospect, was his farewell tour. He knew what was coming, and was on a mission to say goodbye to the people he cared about.
I had no idea, and I’ll always regret declining to meet him that night. I heard from others that at that time, after he’d made his decision, he seemed freer and more clearheaded than he’d been in years, likely since his accident.
In December, when I got the call that he’d died, I undertook some soul-searching myself. The questions hit like bricks. I realized immediately why he’d texted me a couple of weeks prior. If he’d come over, would I have sensed what was to come? If so, how would I have reacted?
Would “goodbye” have offered closure?
I think often of a parable I read in college about a cafe owner in the city who kept his door open until 4 am or later each night, even though there often weren’t any customers. When asked why he did this, he replied, “You never know when someone is going to need a place to go.”
Cash was the first close friend of mine to die, and though we weren’t as close at the end, when I think of him now I smile through the tears knowing that he found the clarity he’d been looking for.