A Remembrance of Andres on His Birthday

On my birthday last November, I had turned off my audible phone notifications to attend to those more private anniversary moments with my dear. After pastry and a chai at the Black Walnut Café and just before our walk at Lake of the Isles, I felt a vibration next to my heart and pulled my phone from the breast pocket of my jacket. A call from my friend Andres in Vancouver. Curious. We were not in the habit of talking on the phone. Just occasional texts and other sorts of brief electronic messaging. The soft buzzing ceased. Probably a quick birthday greeting, though we were not in the habit of birthday greetings either other than a Facebook emoji. Maybe an additional comment. An exchange of erudite literary witticisms. All was well with our friendship. All was always well. I would touch base with him later. While the phone was still in my hand, it buzzed again signaling that a voicemail message had been received, a transcripted portion of which I could read in the little window on my iphone, “I am leaving this world in about seven hours.”

I called back. Terminal cancer, assisted suicide. We talked for fifteen minutes, of mutual love and excruciating heartbreak. He was one of those kindred spirits for me, an instant friend, a long-lost brother. We did not enact friendship or brotherhood the way it is spoken of in popular culture or even in the more serious, philosophical treatments of that subject. Our bond was largely unspoken, but felt and appreciated all the more, perhaps, for its mute power over certain difficult circumstances, some distance, and almost twenty years. Few, if any women, I’ve known understand this very particular kind of masculine vibe. They might even deny that it’s friendship. Maybe it isn’t. Maybe it’s something else entirely, something that remains nameless in any language I know. All I know is that if there is an afterlife worth a damn, I’ll see him in it, and we’ll live all the lives of that “friendship”—for there will be more than one—in their fullness, fullnesses simply unachievable in what we understand as real life. Until then, my friend.