Show him the ropes.

It’s been 120 days. Or 122 to be exact. And it hasn’t been any easier to cope with moments of shear panic and pain scattered among them.

It was during a conversation with a very close friend, whose father had just been given a week to live, that all of those moments of pain, shock, and torment over your loss began to flood back over me. She asked me if it got worse before it got better. Without a moment’s pause or hesitation I told her I could not begin to tell her how true that was. I also told her that she will hear two of the most enormous lies in the days and weeks that would surely follow the most devastating moment in her life. While both are often told without consciousness to the fact that they are lies, the first is “I know how you feel…” and the second is “time will heal your pain”. The first statement takes the form of a lie due to the fact that there is no possible way that anyone, in that moment, could ever know how you feel. While they may have experienced some semblance of the pain that you feel it is my experience that everyone’s dealing with death is all very different. And the second is a lie because time does not heal it, it just makes it easier to bare.

So when my friend, saddened and heartbroken, asked me if it gets worse before it gets better, how I am supposed to tell her that the pain she is about to experience is going to be the worse she has ever experienced. How can I tell her that what she is about to experience will be the worst pain and most devastating moment of life that she will ever know? How do you tell her that when you think that you can’t cry anymore and when you feel like there is nothing left inside of you, you find yourself wincing in pain? How could I tell this friend, in what, at the moment was her most tragic time of her short life, that she will soon feel like digging her own grave, crawling in, and burying herself with what was left her spirit? That while life continues on around her it will feel as though she has lost a piece of hers and at times, when she is alone and it is quite, that she will actually make herself believe that she can hear her heart shattering into a million pieces, literally? How could I prepare her for the hardest journey that she will ever experience and tell her that her life will be forever changed? That she is about to start a journey, that feels never-ending? How could I tell her that no matter what I say or do or whatever help, condolences, and warm wishes that those that pass her will give, nothing will make it any easier bear? That no matter what, she will feel like the burden is hers to bear alone? I couldn’t. So I didn’t. I just told her that, yes, it gets much worse before it gets better. I told her that the burden is not hers alone, that she is surrounded by love and we are all here to take that journey with her, something I have learned, humbly, in the four months since you left us. I told her that my heart breaks with her but that it is okay to fall apart because she has so many people that love her that will divide the load and carry it for her.

Unfortunately, she did not have to wait long for that moment. Her father, Tim Wade, lost his valiant and harrowing battle with cancer today. It was in that moment, when I got the devastating news that I thought back to the moment that Vince and I ran into the Emergency Room at 2:00 in the morning, one stormy, Friday night, thinking that we had all of the time in the world with you, only to happen upon your dad coming out with the answers written all over his face. I felt that feeling again when it feels like a mac truck hits you in the stomach and all of the emotions run over you all at once and you open your eyes only to discover that you are keeled over, on your knees, heaving the life out your soul. My thoughts went to the thought of wet towel dumped, accidently, into a pool, and you pick it up to ring it out. It isn’t the towels fault that it is dripping wet, why does it have to be twisted into unforgiving knots over and over again? I thought to my friend and how she might be feeling in that very moment when the waves of nausea come intermittently with waves of physical pain and unexpected insanity, and I felt it too. How I wish I could take it from her.

Whether it is a tragic, one car accident, on a rainy Friday night, or a long, heroic battle with cancer, death is never something experienced exactly the same by any two people and is never easy to take in by the living. We are the ones left behind to suffer in agony. The only piece of advice that I could extend to my friend was that, somehow, someway, she will come out on the other side in the end, and she will have only her fond memories and her time with him to help her carry her through. And somehow, it will. It will be the small things that mean the most, like me with the memories of you and the rain, or riding in the car and song that you would belt out to comes on, a favorite food, or in your case foods. Those will be the moments that will hurt the most but be cherished the longest. 

Tim Wade was an amazing man, but you were an amazing person too, and your life was ended too soon as well. That just goes to show that God has EXCELLENT taste. I was a lucky person to get to know him and for that I have to give a little tribute to one of my fondest memories of him. It was at a crucial time in my young, impressionable life right before I got my driver’s license. My mom had purchased my car a month before I actually got my license and I was feeling indestructible one evening. So Ann, Leann, and I concocted a plan to tell all of our parents that we were going out with the other’s parents driving us. I then took the keys and drove to each person’s house and picked them up, Ann first, then Leann. When I arrived at Leann’s house, Ann and I went in to greet her dad and family. I still to this day am not sure what set him off to our plan but he immediately knew something was up. He asked me if he could come out to the car and say hey to my mom, “he hadn’t seen her in a while”. Our “quick thinking” went into diverting mode and quickly told him, as we were scurrying out the door that we were in a hurry and to get going. The next day at school, I was called to the counselor’s office, having been the “good kid” in my family, I started hyperventilating. As I walked down the hall, sweat in my palms, I kept trying to think of what it was that I had done wrong. When I rounded the corner to find the White County Sherriff’s Deputy standing, very official, outside the counselor’s door, I started peeing myself. With pee running down my leg (not really), I sat in the chair and the sheriff asked me if I knew why I had been called to speak with him. I didn’t. He then proceeded with the story of being called “anonymously” by a concerned community resident that I had been driving around without a license. Shocked into disbelief and curious as to how he would have known, I lied and said that was false. He gave me one chance to tell the truth. Okay, I did. He let me off with a warning but told me he would his eye on me. Later on, while discussing who could have ratted us out and recounting the evening, we came to the conclusion that it had to have been Tim. Many years later, I asked him. He chuckled, and with his eyes squinted and the reflection of the light in his glasses, he replied, “Well someone had to teach you a lesson? It worked, didn’t it?” Only Tim had succeeded in doing what my mother, still to this day, has failed miserably at…bested me.

I take comfort in his passing knowing that you will “show him the ropes” up there. I will never understand why things happen the way that they do, but I guess I don’t have to. You have both left huge holes in the lives of those that your lives have touched, but you have also left an amazing impact that will never be forgotten. 


                                                 Tim Wade 12/30/64-07/05/2012