In Memorium: Mitch

Author's note. I've reached the age where friends and loved ones pass with greater frequency. This is my attempt to memorialize those who have gone before, the first in a series dedicated to absent friends. These are people I love and respect, whose stories deserve to be told.

Mitch

I met Mitch my junior year in high school. He'd transferred from a nearby school and was a year younger than I. This was a fortunate move for me, as both of my closest friends had moved out of state over the summer and I was feeling a bit lost. Marijuana and rock music solidified the friendship, and soon we were hanging out alot with the mutual friends.

Our group of friends were stoners and lived the stoner lifestyle, getting high, watching too much TV, living on junk food. We’d tell the same jokes repeatedly, laugh like we’d never heard it before, only for one of us to tell it again soon after and repeat the cycle. It was like a scene in Philip K Dick’s “A Scanner Darkly,” when Bob Arctor was watching surveillance footage of himself and friends telling the same jokes over and over. Being a teen in the 1980s was a Dickian experience.

The final two years of high school passed quickly. Being older, I graduated and entered the workforce, all but immediately losing touch with Mitch and my younger friends. Living in a small town, we’d occasionally run into one another and always made the “let’s keep in touch” comment but rarely phoned. Adult life took us in different directions but similar trajectories. We both found work in the local floor covering industry. I used weed and alcohol regularly but only dabbled with harder substances; Mitch got into cocaine.

I’ve lived the double life; the addict and the achiever, the guy winning safety awards at work while secretly unraveling, overindulging with friends because that’s the only way you know to show you care. The paradox of my 20s was that even when I was lost, some part of me stayed outside the mess, watching. An observer-self, above the fray, seemingly both inside the story and narrating it from the edge, grieving but clear-eyed.

I’ve lost friends to addiction. Some are dead. Some are alive but diminished, shadows of who they once were. One night, I thought I saw Mitch outside the local grocery store. He looked like a husk, a corpse walking. We made eye contact, then turned away. I turned back to look again, and he did the same. Too many years had passed to speak, I supposed.

The experience unnerved me. I told my wife about it when I got home. Days later, I told a mutual friend from high school that I’d seen Mitch but didn’t speak. “No you didn’t,” she said. I insisted I had, having known the guy since we were teens. “Mitch died two years ago.” she told me.

This was a shock, memory and reality colliding, a moment of disbelief that seemed to last forever. Had my mind played a trick on me, or was he there, a wandering spirit revisiting familiar places? I don’t know, but I do know we’d been friends. He mattered.

One of my last times I spoke with him was when I worked as an Emergency Room clerk at the local hospital. He was a patient after burning himself using a FryBaby to cook tater tots, his favorite snack. I went to his room and said hello. He began telling me about his life, how he moved to Florida for five years, lived in a condo on the beach making $50,000 a year working in construction.

It was all a lie. I knew he’d been swept up in a drug bust and served five years in a Florida prison. I didn’t let on that I knew; I let him tell the story he wanted to tell, a story he wanted to be true. The bust happened years before, was in the public record, and I am friends with his lawyer. I guess he assumed I didn’t know.

I saw him again a few weeks later, when he came in for a checkup. As we were talking, he confessed the lie, apologized for his dishonesty, and told me the truth. I shared the story of my struggles, and he said his therapist told him our group of friends were almost destined to be addicts. I agreed, and thanked him for his honesty. We made it, I thought. Gotten clean, started families, reached middle age. We parted as friends still, on a solid footing of acceptance and honesty. We even parted with our usual “let’s keep in touch,’ actually meaning it this time.

It was the last time I saw him alive.

Mitch’s story, like that of Bob Arctor in “A Scanner Darkly,” reminds me that people are fractured, fragile, and often invent versions of themselves to survive. I’ve done it. Compassion is not judging those fragments but witnessing them fully, allowing them to exist, even if messy or incomplete. It’s in that witnessing and the patience it requires that humanity persists, even in the darkest of times. Mitch was my friend. He mattered.

I miss him to this day.