Living with Andrew (the stories continue)

We all have friends and different “types” of friends, right ?

Some of us have friends that we really don’t want anyone to know we are friendly with – like old friends from school that haven’t turned out so notable.

Some of us have friends that are only friends in the place where they belong – like work friends

And a few of us have friends no one else can see……like those people that talk to “themselves”.

Me ? Well, I had a whole bunch of friends that only I could see ! Really. As Allison referred to them in my eulogy, my “famed invisible friends”. OK, so you are probably thinking right about now, “sure, I’ll bet you had a lot of invisible friends”, and to tell the truth, I did. But those are not the friends to whom we refer.

My invisible friends, the famed ones, the ones I “listened” to, they lived in the upper corner of the den. Sometimes they came out into the other rooms but mostly they stayed in the den and always, they were in the corner of the room near the ceiling in which ever corner was over my left shoulder.

These were the friends I “talked” to and they only talked if I had my spoon. I would vocalize a sound and cock an ear to that corner where I knew they waited. A few seconds later they would start to respond and it was usually a lengthy response that required me to shake my spoon and strain my “good” ear toward that corner the whole time. Finally, they would stop talking but I had to look and see – just to make sure they really had stopped – so I would look at them from the corner of my eyes and watch with suspicion and trepidation, straining to hear any sound they might make and see any movement. And then, satisfied that our exchange had ended, I would return to what I had been doing.

Everyone I knew also knew my friends and will miss them. Mom and dad sometimes walk quietly into the den and look at their corner hoping to see them or hear them, but alas, they left the house when I did in late July (they usually came with me anyway). They came to the hospital with me. They were there in the hospital all that time with me. I never talked to them in the hospital but only because I couldn’t hold my spoon and with the ventilator, I couldn’t utter that starting vocalization, but I knew they were there, sometimes I looked right through whoever was there to watch my invisible friends … I could see them as plain as day.

And they were with me, comforting me, when I left this earth.