Will Ashton Kutcher please just come out from wherever he's hiding already?

This is my space, I get to grieve how I want. You don't have to read it, but it helps me to externalize. My thoughts below the jump.

On one hand, I think, I haven't seen this guy in five years, and the reason we haven't spoken is that he was charged with battery and making terroristic threats. Against me and my friend. On the other hand, he was my oldest friend, DH's best friend, and the best man at our wedding. I think I have a right to have sobbed until I look like those NyQuil commercials.

And to hurt like a truck hit me. Physical pain worse than the emotional pain.

And to keep looking over my shoulder for Ashton Kutcher. Am I on Punk'd? It would be just like him to set me up and see how I respond. Shit head. I'd kill him if he wasn't dead. Every time I say it out loud to someone, some little part of my brain nags at me "You shouldn't say that, you don't know it's true? Think about how much you'll hurt this person if it's not. What will they think of you?" Like an evil bit of gossip, you know? Like salacious garbage. But his friends need to know.

I won't go into the details, out of respect for his family, even though this is an anonymous space. Once the news story hits the net, googling the details would likely spill out the whole story. I'll just say that he had a handy gun at a desperate moment, and now I am missing a big part of my past for the first time.

A part I tried so hard to help save. But like so many people who love addicts, I had to give him a bottom line and let him choose. I was never qualified to be his therapist in the first place.

I feel guilty. I feel angry. I wonder if this is real. I feel relief. I hope he finally doesn't have to be angry or lonely or sad anymore. I hope I can come to terms with how we left things.

I know I did the right thing, and I KNOW he's gone but I still feel guilt and denial so strong it's like a physical restraint.

I'm thinking about all of the times I tried to help. I keep thinking about the night I kicked him out. And then I think about us, age 8, on the jungle gym, which was our GI Joe spaceship, and how he would swing higher on the swings than anyone else, how he took me to the doctor and the lab and the therapist when I was first diagnosed with RA, and how he would hug me and offer to switch out his capable hands for my weak ones.

He took care of me when my DH couldn't, and for that I will always be grateful. He was a good friend to me every day save one. And then he wasn't. And now that can never be again.

I feel like I need to tell all the good memories, to justify why I adored him, like a big brother. As if to excuse the horror of the last 36 hours. He was a good person, with a caring heart and a huge capacity for giving. He saw himself as a warrior son, a protector of man. But the alcohol and the rage obliterated that, and one by one they destroyed all the beautiful things in his life.

He's always been a legend, pulling the proverbial "get out of jail free" card from his back pocket. Which is, of course, why I'm on the lookout for Ashton. He was our own Ferris Bueller. He beat the rap so many times. He was so infamous, he'd get accused of impossible things, like hacking into the school's database when he didn't even own a computer (he changed his grades the old-fashioned way: he erased them). And now he has passed into mythology.

God damn this past-tense shit is killing me. I've gone back and changed "is" to "was" about 8 times now.

Someday I will tell my children stories about the crazy uncle who would have loved and spoiled them and looked the other way when they were naughty. And eventually, I suppose, I'll tell them the rest, too. The drinking, rage, divorce, arrests, violence, and the downward spiral.

I want to believe he is in heaven. He certainly believed he would get there someday. I want to believe he is finally at peace, that his pain is gone. But I'm not so sure.

Comments are closed. I don't want anyone spamming my grief, and I'm really not putting this outside of myself for sympathy. I just need to tell someone how much I love him and how much I miss him and wish that this was all a terrible joke.