Tom Hanks is a big believer in breathing, I told a friend with PTSD seven years ago. Here are the quotes I shared with her.
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John Prine personalized his “Souvenirs” CD for me almost a decade ago, and the layers to that story remind me of his textured songs. Here are a few of both.
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Whether I am speaking only for myself or also for others, here is long-overdue thanks to my therapist.
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Published August 16, 2018
Danny had been on my mind lately. The reasons, like life, were a series of seemingly random events and circumstances that somehow worked together to point in a certain direction. Then, on Monday morning, I got the call telling me that he was gone.
Oof, as Danny often said. Oof, as if reacting to a body blow, a gut punch. That’s how it felt.
I’m writing this during my private candlelight vigil for Remy Daniel Miller II, whose funeral Mass is six hours (and two time zones) away as I begin this remembrance of the friend I met during our freshman year of high school. What would he think, I wonder, if he knew that my apartment building prohibits candles, forcing me to improvise with a battery-powered version and a Shutterstock image? My guess is he’d allow it.
Why had Danny been on my mind lately? For starters, two other high school friends — both of them one year my senior — visited me five weeks ago, stirring up memories that began flooding back a few weeks earlier when they told me they’d booked their flight. Flipping through yearbooks put a lot of names and faces back on my radar. And around that time, I reconnected with a classmate, the one who called me with the bad news Monday.
We said goodbye to Mom on July 3, 2006, in a hospital room in Houston. She was the subject of one of my first posts on this site, and of the only obituary I’ve ever written.
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Published February 2, 2018
The mass shooting Wednesday in Parkland, Florida, and the public reactions from students who survived it caused me to think a lot about high school. During my four years, nothing remotely close to it ever happened. Until Columbine in April 1999, something like that occurring on a high school campus was largely unimaginable to me.
Published December 28, 2016
Gary Laney died without warning Friday, two days before Christmas. He was 47. The news was crushing. The shock hasn’t worn off, and I am flailing about in search of words.
His funeral is happening now in Baton Rouge. I wish he were here to talk about it with me. Gary’s presence here two years ago, the day before the funeral of our first editor in the daily newspaper business, was a gift to me from the cosmos. Now, he’s gone, and we are not having lunch together, not having beers, not telling Lake Charles stories, laughing and crying.
In a year of so much loss, Gary’s death is one of the hardest losses to bear.
We first met in the mid-1980s, when my journalism career was just getting started and he was a high school student with an interest in sports writing and newspaper work. He came up one day to the makeshift press box at Legion Field in Lake Charles where I was covering American Legion games, and on some level, he never left. Gary was like a friendly puppy, tagging along as I did my job. He was likable, smart, curious, full of questions, and eager to discuss sports, music, writing and many other subjects.