A Blog Post

I found out a couple of days ago that my good friend Kim passed away.

She died in June.

This is a hard post for me to write because it brings up my many shortcomings – one of which is that I tend to forget things. Forget ABOUT things, and people. I concluded a while ago that I’ve always had ADD, and one hallmark of that is basically “out of sight, out of mind.” Once something isn’t right in front of me, it almost ceases to exist in my mind. My brain is on to the next thing in front of me. I forget to get in touch with friends, to make plans, to do things in general, until I remember – and then I promptly forget again.

I keep a very long to-do list, which has gotten rather long because I just keep adding to it. Not just things I need to take care of but book ideas, jam ideas, notes, etc. Add add add. It’s now, umm, over 400 pages long, which is ridiculous. Do you know how many times I put “call Kim Gamel” on there? 

125 times. Yes, 125. 

Kim called me last year (!) and left a message, and I texted her back and said I’d give her a call. And then… I didn’t. I just didn’t, and I have to live with this. Why? I don’t know. Sure things were hectic: my mom died, I was dealing with her estate, had to pack up her house and then sell it, then pack up my own house in Oregon as I was trying to sell it, then deal with movers and moving back to the Midwest and bouncing from one Airbnb to another and BLAH BLAH BLAH. For fuck’s sake. What a bunch of bullshit excuses, the lies I tell myself. What, instead of scrolling reddit I couldn’t have picked up the phone? To call Kim or some other friend? 

I could attempt to blame other people, but again, I would just be pretending I’m better than I am, that I’m a better friend than I am. I’m not. Sure, Bob could have realized he was calling my old Chicago numbers and not my cell# that I told him was mine the last time we messaged. But no, this is on me – he was helping Kim, and I was just ….forgetting. 

It’s so easy to get caught up in the stupidity: we’re busy, or I sometimes wonder why I’m the person who always has to make the plans and I get peevish about that. Who the fuck cares? Maybe other people are as ADD as I am and get caught up in life things. We say “we have to make plans!” and we mean it, but then we never get there.

I loved Kim and I can’t believe she’s gone. We met on our exchange program in Kyiv, way back when, were roommates for half the year before we moved into separate dorms. We went on crazy trips to places like Uzhhorod, where we lied to the maître d’ to get into an empty restaurant because that was how things were done. In early 2020 we started planning a trip to Iceland, and, well, yeah. One Thanksgiving I visited her in NYC, where we went to friends of hers who invited a lot of people but cooked the smallest turkey I’ve ever seen while Kim volunteered me to cook literally everything else, in the tiniest kitchen imaginable. (NYC y’all.) So many great memories, so many more we’ll never get to make.

For some reason, Ebeneezer Scrooge keeps coming to mind. Post-ghostly-visitation, that is, where he goes from being a total jerk (“curmudgeon” doesn’t cut it), to the man who’s the best person ever.

“He did it all, and infinitely more; and to Tiny Tim, who did not die, he was a second father. He became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew, or any other good old city, town, or borough, in the good old world.”* 

I’m so so sad right now, so bereft. I can’t think of Kim without bawling. And you know what’s worse than grief? Grief tinged with heavy regret. Don’t be me. Don’t be the person with a friend’s name to call, hundreds of times on your to-do list. 

And for my friends: let’s get together! I’ll call you. Really. 

*No I will not become a Pollyanna. I still in general hate people of course. But to my friends, yes! We shall plan trips and go on them and do the stupid things and remember that life is short and cruel and so fucking unfair so it behooves us to not waste our time on stupid things. So it has been spoken, so it shall be done.