Lately, Ive been thinking about all the strange ways that grief intersects and interlocks, and how our losses affect us in so many new and different ways as we keep living our lives.

I have talked here before about my first love, my first kiss, my high school prom date, the boy I was friends with since age 5, the boy I dated and broke up with 400 times in junior high and high school, the boy who shared all of my formative years with me, and watched me grow into a young adult. The boy who first made me feel love, and the boy who first broke my heart. His name was Scot, and he was one of the funniest people I have ever met. That kid could make me laugh constantly and often. We lost touch as adults, at some point after college ended, and then a couple years ago, I found out on Facebook that he died at age 50, of brain cancer.

I feel like Ive been processing this news quietly, sadly, and on my own mostly, for a long time now. I am not really in touch with his family or the friends that knew him as an adult, and my instinct is this need to go up to one of them and say “we were best friends our entire childhood and teenage years. You knew him as an adult? What was he like? Was he happy? Did he have a good life that he loved?’ I always thought we would one day get back together again – not as a couple – just as two old friends having coffee and laughing our asses off together. I always hoped that would happen, and to know now that will never happen, is incredibly sad.

Yesterday I was talking to my other childhood best friend, Sarah, on the phone. We were talking about Scot, and how he was such a huge part of both of our childhoods and formative years. The three of us hung out all the time, so its a great loss for Sarah as well. I was telling her how I had suddenly realized that the biggest love of my life as a child, and the biggest love of my life as an adult, are now both gone. Dead. The one who really knew me inside out as a young person, and the one who knew me like nobody else did as an adult – and both of them had that kindness quality, and both of them had that EPIC humor where we would just laugh and laugh over practically nothing, and everything. I had BANTER with both Scot and Don, and since knowing them both, I have not found that banter and wit with anyone else. Sure, there have been moments of that, and lots of laughter with other partners, but these two men both had that quality where they could take the most ordinary circumstance or daily chore type thing (like standing in an annoyingly long line), and make it LESS stressful, find laughter in it, and be able to see it in a whole strange or unique way.

I miss that. I miss them. I miss what they brought to my life. And Im so lucky to have known them, and to have been loved by them.