KC

I wrote this last year about my friend Kevin. Today is 8 years since he has been gone. I needed to share this again because sharing what he means to me is part of my healing and helps me to keep his memory alive.

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Today is 7 years. Seven years can seem like an eternity, or it can pass in the blink of an eye. No matter how long it seems or feels or actually is, the fact that the world keeps on spinning without Kevin here just seems cruelly unfair. It’s funny the random things that make you miss a person’s existence. You see, I have always hated sports talk radio. I hated it, that is, until I started to miss Kevin. I have found that in the past seven years sports talk radio has become a sort of comfort for me.

There are moments I find myself listening to it just to get to that place in my mind where he still exists. Just to sit and reminisce all those nights Kev would come by in his “shaggon wagon” and park in the driveway. I would go sit in the passengers seat and we would chat or listen to the radio or play trivia games on the phone. He would always say, “ya know, if you ever want to come out to the van topless, I’d be more than happy to turn up the heat for ya!” and he would laugh. I miss that laugh. That gasping for breath, can’t talk, side splitting, body aching laugh. The kind of laugh that literally hurt when you finally stopped.

It still hurts. It hurts that he isn’t here to make me laugh like that anymore. It hurts that he isn’t here to share his amazing spirit with this world. Maybe I’m just being selfish, but maybe if you knew Kevin you would feel a little selfish too. If you knew the way he would lend a listening ear when you were having a bad day. The fact that this man who went from running the basketball courts to laying in a hospital bed as doctors explained he would no longer have use of his legs, could say “it’s all relative” when someone complained that the toilet paper was hung the wrong way.

They say time heals all wounds… I’m not sure that is true. Time just passes and life goes on, and we adjust. We learn to live our lives in a new way, Change our routines. I’m not so sure all the wounds heal, maybe they’re just not quite so visible. I think about the fact that Kev has been gone 7 years. I wonder how these past 7 years may have been different if he had still been around. I think about the moments in my life that would have been different, had I not known him. But mostly, I think about our nights in the “shaggin wagon”, listening to sports talk radio and laughing until we hurt, and that helps missing him hurt a little less.