Thomas, 2 months On

Hard as it is to believe, it's been a little over 2 months now since losing my longtime friend and mentor Thomas Johnstone to suicide. Life goes on with its daily routines, problems, work, noise and business and I find myself as usual swept up in the rhythm of the city that runs just like a giant clock. Just when I thought things were more or less back to normal, the pain found a chink in my armor, crept up behind me and demanded to either be dealt with or suffocate me.

Yesterday I found myself in a position of having some forced free time because I had to let some maintenance workers in to perform repairs on the apartment-from-hell (an entire saga of its own which we won't even touch here). After said repairs I desperately needed to get out of apartment-from-hell and clear my head, so I decided to go to the main branch of the Brooklyn Public Library (Grand Army Plaza).

As I approached the plaza and the Prospect Arch came into view, it dawned on me what a long time it had been since I last went to the library...but in years past, I was in and out of this beautiful and historic library all the time, and it was one of Thomas' and my regular meeting places. No sooner had these thoughts surfaced when it dawned on me, suddenly and all at once: the last time I was in this library, I *was* with him.

I couldn't take it anymore. In the middle of Grand Army Plaza, I broke down and cried. And cried some more. It was as if the floodgates broke and everything that I have been trying so hard to hide behind a resolute, stoic facade just washed away. For a few seconds I really felt as though I could not breathe as the awesome weight of the massive changes and emotional watershed that 2013 has wreaked on my life just crashed over me.

By the end of this year, nothing in my life will look like what it started out as in the beginning of the year: a new job, a new apartment, new friends, and the list goes on and on. Someone recently said that immediately preceding all great changes in life is chaos. It took a while for that to sink in, but I now fully believe it to be true. It's undeniable that many good, necessary and positive changes in my life have converged on 2013 as the year to come to fruition. And in the midst of choosing to focus on and celebrate the good, it becomes easy to relegate all the pain and heartache to the shadows, to sweep what we don't like under the rug in hopes that out of sight really is out of mind. But I've found out the hard way that a more balanced approach is often required. Ignoring our demons can really come back to bite us. Maintaining a frenetic schedule and hoping that the pain will get lost or at least numbed in all the business may work for a while, but sooner or later we have to pay the piper.

So I look for and crave balance. Ways to honor and not forget my friend's legacy even when I'm caught up in the daily blur of New York life. Ways to remember and cherish the good memories and allow myself a little breathing space to reflect and grieve if I need to. In the end, I think he would be proud of me - where I am in my life now, how I'm handling very adult situations and challenges and even how I've handled his passing. And sometimes I even get the sense that he's still walking quietly beside me.