I should have known something was wrong when I didn’t receive the standard five phone calls from Billy, the guitarist of my band, on a day we were supposed to practice. Billy is a pushy guy; he knows how to get what he wants from people while still being pleasant. He’s my only straight best friend. Not that I only run with gays, but coming from a small town, I never expected to have a friend like him. I called him to check up on things.

“Billy, what’s up?” I said.

“Not much,” he replied, and then paused for a time.

“Well, after I didn’t hear from you every hour on the hour, I got worried, so are we practicing?” I asked trying to break through the awkward tension that had grown out of his uncharacteristic quietness.

“Well, no I don’t think so, man, my … well, something happened … my dad died today.”

I almost vomited after hearing this. I didn’t even know Billy had a dad. I only knew his mom and that his parents were divorced. Billy never talked about his dad to me. I didn’t know what to say.

I talked to him a little while longer and offered to go to his house, but he said he wanted to be alone. I hung up the phone in a haze. I knew I should go to his house despite what he said. When you play music with someone or create some kind of art with someone, it’s rare that some kind of indestructible connection doesn’t form. Billy and I complete each other’s sentences musically; we think along the same lines. We’re connected in a way that I can’t appropriately articulate. It’s not friendship; it’s not sex; and it’s not family. It’s something different.

Because of this connection, I found myself in my car headed for Billy’s house, praying silently in hopes that he wouldn’t be mad at me for showing up. His girlfriend greeted me, and we both went downstairs. Billy kind of filled up when he saw me, ready to cry, the way you do when you see friendly faces during a rough time.

His father’s death meant so many things. It meant that he really was the “man of the house” even though he basically played that role already because of his parent’s divorce. But now it was different. He is William L. O’Brien Jr., his father’s namesake. The weight on Billy, an eternally skinny boy, was clear in his puffy eyes and his soft voice.

I hugged Billy; I hugged him not only for the grief he was bearing, but also because it was kind, because he needed to have a friend be there for him, because it was the right thing to do. While hugging this guy who’s friendship I never expected, I realized how strong my friends are, how strong people are and how dangerously lucky I am.

I am lucky because I have no idea what it is like to lose someone as close to me as a father or a best friend, unlike my friends, unlike many people I come in contact with daily. I have no grandparents; they passed before I could really and truly understand what was happening. A young man who killed himself while I was in high school was only an acquaintance of mine. I was there for my friends who were really devastated by his terrible departure, but I had no idea what it was like.

I know that someday I will have the unfortunate occasion to lose someone close to me, and I know it will be devastating. I look at my friends who have dealt with traumatic experiences in life and stayed strong in the face of such trauma, and I am amazed.

I think of my friend Airline (yes, his name is Airline) who doesn’t know his mother and whose father has passed away. He is one of the most brightly energetic people I know, and it’s amazing to me. It’s not that I think that people who have lost their parents would or should be in a constant state of paralyzing grief, but if I lost my parents, I would be in terrible shape. Airline may not be as happy as he lets on, but his ability to even attempt to put on a front impresses me.

I think of my friend, Anne, who is one of seven or eight (or perhaps more) children, all by different fathers. She has led a considerably normal life with her biological father who loves her dearly. Her ability to deal with her mother’s history of drug abuse, alcoholism, careless sex and the resulting births of children into such an environment dumbfounds me. She has no relationship with her mother, and she doesn’t want to. I see in her this need to be what her mother wasn’t, someone who will make it.

I guess we are all the sum of our experiences, traumatic and otherwise, but for someone who holds onto pain so hard, I am continually inspired by people who can let go of this pain, who can hang onto the world around them when those who they have needed have gone away.

I drove up to the wake for Billy’s father with a lump in my throat. I didn’t want to see his mom in black; I didn’t want to see Billy looking tired and horribly sad, having not slept in days; I didn’t want to see Billy’s younger brother, Mike, hanging around by himself; I didn’t want to see the body of a man I never met in a casket.

I saw all these things as I walked in, and I wanted to cry so bad at that moment. I wanted to cry because it wasn’t fair, because it’s never fair. A young man, not even 18, should not be spending time with his dad while he lays lifeless in a casket. I walked over to Bill. I hugged him again, this time harder, in comfort and private wordless anger at fate or God or whoever who had brought Billy to this place.

It’s been a year since his father’s death and I know Billy thinks of him every day. He is still the same pushy Billy; he can live his life, of course, because he is a strong person, because we learn from pain that we must continue living. There are some moments, however, when I can see it, when I can see Billy re-living the moment he learned that his dad had died. I am frightened when I see that in his face because I know I will share experiences like that in my own life. But what happens later calms my fears – Billy comes out of it; he comes back to his normal self, and he goes on living.

Thomas Naughton is a Collegian columnist.