Originally written 23 April 2015

Revised: 20 April 2021

Unspoke Words: in Memory of My Buddy

Ray’s gaunt face looked across at me from his bed. The pain there, visible but as unspoken of as the jumble of thoughts in my own mind. I wanted to tell him how much I would miss him. How important he had been to me during my initial “on my own” years. The friend who had always been there when needed even in distance when his rich deep “Hey Jer” would fill the earpiece on the phone.

But now, we both knew, this would be the last time I would see him. The cancer had spread to his brain and there were only a few days left in his short but impactful life. And as always with Ray, as it was a known reality, we did not have to talk about it. He asked me, how things were going with work, knowing that I was lost at this point in my career. He wanted me to talk about me and offer his gentle encouragement and support. Tell me to trust myself and how much he respected what I did and that I would be ok.

So I prattled on about the travel I had coming up and the new boss we had, that I had supported before his ascension to the big chair, and about my new car. All things unimportant to the moment, just passing the time before I would have to leave and head back south to my house and life 12 hours away. It was just us in his makeshift hospital room established in his nephew’s house. He did not want to die in Hospital. He wanted his family around and they were all there, the generations that he had helped raise and give warmth and encouragement to, as he had with me. They were outside the door. This was our time and they all respected that.

It had been 23 years since I had first met Ray over a bottle Saki. The saki had orignially been intended to share with Mary, a woman he had known since before he went to Vietnam. She had lived in Japan for a time, and he visited her there, on his R and R trips from the field. I had just moved into the large house as a lodger in one of the 6 bedrooms. Ray, another of the renters, had returned from Nam a few months before and was trying to pick up the pieces of his insurance business that had disintegrated after he was sent on the folly that was the US effort to stop the commies over there, so that we did not have to fight them on the streets of the US. As if…

It was late in the evening of my first day in the house and I had wandered into the dining room. After a hello and introductions he asked, “Have you ever had saki?” I was one year out of University, unemployed after a year of teaching and trying to figure out where I was going in life. By the end of that bottle, I had made the dearest and best friend a man could ever have.

Our backgrounds could not have been farther apart. He was the product of the Arkansas countryside, with a fundamentalist baptist preacher for a father. He spent more time picking cotton and tobacco than he did going to school. He left home and the biblical thrashings by his father, to come to Indiana at the age of 13 to live with an older brother, had reentered school, and worked hard, eventually going to University until his insurance business took up too much of his time and thus lost his education exemption and was drafted into the Army.

Ray was the youngest of 7 children. As became clear in the years ahead, he was also the best of the crop and became the central figure in the lives of all his family. In effect he became the patriarch and solver of problems, of which there were many. Perhaps in a way, I fell into his orbit in the same way as they did, coming to realize that if anything at all went wrong, Ray would be there when you needed him, dependable, caring, willing to listen, telling you to trust yourself.

That summer of 1970 brought me my first steps into true manhood, learning to be a man, learning to handle responsibility for my self and actions. Ray was there to offer comment when asked, or to pose a question that made me sort out the answer on my own. Though only 2 years older than me, he had already a lifetime of experience. And he had a way of steadying others when all was seeming to fall apart. He never told anyone what to do but by example showed that graciousness and being responsible for your actions would get you through most situations. As with most things, he was so right without making it obvious.

Our paths were interwoven for the next two decades though separated by distance. I was there as the best man for his first marriage which lasted less than a year, and there again for his second, just 6 weeks before I was with him in that bedroom of dying. The one thing foretold in that first night of meeting when Mary did not show up or call, leaving me the saki to share, was his lack of luck when it came to women. He would attract them for his kindness and willingness to help, and then they would move on.

But he never changed, he could not change, he did not have to change. He would rather have been the one helping than having to be helped. He was totally comfortable in his skin. Status or clothes or outward signs of success meant little to him. It was all about character. I’ve never known anyone who was so totally focused on the person in front of him irrespective of position, wealth or background. We were all equal human beings to him and deserved to be treated as such. As long as you were true and honest to yourself, you had his respect. I never wanted to lose that respect and so was inspired by him to be my better self.

As the years passed, and my work progressed to allow me some discretion of schedule, whenever I was on business within 6 hours driving distance from Ray, a phone call would have him outside my hotel room door for a weekend spent together. He owned a music management company so he could justify wandering anywhere. There would always be a big smile and a hug, and a case of ice cold long neck Strohs beer in the trunk of his Cadillac. And we would hit the road, visiting clubs and spending time together, and me receiving his healing touch for my soul.

In the late 80s, we both relocated to the south and ended up only 4 hours of interstate apart. And in a way, we had some of our best times together after that. He would come down for a long weekend, helping Paula with whatever she needed doing around the house, that I did not/could not/would not do; spreading his calm and caring. I would cook and we would sit up late every night talking about everything but in some ways not talking about the thing that I realized mattered most after he was gone. How much I needed and depended on him and the deep respect and brother love I had for him.

It was less than a year before his death that Ray had called and said he had found love, a true soul mate. She lived in New York City so he sold his business and moved there to be with her and they made plans for marriage with me to be his best man. It was a few months after that, that I got another call, that he had lung cancer. Ray had begun smoking while working the tobacco fields as a child. It was a constant with him for 30 years. I nagged him at every turn and he finally quit on a visit with us ten years earlier. But the die had been cast and by the time of discovery there were but a few months left.

Undeterred, he and his wife to be, set a date and invited friends and family to join in their ceremony scheduled for Valentine’s day, 1993. One of the biggest snowstorms in decades hit the city that weekend but it did not deter over 150 people from showing up from all over the country. He instinctively realized, it would give people who loved him, the chance to celebrate his joy of life, rather than mourn his death.

In a weekend filled with so many special moments, there is one that stands in my memory. At the wedding reception, when it came time for the newlyweds to do their waltz together, the sound system in the hotel had given out just at that point. We all stood awkwardly for a moment until someone said, “Let’s sing to them”. There was still silence as we all began to think about how it would work when Paula said, “We all know the words to ‘Let me call you sweetheart.”‘ And we began, and the room filled with our voices and we shared in the love and joy we had for Ray as they danced. Six weeks later, he was in that bed, in his nephew’s house.

And on that last day of the last weekend I was to have with him, we kept to our pattern of time together. Our friendship did not need to be spoken about. It was accepted, real, equal on both sides. And I left with the words “I love you. You are the best friend anyone could ever have”, not said. I tried to leave the impression that I would see him again soon, even though we knew that would not happen. I did not want to accept the reality that he was dying by saying “Goodbye”.

Two nights later, at 3 AM, I got the call from his nephew that he had passed, surrounded by his family. I have missed him every day since. And I’ve regretted not saying those unspoken words every time I think of him. He would have said, “It’s ok.Jer. I know, and understand.”

Post script: I had barely left the nephew’s house for the long drive home. My mind was swirling with so many thoughts and emotions so pent up from the weekend, when on the radio came a song, one that had to have come from Ray’s affect on the generous universe, speaking directly to me at that moment in time. It was Dr. John’s version of “My Buddy”. And as the words of the song played out, it released all the emotion and feelings that I had bottled up for so long. The tears flowed as I drove and listened to to the words I had not been able to speak.

My Buddy

Life is a book that we study
Some of its leaves bring a sigh
There it was written, by a buddy
That we must part, you and I

Nights are long since you went away
I think about you all through the day
My buddy, my buddy
Nobody quite so true

Buddies through all of the gay old days
Buddies when something went wrong
I wait alone through the gray days
Missing your smile and your song… 

Miss your voice, the touch of your hand
Just long to know that you understand
My buddy, my buddy
Your buddy misses you

Your buddy misses you, yes I do