I Said Goodbye To My Friend Tory Brown Yesterday…
Originally published to Facebook on Aug 10, 2018
On November 3, 2013, my dear friend Tory posted the following on her facebook wall: “When I die and go to heaven, God is going to say, “Nope, remember what you said on Facebook!”
Not even 5 years later, those of us who had known and loved her would have to grapple with the fact that she was gone. Much, much too soon.
And although I’m still trying to wrap my mind around losing one of my oldest and closest friends, I felt like I needed to write about her and what her loss means to me. Eulogizing sounds way too formal, and honestly none of this seems real, so I don’t even want to call it that. I just want to tell you some cool things about my friend.
So I thought I would open this “telling of the cool things” by highlighting some of the stuff she said on facebook, because it was hilarious, and it was thoughtful, and it was her. There really was no disconnect between her presence online and who she was in person.
She would post hilarious jokes, like the imagined conversations between God and His angels when creating some of the world’s many creatures:
God Creating Butterflies
G: Gimme a fly.
A: Ok
G: Make it FABULOUS!
A: WHAT? Like THIS?
G: YAAASSS, HUNNY, SLAY!!!
Other times, she would ask the tough, thought provoking questions, like when she was told that her problem was that she “just wanted her cake and to eat it, too.” To which she replied, “Yes. Yes I do. After all what good is a god damn cake you can’t eat?!” I mean, it was a logical question!
Still other times you could find her in the comments section of some hot, ghetto mess type of post, battling some ignorant fool’s sexist comments head on, taking on all challengers, and calling out their bullshit for what it was — because it’s what she would do in real life. She would let those jokers have it! If you came into a space popping off and talking junk about women or gay people or people of color, you were getting clowned. Period. She wasn’t the type to sit quietly by and let others be down-talked for being who they were. She stood up for what was right. She had been that way for as long as I’d known her.
You might even find her occasionally in a moment of vulnerability like when she recounted being approached by a cop with his gun drawn on her as she sat in her car before he saw that she had a cane and a bag of groceries. Discussing the moment unburied feelings of terror and utter helplessness for her, but she was doing it to help enlighten people about the plight of another woman in the news. I’m sure it felt like re-opening a wound to bring that back up, but she rehashed it to do her part to help that woman not be judged unfairly for how she responded to a similar encounter.
No matter what she was saying or where, she presented herself truly, honestly and consistently. It is a testament to that realness and that consistency that you can find similar themes weaving themselves through the comments her many friends and family have posted about her since her passing. One after another, folks talked about how funny she was, or how much fun they had with her, or how much she was there for them as a true friend. I envision these themes as beautiful, colorful threads connecting the fabric of our memories into the dopest quilt. The nerd in me imagines this quilt as the magical kind that adjusts to provide the perfect amount of warmth and comfort for any given scenario, and that it’s doing its part right now to try to comfort us today.
(Side note: I’m writing this on what has turned out to be a very eventful and triflin’ round trip Greyhound bus ride. It’s the kind of triflin’ that I can’t help but feel would amuse Tory greatly, considering a little person just got on in Chattanooga and delayed our pull-off because he was stepping all on seats, refusing to put his ridiculously over-sized bag under the bus. It was a whole scene and a half, and I’m sure she would’ve been rollin’ over it. But I digress…)
In the minutes, hours and days following the news that Tory had transitioned, I went to her page just to read the comments from her loved ones. I was and still am struggling to make sense of all this, and reading folks’ notes about her made me feel less alone in this battle. You see, Tory is the first person I’ve ever lost that was close to me at the time of their passing. The closest thing I’ve come to that was when I found out my high school guidance counselor had passed away. But she was easily in her 70’s or 80’s when it happened, and we hadn’t spoken since shortly after I graduated. It affected me, but nothing like this. This is a feeling — a pain — that I am completely unfamiliar with, and I’m struggling to connect the dots on this one. Right now, I exist in a limbo-shock of not entirely believing any of this is true and yet knowing she’s gone. To put it succinctly, I simply cannot accept this loss.
I had JUST spoken with her a few weeks before that terrible day. It was an uncharacteristically emotional phone call; one in which we told each other that we loved each other, and I told her how much she mattered to me. I would never have imagined that that would be the last conversation I would ever have with my friend, the last time I would hear her voice. I would never have thought that this huge presence in my life, this person who co-piloted some of the best times I ever experienced, one of my closest compadres for over 20 years would just be gone barely a month later. It feels impossible to come to terms with that.
When I first met Tory, I was on the brink of turning 18, an enrolling freshman on the University of Minnesota, Morris campus. It was the first time I was really living away from my family, and I was in new territory — and the whitest place I’d ever traveled to, rural Minnesota. I was excited to start my life in a new place and maybe reinvent myself, but I was also very nervous because I didn’t know anyone. I was incredibly shy and wasn’t very good at making friends. It wasn’t something I’d mastered in high school, and I wasn’t sure I’d be able to fare much better in college. Tory would often recount how weird she thought I was because I would just sit nearby in silence, watching everyone with my big ol’ eyes “just staring at people” as she put it.
It is true that I have always had large eyes and I was busying myself with observing people, trying to learn about them so that maybe I could get to know them. So when I met Tory and her friend and roommate (and former high school classmate) Shawntan — both sophomores — I likely was staring at the both of them. Both were really tall girls, and when I met them, I thought “They wear glasses, kinda nerdy like me! But they’re so tall nobody must mess with them. And everybody seems to know them.” And I thought it would be an awesome thing to be friends with them. But I didn’t know how to become friends, so I just stared in the beginning. But a funny thing happens when a bunch of black kids from the city get uprooted and transplanted into an all-white country town hundreds of miles away from home — you become a community. Loosely assembled in some places, tightly knit in others, but a community nonetheless. It’s the kind of accelerated gelling that happens as a side-effect of our circumstance that might not have happened otherwise. So over the course of that year, we got to know each other and we did become friends.
Later on, Shawntan moved off campus, so Tory was in need of a roommate for an on campus apartment, so we thought I would make a suitable substitute. I was a little apprehensive about moving in with her because although we were developing a friendship, you never really know a person until you share an apartment with them — until you’re sharing a bathroom and a kitchen and a fridge with them. We risked being at each other’s throats if things went south. But in the end, we took the leap. It was easily one of the best decisions I’d ever made in my young life because it revealed to me a truly kindred spirit in Tory that I wasn’t even aware that I needed. It bonded us quickly. And now I wonder who I would be without that experience.
Living with Tory was like living with a further advanced, less inhibited version of me; a future me, of sorts. Whatever I thought I loved about video games, she was on 10 with it! I LOVED music, and wanted desperately to dance at parties, but lacked confidence to do it. She was all over the dancefloor not giving a fuck. I was coming into my own with profanity; she cursed like a sailor. I was endlessly curious but reserved; no topics were off limits for her. My humor was sarcastic, dry and understated; hers was sarcastic and boisterous. I think that when a person comes across someone who is a more evolved reflection of themselves, it can go one of 2 ways: Person A can come to resent Person B because they are all the things Person A wants to be but isn’t, or Person A can learn from and be influenced by Person B and grow from the experience. Tory was an infectious personality. She was bound to rub off on me, so I went the way of the latter.
In each other, we found a complimentary partner in mischief, engaging in various adventures and shenanigans. Sometimes that mischief turned inward, as when Tory would sneak into my room and move different objects just lightly because I would notice that something was “off” but would not be able to put my finger on what it was, and it would drive me nuts (she didn’t admit to doing this until years later). But usually we just enjoyed chillin’ and actin’ a fool together.
One of the first memories that immediately came to mind when I read of Tory’s passing was the time that we went on a stealth mission to jack a large stash of toilet paper from a nearby unlocked maintenance closet. I had to go to that particular building regularly to see a counselor because I was battling crippling depression at the time. On one of my visits, I noticed that a maintenance closet was left ajar and it contained the holy grail of toilet paper supplies. This was before the days where I qualified for food stamps, so toilet paper was at a premium. I got back to our apartment and reported the treasure trove of fibrous sheets, and because we had no one there to talk us out of this madness, we devised a plan to pull off the heist of the century. This “heist of the century”, mind you, involved us simply casing the joint at night when the campus cleared out, and testing the closet door to see if it was open after hours. At the time, it seemed like a caper on par with “The Italian Job” as we made off into the night with armfuls of pilfered paper, but it was more like a “Phineas and Ferb” adventure. We really weren’t that hard core. In any case, it was exhilarating as hell! I just remember us giggling and running across campus holding it all. And we were never discovered. In Scooby Doo parlance, WE were the meddling kids and we HAD gotten away with it.
Sometimes I think back on the time we lived together, and it occurs to me that we really might’ve benefitted from having a chaperone because one of us was always down for whatever nonsense the other suggested. We drove my rust bucket ’87 Chevy Cavalier over 550 miles from Morris, Minnesota all the way to Chicago when we KNEW Ol’ Unreliable never should’ve crossed state lines!! Perhaps a clear-thinking, responsible friend like Shawntan could’ve made us stop to reconsider had we bothered to run the idea by her and then listen to her input. But nooooo. That was not our way. Our way was more like “Hey, you feel like driving back home for spring break?” “Yep! Let’s do it!” So we did, never thinking about the age or condition of my extremely used up automobile. And then we had the nerve to be surprised when it broke down on the way back — due to a faulty catalytic converter — in the dead of night, somewhere in the middle of Wisconsin.
We were cruising along, chillin’, when we noticed the lights in the car started to fade out and then went completely black PRECISELY at a time when we most needed them! Next thing we knew the engine stopped and the car slowed to a stop. We had no idea where we were or what happened, so, in the days before widespread cell phone use and GPS systems, we got out and started walking down that dark ass highway to look for help. We were both scared as shit, man.
And even in recounting this, it’s not my car breaking down that is the first thing I remember from that ill-advised trip. It’s us blasting our riding playlist. Notable favorites were “Home Alone” by Keith Murray because it had us bouncing so hard to the beat, “Hit ’Em Wit Da Hee” by Missy Elliott, where we would always (Every. Single. Time.) switch out Missy’s name for Tory’s and mine according to whoever was rapping the part, and “Gone ’Til November (Remix)” by Wyclef because you couldn’t tell us nothing when we were belting out “Meeeee-chelle, my belllllllll!” at the top of our lungs. That’s what I remember most.
We were down for each other in ways both serious and hilarious. In one instance, I helped her to defeat The Legend of Zelda game purely by being her wingman. She kept getting stopped at one point in it, and she was getting frustrated to the point of wanting to quit. We heard that there were instructions on how to flip the game somewhere on the internet. But because Google didn’t exist yet, it was damn near impossible to locate them and folks who had them weren’t so open about sharing that fact. Getting our hands on them was like finding the Lost City of Atlantis — you hear legend that something exists, but you doubt it until you actually see it. The day she got her hands on the cheat codes was one of the happiest of our household. We set aside huge chunks of time dedicated to nothing but beating that damn game — and I didn’t even play it! My only role was to provide moral support, get the occasional snack or drink and read the instructions while she followed the steps. When characters came out to attack and kill her character, we both screamed and freaked out. We’d have to retreat to gather ourselves. We became frantic like it was a movie and we were trapped in its script. When she succeeded in a stage, we here high fiving and celebrating together. I never had a desire to play Zelda, but that assist put me in the game and was a highlight of my gaming career.
Later that year, Tory would provide me the necessary assist in a much more serious circumstance.
Growing up, I was never a big reader. In high school, I actively avoided books. My family moved around a lot, and often we were surviving by living in motel rooms, all 4 of us jammed into a single space to eat, watch tv, talk, sleep and — in my case — do homework. It wasn’t an environment conducive for reading and concentrating on the content of novels for my English classes. Because I couldn’t focus enough to make it through complete readings of assigned books, and I was struggling with understanding abstract concepts of “deeper hidden meanings” of authors I didn’t know, I began to believe that something was wrong with me. I believed that I was stupid. I carried that insecurity on to college where I continued to struggle with pushing through assigned readings. I would grab the Cliffs Notes and try to flub through my papers based on them, with mixed results.
During one “gotcha” moment in class, my Cliffs Notes reliance was discovered, and I realized I could no longer just lean on that or I would fail that class. But I developed an intense anxiety over reading the books when I tried to digest them and was still struggling. I went into panic mode, a tailspin. Tory came in with the MVP-level assist. She stepped in to speed read the books and give me chapter-by-chapter summaries (including the precious details Cliffs Notes often lacked), and we would discuss the themes present in the novels and what larger meanings we thought they had. I would use all of that to write far better papers than I had done before. She did this with me for at least 2 or 3 big novels — I remember “Invisible Man” being one and she remembered “Moby Dick” being one. She saved my bacon that year, as I’m sure I would’ve failed without her help. All I needed to do was to ask for help, and she jumped in without a second thought.
As I briefly mentioned before, I was struggling with undiagnosed depression back then. I had always dealt with it as a kid, but I lacked the emotional vocabulary to recognize and verbalize what I was feeling. So I pushed it down as long as I could, but it came roaring back once I got to college, but in college I couldn’t function with it. Until I was prescribed medication for it, I stopped going to class. I was failing all my classes because I couldn’t get out of bed. I spent many days where I only left my dark room to go to the bathroom. I was barely eating and I wasn’t bathing. I mentally crashed unexpectedly, and Tory had to witness it first-hand. She supported me through it, giving me a bit of space to not overwhelm me, but frequently checking on me. She brought me food because I couldn’t will myself to get up and make it for myself. She kept the household running smoothly until I got the treatment and the meds that I needed. And we never really talked about that time once it had passed. It was just understood that that was what friends do for each other.
On the more light-hearted side, Tory and I just had a great time together, man. And music was a huge part of that. All on-campus apartments had a large front facing window in the living room. I don’t even remember how we came up with this idea, but one year we decided that it would be dope to draw back the curtains from our living room window as if to reveal a stage, turn the lights off in the whole apartment and then turn up my tape/3-CD changer boom box to full volume and put on a full-on rock concert — right in front of the window, using nothing but average household items. No regard was given to our neighbors other than the fact that we were doing it before sleeping hours. Tory would grab pencils, pens, markers or chop sticks and bang on the table like she was playing the drums, and I would grab the broom and strum it like a guitar. We’d typically do this to Jimi Hendricks or something like that. And when we were really inspired and feeling spicy, we’d play Wyclef’s “Yele”, and I’d ditch the broom for flashlights that I would twirl while I spun and danced around the room. I was putting on a light show for our non-existent audience. We legit thought this was a great idea.
(Side note: such was my obsession for flashlights that Tory bought me a Mag-lite as a graduation present!)
The concerts drove our Resident Director nuts! She would run, huffing and puffing, to our door, her blonde, stringy hair all disturbed, yelling at us “You have to TURN THIS MUSIC DOWN!!” We would innocently give her the nod, and when she left from earshot, we’d descend into fits of giggles and turn it right back up. I know she hated us! But we loved it! We just got each other, man.
Tory inspired me to dance in the center of any given dancefloor. My whole freshman year, I was too scared to dance in front of people. On campus, I was surrounded by a bunch of Chicago kids that all knew how to dance amazingly, and I felt incredibly lame by comparison, so I quietly practiced in corners at the parties. I completely lacked confidence. Well Tory didn’t have that problem, at least not by the time I lived with her. At any party, she was front and center, so I drew encouragement from that and began moving more into the open with my fledgling moves. By the end of our time at Morris, we could always be found on a dancefloor, be it at a house party or a campus dance or a local bar, being completely carefree and hyping each other up to the music. Dancing has become an integral part of who I am as a person and how I express myself. It’s hard to believe I was ever that kid staring out at the floor longingly, wishing I could be down. Tory’s influence helped to propel me forward into the dancer I am today.
During one of our excursions to Minneapolis, we went to the club The Gay 90’s. At the time, as far as we both knew, no member of our winning duo was gay. I had been attracted to women since I was 5 years old, but still wasn’t ready to acknowledge that fact at 21 years old. As far as I was concerned, we both just loved going to “The 90’s” because they had multiple rooms for different music types, and we loved to party there. While we were dancing in the techno room, Tory was on the floor in front of the main stage and I was up on the stage when I felt hands start rubbing up and down the sides of my body. I remember being shocked because I knew it couldn’t have been one of our classmates we made the trip with. I froze and looked down at Tory, trying to catch her eye. I’m sure my eyes were bulging. When she looked at me, I discreetly pointed my thumb towards my back and pantomimed (in a most animated fashion) 2 body shapes, one for a man and one for a woman. She knew exactly what I was asking: “Was the person rubbing all on me a man or a woman?” I had never had a woman dance with me before like that and I was panicking at what to do.
She bounced back at me the symbol for a woman and waited to see my response. I tried to play it casual by shrugging “Okay” and going back to dancing, but my heart was racing. Tory went on like nothing ever happened. Later that year, after I finally decided to come out to her, we both cracked up over my shook face that night on the dance floor. She had no idea that I was struggling so much internally with my sexuality. And at the time, she also had no idea how much I appreciated that she just reacted like it was no big deal for a chick to be dancing and rubbing on me. It helped me to be cool with it because she reacted so cool to it. It made coming out to her much easier.
Buried somewhere in my home are recordings of an episode of the weekly radio show we did on our college radio station called “The Sweet Escapes Show”. Only she would remember that we got the name from a candy bar in a campus vending machine. I wish badly that I’d gotten the tapes converted to digital long ago so that I could’ve sent them to her. I know she would’ve loved it. Hands down, we had the dopest radio show on KUMM, period. We focused on playing R&B and hip-hop, but we also played dance music, house music and a little reggae, but the thing that made it dope was the chemistry of the hosts: me, Tory and our pseudo-roommate Stephanie. We got the show during our last year at Morris. I had put in my time on KUMM in previous years by reading the news during other people’s shows while school was in session, and I spent the summer on campus doing a solo radio show while school was out. So when a prime spot opened up for the new school year, the station manager gave it to me. I couldn’t think of a person I’d rather do a show with than Tory.
We had the same taste in music, and often could be seen singing and dancing around campus. One of our favorite memories to reminisce on happened on an average day after an English class. We were walking up the stairs in the HFA building when out of nowhere, I began some spastic walk and busted out with “IF YOU SEE A FADED SIGN AT THE SIDE OF THE ROAD…” and Tory picked right up with “IT SAYS FIFTEEN MILES TO THE LOOOOVE SHACK!!” We were both in this cavernous, echoing building, bopping up the stairs and singing The B-52’s “Love Shack” at the top of our lungs, not giving a damn who it might be disturbing. Because when “Love Shack” calls, you simply MUST answer it. For us, doing a radio show was really just carrying over our antics from living and hanging together into the deejay booth and adding more music to it. We brought in our friend Stephanie to round out the trio because we just knew we’d be the bomb combination. And it was a fucking blast, man. I loved every second of that time, from recording our promo drops, to mixing on the boards, to clowning around about our experiences as black women from the city existing in a tiny, white farm town. In fact, we had a short Grinding My Gears-type of segment in each show dedicated to Tory going off about what ridiculousness bothered her for the week.
We joked so much on the show that we used to be damn near in tears. There was this crazy white dude on campus that was obviously racist, and he wrote some controversial (read: thinly veiled racist) article in the campus paper that year. Somehow we’d had the occasion to speak with him once or twice — it may have been in class. He talked slow, like he was slow thinking and not very confident, and yet that didn’t stop him from voicing his foolishness, although he was much braver in written form that when you talked to him in person. He was the precursor to the keyboard gangster. During that short conversation, this fool was saying something about Black people, but when he got to the descriptor of “black”, he would drop his voice down to a whisper. Literally every other word in his sentence was spoken at a normal volume except for the word “black”, as if it were a racist word he couldn’t use. As if he were confusing it with a whole different word that was actually racist, and he couldn’t tell the difference. Of course, we had to re-enact that during the following week’s show. We joked about that dude so much — him, and the way white folks pronounced “chitterlings” — that we could barely compose ourselves.
And beyond all these laughs, and tense “Will they finish the book reading/paper writing in time” moments, we enjoyed normal, quiet, often meaningful conversations that further revealed the strength of character that she had. We often spoke about family — my dysfunctional dynamics in contrast with her healthy ones. She spoke often of her relationship with her older sister Veleka, a relationship filled with a lot of love and a little bit of annoyance, as can be expected. I think one of the things that she valued about our friendship was that, to me, she was finally able to be a big sister after always being the baby sibling.
She absolutely adored her mother and her father and often spoke lovingly about them, which I valued because my relationship with my own mother was tenuous at the time, and I had no relationship with my father because he had abandoned us. I barely knew him. Through her relayed experiences, I got to witness a positive take on parent-child bonds. And although she couldn’t identify with what I was going through with my parents, there was no awkward disconnectedness there. Instead, she focused on listening to me vent my feelings — of which there was no shortage — about my situation.
If it’s understood that getting through college is already difficult enough, one can imagine that the difficulty would be magnified if the person has no familial support system in place to lean on — and I didn’t. So when I was going through my crippling depression and failing my classes and trying to accept being gay, my family didn’t know about any of it and they didn’t ask. When I emerged from the depression and I rebounded to make the Dean’s List, it didn’t even make a blip on the family radar. My mother rarely called or wrote letters, and my brothers never did. I had spent my childhood being made to feel like I was weird and not like the other 3 members of my family. I was alone. I was an “other” in my own family unit, and I wished constantly that some other family would adopt me. They would be more like me, and I wouldn’t feel so alien anymore. I ended up meeting that “other family” at college in the form of my newfound friends. Their presence — of which Tory was at the forefront — was necessary for me to thrive. They made me feel normal and accepted, that I was actually liked and that I finally belonged.
Tory became my surrogate family. When I spoke, she listened. She cared. I did not have that with my own blood. I came into college completely guarded and shut off emotionally. It’s one of the reasons I was so quiet and shy when I first got to Morris — because no one typically gave a damn what I had to say or took me seriously. And even though I did learn to let go of much of those “protections” with my friends, I remained a tiny bit guarded from everybody but Tory, and that was purely because of the levels of honest conversations we had. There were times we talked about everything from relationships to personal hygiene, discussions in which she taught me things because my own mother was often too busy working to tell me about them. And I was never embarrassed to bring up something I didn’t know with Tory There was literally NOTHING we couldn’t talk about. We just had that kind of openness between us.
Tory was also very protective of those she loved. If she held you close to her heart, she wasn’t abiding by anyone hurting or disrespecting you. When my first real relationship fell apart and the guy broke my heart, I honestly think she hated him more than I did! Lord help him if she ever ran across him in the streets, because she was going to hurt the boy ON SIGHT! All because he made me cry. I had grown up in a family in which I was often pushed to the background and pushed around, so I had never known that level of protection and care and devotion and loyalty from anyone that was supposed to be close to me. It is, I think, one of the things that makes dealing with this loss so hard right now. She was down for me without fail and without question, in a display of uncommon loyalty, whenever I needed a friend, and it’s hard to find people like that. She was special. And I always thought I would get the chance to pay her back tenfold for what she’d done for me.
I mentioned before that our last conversation, which happened a month before she passed, was an uncharacteristically emotional phone call. I think my friends all know that I love them, like I know that they love me, but we don’t really talk about the emotion of it. I don’t know if it’s a hallmark of us being black or being from the city and having to grow up a little faster, or some combination of both, but we just don’t verbalize emotions or vulnerability that readily. And if anyone should be able to be vulnerable and show some cracks from the pressures we’re always under, it is Black people. But our parents buried that in order to survive, and we learned the same habits from them. I just so happened to have started therapy to learn to be more open with my feelings and more communicative when I called Tory on that day. There was something about what she posted that day on facebook that did not sit right with me, so I called her immediately. I put my impending business meeting on hold.
My friend was in pain. Pain from a few different sources, and she was feeling more down than I had ever heard her express before. She needed me to be communicative then. I told her about the beginning stages of my business plan and that I needed her to hang on because I was just getting ramped up, and I had a place for her. I told her the truth — that I didn’t know exactly what area she would head up, but it was going to be huge and I would make sure she got whatever she needed — bomb insurance, meds, whatever. In my mind, I knew it didn’t matter what area I handed to her, she was not going to let my endeavor fail. She would not let my shit fail. I knew I could trust her with whatever, and I wouldn’t have to worry much about it. We would figure out the details later; I just needed her to hang on. Whenever I got put on, I was going to put her on and we were going to wreck shit and take over. It was going to change our lives.
I told Tory that I loved her. I was desperate for her to hear me. I told her that she mattered greatly to me, that she was my ace and I needed her around. She mattered. And she told me that she loved me, too. I am incredibly grateful that we had the chance to say those words to each other, knowing how deeply each of us meant it. I got off the phone, and I told my business partner that I felt I wasn’t moving fast enough and I needed to do more, faster. This business was a means to help my friend, and I needed to get it off the ground. I never would’ve imagined our time was running out as fast as it ultimately did.
It absolutely devastates me that she won’t be around to benefit from any of this. She, the FIRST person on my list to be put on. The first person I thought of. The person who hyped up any idea I had that I felt good about. No hesitation, no secret envy, no frenemy bullshit. Nothing but unwavering support. No matter what venture I was entering, if I was winning, she was going to win. I never thought we would run out of time before we got the chance. It’s not fair. Every time I think about that, I get enraged. I want to start punching the shit out of anything near me. I understand that everything has its time, but I wish I had started this business venture 5 years earlier. Maybe it could have turned things around for her. Maybe it might have made a difference. Maybe she would still be alive today, if I had only started sooner.
And although our last conversation allowed us to express our love before she transitioned, which is all anyone can ask for, I could have done more. I knew that she was dealing with more health issues, but I didn’t know they would be as severe once she went into the hospital to get help. Still I should have called again. It was hard to hear her sound the way she did in our last call, but I stayed on the phone until she sounded better. And I thought I was getting through and making her feel better. But I was struggling to pick up the phone again to possibly hear her like that once more when I couldn’t get her anything to help ease her pain. I didn’t have extra funds to contribute, and I felt helpless. It didn’t occur to me until after she was gone that just my voice and my time might have helped in some way. I let her down when she needed me most in those last days. I didn’t handle the situation well. In her final moments in this life, I failed my friend. The depth of my regret over that is something I will live with for the rest of my life.
I’ve been wrestling with the question of what is the point of all this? What is the point of getting to know people and absorb them into your heart and loving them when the possibility exists that they may be taken from you prematurely? Why do we open ourselves up to this? This world of unimaginable pain, of grief, of regret, of seemingly bottomless reserves of sadness? Where once there was a lively force of nature spreading mischief and touching folks all over the world with her care and biting sense of humor and feistiness, now there is nothing, there is a void, because she’s just… gone? What the hell is that?? Why do we risk any of this? What is the fucking point?? I don’t understand it.
And then I think about the alternative of never having opened my heart to my friend Tory. And I think about the following lyrics from my favorite song from my favorite musical “Hamilton”, the song “Wait For It”:
“Love doesn’t discriminate between the sinners and the saints. It takes and it takes and it takes, and we keep loving anyway. We laugh and we cry and we break and we make our mistakes.
Death doesn’t discriminate between the sinners and the saints. It takes and it takes and it takes, and we keep living anyway.”
I understand that song in a totally different way now than when I first heard it. It hurts more. But it helps me to come to grips with all this. Love and death are part of our condition. We do it because we’re human and that’s just what we do. Doing it adds meaning to our lives.
I am crushed over this loss, with a sorrow I could never have imagined. My friend and sister is gone when I thought we would always be in each other’s lives. So I ask myself if getting to know and love Tory was worth the heartache I’m feeling right now. To answer this, I must ask the question of where I would be if I had never met her or we’d never befriended each other to the level that we did.
For starters, I might very well not be here at all. She was with me through what was the lowest depression I couldn’t fathom digging myself out of. I might well have killed myself. I was not eating, and I was getting weaker, and I didn’t care. She held the fort down, held me down while I was going through it and waiting for my Zoloft to kick in to pull me out of it. She helped me survive.
Academically, I would have failed at least one English Lit class that I needed for my major. But worse than that, my ability to be patient as I dug through and found value in densely academic writings would have been hampered. Maybe my graduation date would have been delayed. Maybe I would have failed more classes had we not been friends.
Most importantly, I think that I would be a completely different person if not for Tory. She helped me be cool with being the black girl nerd that I was. More than be cool with it, she helped me revel in that shit. She helped me to be me. We celebrated being just normal ol’ us in a way that is unlike my relationship with any of my other friends. She gave me confidence. She was animated and she pulled that out of me, too. She introduced unfettered joy — and hijinks — to me. She was an outlet for me so I wouldn’t be so bottled up and repressed. She helped me accept who I was meant to be a whole lot sooner by never judging me and loving me for me. She helped to shape for me what it meant to be a true friend, because if there was ever a physical embodiment of a “ride or die” friend, Tory Brown was it. She helped me to bloom and grow. She inspired me to dance, and — understanding how singularly important dancing is for my sense of release and self-expression and happiness — this may have been the greatest of all the gifts she gave me.
And I would not have laughed anywhere near as much I did if not for her.
I simply would not have enjoyed my life as much if not for my time with her. I can only hope that I gave her at least a fraction of what she gave to me. She was invaluable, and she was amazing. And if had it to do all over again, knowing that our time together would be so agonizingly and abruptly cut short and I would end up feeling this way, I would do everything the exact same way. The exact. same. fucking. way. My whole life I’ve hated the adage “It is better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all.” I thought it was bullshit and I didn’t believe it. I understand it now. I wouldn’t trade the time we had, however short it was, or the experiences we shared for anything in the world, despite my grief now. I wouldn’t even be the same person if I did. I’m indelibly changed for the good, and I’m grateful for that. And so I have to say that every moment we shared was worth it. I guess that’s the point of all this. That’s the why.
Once upon a time, we talked about co-writing some fiction based on one of my 70+ story ideas that I had stored in my vault. I remember when I sent her a handful of them. I’d never heard someone so excited about my ideas. She believed in me, in my skills. To date, she’s the only one who ever heard or read any of my ideas, outside of my wife. I trusted her that much. And once upon a time, I thought I could build a mini-empire with her right there every step of the way, like a consigliere. Well life intervened. Me and my homie, my road dawg, my ABC, had an unforeseen change of plans, so I’m going to have to adjust on the fly. It’s my new mission to make sure she is never forgotten. I already have a few ideas on how I can creatively incorporate her into my plans and make sure her name and her spirit live on in whatever path I take.
I am profoundly sad that Tory is no longer here in this plane making her mark, spreading her Tory-isms and impacting folks, but I am incredibly relieved that she is no longer in pain. At least there is that. The knowledge of that helped me get through the roughest days after I first heard the news.
In a particularly tough day last week, I thought about a picture she posted on facebook of a red bruise that appeared on her shoulder after a dream one night. She believed it was a message that her beloved mother had sent to her from beyond to let her know she was okay. I cried up to nowhere in particular, “Please just give me a sign that you’re at least at peace!” I don’t know what kind of sign I was hoping for, but nothing happened. Well, I said goodbye to my dear friend Tory yesterday. And in the middle of one of the roughest days of my existence, my homie sent me a sign that not only is she at peace but her sense of humor is definitely still intact. And it provided some respite.
I imagine she’s on the other side comforting folks, pranking others and laughing over it, and gleefully dancing with her mommy and daddy. And I’m happy with that. Those who loved her will miss her terribly, but we got her memory covered here in this realm, so she can focus on doing her thang in the next one. And we’ll see her around in the next lifetime.
With that, I say rest in peace, my friend. I will roll one up, and toss one back and watch some crazy ass anime in your honor.
Love, the little sister you never had but always wanted,
Nikki.
