nick post

_posts/2024-10-10-Nick.MARKDOWN

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+---
+layout: post
+title: "Personal: Nick"
+date: 2024-10-10 07:00:00 -0400
+categories: personal
+---
+
+**Summary:** This post is totally not about me, it's about a better man whom I consider my actual father figure in this lifetime.
+
+<!-- more -->
+
+### Birkenstocks & Owl Shit
+Once upon several lifetimes ago, I was an idealistic kid. I came down to Columbus from Marion to go to OSU and navigated through several course corrections, ultimately landing in forestry. I learned a ton. I still carry that knowledge in me today—tree identification, the bits and pieces it takes to do both aerial surveying of forests and managing watershed mechanics over a given set of decades. Then there was the owl shit analysis and bud counting that never seemed to end, all while wrapped up in a rain slicker with grease pens in the woods every spring to count the bud break and calculate the health of the crop.
+
+All this happened during an awkward process of self-discovery and a lifelong journey toward healing and transformation.
+
+- ![Young Jeff]({{ site.url }}{{ site.baseurl }}/images/1990-jeff.jpg)
+
+### School Jobs
+I came from a hometown family who worked hard to give me a chance, for which I will be forever grateful. I never really understood that back then, but I very much do now. But now is a topic for later in this fable. During those years, I was working part-time as a student. I worked at the OSU Main Library in acquisitions when, after a bit, I met Nick. I was a freshly minted 20-year-old post-teen man-child. I was also studying forestry and experimenting with everything except sex at that point. So, I was deep into the born-again-hippy mindset, and wearing my brand new Birkenstocks from Son of a Son of a Cobbler, on High St.
+
+Nick and I struck up a conversation that summer. He is roughly 20 years my senior and, to this day, one of the smartest, albeit complicated, people I have ever known. It felt great to have the ear of this super smart guy at my age. I wasn’t thinking about anything else then—it was just cool to sit on the Oval, our Campus “City Center” here in Columbus, and listen to him tell me about the Civil Rights movement, the Stonewall Riots, the history of gay Columbus, and how he had to watch all his friends die in the AIDS era, which was still ongoing for me too, even then.
+
+I was reading a lot of Kerouac then, as well as books about mycology and insect diseases, having tie-dye parties with a small group of collegiates in one another’s orbit talking about saving the world. I bought an initially stiff pair of Birkenstocks because, well, “earthing.”
+
+Then Nick asked me over for dinner.
+
+### One Week
+As I alluded to earlier, while I was a capable lad at that age, I struggled with being gay. A virgin at 21, until I decided it was time to show up for life and just let it happen. I had no designs about Nick whatsoever, but he became a teacher that night.
+
+He, being the consummate romantic, and me not so (at that time) much, well, we “hung out” for a week. Then awkwardly moved on from that short-lived, but personally beautiful, experience in the prism of my mind’s eye tonight. The unexpected thing? Well, it was Nick. He was so non-judgmental and all about support that he took me under his wing. Almost like a son. Granted, both he and I are raging Aquarian energy, all the way. So I guess it made sense, and to be honest, he was the best guide, ever, aside from Eddie and Lora.
+
+### Coordinates Set to Nowhere
+From that period forward, he and I were always connected. He saw me through my first crappy relationship that lasted 3 months, then the one that lasted a year with a good guy who loved to act, had an oddly resonant laugh, and a propensity for having good times with other guys while we were “together.” These were my shirt-off, dance-all-night, sweat-on-the-dance-floor years during my wine and beer sales career. It was physical, fun, loud, and ultimately, a rite of passage. I met his best friend Tom. He introduced my best friend Patty and me to Yellow Springs. He warned me against “raves,” so I probably avoided the party drug scene because of him. And life rolled raucously forward.
+
+- ![Tom]({{ site.url }}{{ site.baseurl }}/images/1990s-nick-tom.jpg)
+
+### Eddie
+Then one night, one of my super-wrong-direction friends pointed me in the best direction. He told me, “that guy with a shaved head was cruising you” one night when we were at the Columbus Eagle. Fuzzy math here, but 32 years later, I plan to die with Eddie at my side, or he by mine.
+
+### (My) Life
+Nick was always there in my relationship with Eddie. We had so many parties for our friends and family in the '90s and early 2000s before I got all ambitious about my tech career and moved us to Texas. So many movies—*Soylent Green*, *Out of Africa*, *A Single Man*, and so many others that are better and/or more important. Then, seemingly endless conversations about the history of retail over the past 100 years, with accurate historical knowledge. Or how gay and lesbian culture (it was a binary thing back then) achieved one little victory and/or ten setbacks at a time in his and my lifetime. These were the golden years of Nick, who wanted to retire in Cleveland after working at OSU for 35 years in the library system as a bright shining light of reason, hope, and memory.
+
+- ![Old Nick]({{ site.url }}{{ site.baseurl }}/images/2017-nick.jpg)
+
+### Stroke
+The stroke in 2017 changed everything for him directly, and then for the group of disconnected extended family around him. He had my number in his wallet, so I got the first call. Not being family, I tried to trace a web of names, finally settling on one who got in touch with his sister in Arizona and the four other people who became his POA and, at times, caregivers, for the next 7 years. One of the best things I did was to walk away from that after, as one part of a two-person financial POW team, we hired a financial manager through the Council of Aging who knew how to navigate the Medicare and elder-care systems we have in the U.S. With help, we got him into four places that helped him survive and make his own independent choices—at least until winter presents.
+
+### Winter
+Which came early this year. He had a second event that was diagnosed as a second UTI, but I gotta say this. When he went in for a grossly negligent, on-his-part, hernia surgery during his 7-year window? He went off the Titanic-level deep end into insanity. I thought it was the impacts of anesthesia and his brain injury, and I still do. But I now know what true dead-center paranoid loneliness and fear of death, someone-is-sucking-my-soul-out-of-my-dick-in-a-bad-way sounds like. He called me in 100% panic around 30x a day that week when he was in there for that surgery a few years back.
+
+So he had an event of some magnitude that was not diagnosed as a stroke by OSU. Yet, two of his other friends, one in particular, believe it was and had some form of conversation to that effect with one of his providers. We split the responsibility here, and it works.
+
+- ![Sick Nick]({{ site.url }}{{ site.baseurl }}/images/092024-nick.jpg)
+
+There’s so much that is right up in my face about this whole eight to immediately-two-week period. Watching and immediately noticing something had changed right before he went in for a UTI to OSU hospital. Then seeing him come out of that system unable to walk at all, with his hands starting to curl, and his grip on the light starting to loosen.
+
+I cried my *cry* last weekend. This week has been about being brutal, once again, for his sake. He’s safe. He’s housed. He’s fed. He’s cared for. He is truly secure. And… arguably much more importantly, he is 1) remembered, and 2) we are working to make sure his few tiny little wishes toward human decency and dignity are heard with things like a DNR and how Lori, tonight, took care to have me help her with a cremation outfit for someone she loves as much as I do. We chose a great Nick outfit, by the way, and he’s going to look amazing when he ascends to stardust with so many friends to lift him right the Hell up in flames.
+
+### Closing
+I’m still idealistic, just gray-bearded and road-weary at times myself. Yet, and this is the point, don’t let your stones go invisible. Be there for them as they crack, possibly all the way to dust. Just do it without judgment or purpose. Actually, there’s a cosmic precedent for not having a clue—that’s why it’s a formal archetype, “the blond.” There is power and beauty in this trust.
+
+Working with two other plugged in friends-of-Nick, who had the emotional budget, for this over the past two months? Another testament to Nick and, what I think is, his superpower: the ability to see others with unconditional love, to the ends of the physical earth, and beyond. It pains me to say this, I’m not religious, but this man? He has a saint in him. Why? Well, because of what I just concluded with first. But truly, for his lack of self-care. His financial stress, which he finally overcame before all this through focus and force, all while holding his heart in the hearth and burning like a slow ember—a Maya Angelou poem that makes you feel like the world deserves to be healed, not feared.
+
+Nick embraces the idea, *to me*, that it is not about (him) us, it's only about the people we can uplift around us, not for profit, but for the sake of being there, together.
+
+Nick's viewpoint is exactly that to me.
+
+> Think good thoughts. -- Nick Felt
+
+- ![My Guide]({{ site.url }}{{ site.baseurl }}/images/1991-Nick.jpg)
+
+### Footnote
+He's not dead. If you know him, go see him, call him, reach out. The time is right now. Winter has arrived but his ideals are forever and beautiful.
+
+And, if I learned anything from Nick in this time around the sun together during this lifetime, it's to face darkness with the light of Radical Hope. 
+
+Let me say that again. 
+
+RADICAL-MOTHER-FUCKING-TIE-DIED-UP-YOUR-ASS-HOPE-RIGHT-UP-THE-SPINE-HOPE.
+
+I love you Nick, and I am not alone in this. Nor are you. Ever.