Something I tend to do a lot, as well as a confession.

[LuckyCharms]

12. I'll tell you something that is kind of eating me up with guilt...

and I'm typing it because I just saw it online now.

I used to work with this guy. I wouldn't say we were friends, but we were good acquaintances, and we liked each other. He was older than me.

He got in a habit of calling maybe twice a month. And it was always in the evening, and we would be on the phone for 3 to 4 hours. He did most of the talking. The last time he called...I was tired. i couldn't handle a long phone call. So I politely said I have to go after about 30 minutes of conversation.

Then, he died. Suddenly. a few days after that.

And that tore me up. I cut the guy off. And he fucking died.

I'm wondering if he knew he was on the way out, and he needed to talk to someone? It seems strange to me, because he was a popular guy with a lot of friends, and I still have no idea why he liked talking to me so much. We we were kind of close I guess, but not that close.

So I wrote a long tribute to him in his obituary, and I wish I would have gotten to know him better.

Right after that, I remembered something. There was another guy I worked with that I was closer to. Several years before the guy in this story died, this guy that I was a bit closer to called me on a holiday, maybe Thanksgiving, I can't remember. He called to wish me a happy whatever holiday it was. I had a house full of people and I said "Can I call you back tomorrow"? He said sure. This was on a landline, and before the days of caller ID (at least we didn't have caller ID). I just had a regular old fashioned phone.

I went to call him back the next day, and I couldn't find his fucking phone number. I had it written down somewhere, and I couldn't find it.

So I never called him, and he never phoned me back.

So after this first guy in this story died, I remembered that incident. And I moved heaven and earth to try to find this second guy's phone number to call him after all those years and apologize for never calling him back. By this time, cell phones were in use. I couldn't find his number anywhere online. I ended up finding the number of a business that one of his relatives owned out of state. I called the business and asked for my friends number and which state he was living in.

I got his number, called him, and we re-connected.

I never want to experience again the feeling of having cut someone off in a conversation, and then having them pass away.