So this is it…

It’s over
I don’t wanna look
‘Cause I don’t want it to end
‘Cause I’ve traveled all over this big old world
And it’s so hard to find a real friend
People come and people go
In and out of your life
And it don’t take long to realize
The real thing don’t come every day
When I was up, I had so many friends
When I was down, they were gone so fast
And you were always the one who stayed
And why do we have to wait until it’s gone
To know what love is?

– Trey Anastasio – “Friend”

My best friend Courtney died last Sunday. I am gutted, destroyed. I ended up here to remember her. This journal started in 2001, and she’s in all the entries then and throughout. She was my best friend for 27 years.

Al called me on Saturday, said I should really reach out to her, that he had talked to her and she was crying. Her toxic boyfriend of the past seven months kicked her out, packed up all her belongings and dropped them off at the end of her mother’s driveway. Colin cried when he saw her glasses, afraid she was already dead. And it was only a matter of time. 48 hours later, she was dead.

I had set a boundary with her back in October. It stemmed from a few separate incidents. In June, on the last day of my sister’s bachelorette in Aruba, she called me in a psychosis after a crack/coke binge with some loser. She thought her mom and Bob were outside and saying that they were taking Colin. She thought Scott was at her mom’s house. She said they were arrested. It made no sense. I spent my sister’s last celebratory day as an unmarried woman in a daze. I couldn’t shake the anxious feeling, wishing there was something more I could do for her, while also wishing I could be more present and relaxed for my sister.

I was so distraught, worried about my friend, this friend who understood and loved me despite my darkness all these years.

Then again, in July, same kind of thing, but this time she thought that her stepdad, Bob, was talking about killing her because she would be better off dead. Colin was there, too. She called the cops on him and went two houses down to the driveway of her late grandmother’s house. That’s when her mom finally was persuaded by Bob and her daughter Katey to kick Courtney out.

Since Courtney was already dating the toxic guy named Don, she moved in with him. But their relationship sucked and didn’t help anything. He’d go on long hunting trips with no specific end date after their fights. I know that was a trigger for her because my earliest messages with her on this phone center around how she blamed the downfall of her marriage on time away from one another. Granted, that was drug related, too, but she said that it was a recipe for disaster to spend nights out and overnights away. And in talking to Scott at her burial site, he said as much about his suspicions about her when he’d go away on missions trips. And same for her. She would spiral when he was away.

I set a boundary with her when she called me and told me she had been in a car accident because of a seizure. She blamed Wellbutrin, an antidepressant that she and I were both taking. I stopped drinking altogether once I started taking it because I heard there was a seizure risk. However, this story didn’t sound quite right and she was at Rob’s house, saying Don wouldn’t let her come home because she was at the hospital all night and he thought she was cheating on him. It sounds like the truth of that night was that she was talking to Rob Anderson on the phone the day before, presumably about drugs, and then he got the news that his mom died in the house. She went there within ten minutes and he claims, at least in his messages with her sister, that her presence was great solace to him as she cried with him as he laid next to his mom waiting for the medical examiner to come.

However, Scott told me that Bryan told him that he pulled it out of her that she was on fentanyl when she got in the accident. This is consistent with the story she told me because she said the police reported that she kept trying to get them to leave her alone so she could go back to sleep (in line with nodding out, not seizing.) In talking to Rob, even though Courtney said she went to the hospital after, she did not. They went back to his mom’s to sleep a bit. He claimed she wasn’t there when she said she was. Who knows the truth? Who can possibly know?

This is all I can write for now. I was hoping to come to some powerful insight at the end of this, but it only sent my wheels spinning and spinning. I am hoping that writing can help me through this, but I also realize that nothing might fully repair me from this one.