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Unexpected goodbyes are shitty, ya know?
Listen, Tumblr. I know we don’t exactly have a close relationship (I tend to ignore you for months on end), but the past week has been one of the worst I’ve lived and I’d like to talk about it with you. Once I get everything out, I won’t have to rehash this again and again with friends who have already heard it. It’s a win/win—you get attention and I get to talk (or type) with no interruptions.
Flashback to Monday.
Monday started out amazingly. Woke up before the alarm, wasn’t tired or crabby. I even made it to work in less than fifteen minutes because I caught all green lights. My manager was his usual douchey self, but we weren’t trying to kill each other. Personally, I think that’s because we’ve started going out for a drink every Tuesday after we close the store, but that’s a different story for a different time. Everything at work was actually fine until I got a text from a very, very old friend of mine asking if I was busy. The sales floor was dead and I was walking around aimlessly. I told her to call me at the store. Two minutes later, my world was completely sucker-punched.
“Katie?”
“Hey, girl. What’s up?”
“I don’t… Something bad happened.”
“Sarah, what happened? Are you okay?”
“No. Ryan Goskie died this morning.”Cue Sarah’s tears. Cue my own tears.
Tumblr, let me tell you now about Ryan Christopher Goskie. Ryan and I met in our sophomore year in a chemistry class. He was intelligent, a charmer, mostly a smart ass, and had a smile full of perfectly blazing-white teeth that could stop somebody of either gender mid-sentence. It was a lot of us saying completely ridiculous things to each other while our friend Tom sat between us and shook his head. I eventually adopted the two of them into my core group of friends, which I kept to a rather small number anyway, and we spent many Friday nights drinking ourselves stupid at my house. (Just to clarify: My parents knew I’d hit the point where my friends and I were gonna be drinking just to experience it, so they were of the opinion that they’d rather have me at home instead of out somewhere while they worried. Smart on their part, I think.)
This next part becomes integral to story later on. Spring of our junior year, Ryan sent me a message on AIM (because it was still socially acceptable to use AIM at the time).
“Can I ask you a politically loaded question?”
“Sure?”
“How do you feel about abortion?”And that’s how it all started. A week later we were sitting in a conference room at a library in St. Louis, training for volunteer work at a women’s clinic in our town. I should probably set the record straight here too. We were never actually allowed inside of the building. Our job, so to speak, was to escort patients to and from their cars. It doesn’t sound like a big deal but it was rather a necessity. The main goal for us was to give the patients something else to focus on, other than the belligerent and heinous protestors, as they walked to the door of the clinic.
(Let me give you a little back story here. The main group of protestors at the clinic belong to the same “organization”, and they’re just a fraction of a hair away from being Westboro Baptist-hateful.)
Ryan went toe-to-toe with them many times over the years. They once actually showed up at his parents’ house and picketed in the street. I can’t even imagine how his family felt, but they supported him completely. After graduation, Ryan moved over to St. Louis to attend nursing school, eventually taking over as Director of Nurses at the clinic once he graduated, which really rubbed the hate-mongering group six ways of wrong. This, Tumblr, is where I start to gush about Ryan and how amazing he really was.
When Ryan moved, we kept in touch as much as time would allow, but it was never enough, ya know? He was busy with school and his personal life. After a couple of failed relationships, he found the love of his life in his partner, Jason, and they had an apartment of their own with a cat and a dog and generally good life. Ryan was in a graduate program, studying to become a Nurse Practitioner. He devoted most of his time and effort to women’s reproductive rights and went to work for Planned Parenthood after resigning from the clinic. There were no drugs in the picture and he kept his intake of alcohol limited because of his schedule. Ryan was a good person—one of the best people I’ve ever had the extreme honor of knowing.
It’s still hard to write about him in a past tense. I’ve gone through cycles of being numb and then crying so hard I can’t see straight. The visitation on Wednesday was more difficult that words can express. Sarah and I got a small army of people together and went in as a group because, well, we knew we couldn’t do it alone. She and I walked into the viewing room hand-in-hand, and she lost composure instantly. We saw a lot of people from the past, and it made me consider exactly how important he’d been to so many.
I couldn’t bring myself to go to the funeral on Thursday.
Here’s where the protestors come back into play.
Friday morning I woke up to texts from Sarah. Apparently the assholes caught wind of Ryan’s death and were stirring up their own pot of shit. Their leader, an awful bitch whose name I won’t bring myself to even type, posted on the organization website with the title of her little article being “RYAN GOSKIE DEAD”. Sadly, this is now one of the top search results for Ryan’s name on Google. I read through it and wanted to immediately throw up all over everything.
The Bitch wrote about how she and her husband had known Ryan so well and warned him that his “flirtations with a homosexual lifestyle” (as Sarah would later tell me, “He didn’t just flirt with it, he full on fucking seduced it!”) would end in his demise. I can’t make this shit up. It was mostly them bashing Ryan in their “Christian way”. (For the record, I have no issues with Christianity. They have their thing, I have mine, and never the twain shall meet.) The whole issue was just completely heartbreaking for all of us. It’s all I’ve thought about.
Tomorrow, Sarah and I are driving up to the cemetery. We’re gonna find Ryan and tell him about the tattoos we’re getting in his honor and know he’d probably laugh and tell us how pathetic we’re being.
But ya know what, Tumblr?
If I can tell you what he’d say or do, that means I knew him. And I knew him well. That’s all that matters to me.
