NO.

The title for this post is the predominant word in my head. I think it hundreds of times a day, or thousands. However many times it is when a word is at the forefront of your thoughts for most of your waking hours.

But not all of them. Because there's another word chasing it, determined to obtain the lead, and that word is "WHY."

One week ago, at approximately 9:40 p.m., my world as I've known it for the past 23 years came to a black and empty end. It just stopped turning for me. And while I watch the worlds of people all around me continue to spin, mine continues to stay in suspended animation, frozen with uncertainty about a future that would involve it revolving again.

Bill is gone.

It was always him. He was always my focal point and my best friend. He was also the person who made me feel the craziest, the person who shook up everything I had come to believe in my formative years and made me question who I was and where I was going. He was the one who taught me how to believe in myself. He was the one who made me strong.

When people tell me now how strong I am, I thank him, because without him as my teacher for so many years, I wouldn't be able to survive this.

He carried me through so much. He loved me through cancer in a way that made me feel invincible. He taught me to be self-reliant because his job kept him away so much. He told me more times than I could begin to count that his big shoulders could carry anything, and to unload my worries on them and take his hand.


I feel that I can't even process basic decisions. I can't react to situations accordingly, something that was effortless for me before. I often realize that I've been staring into space, and can't remember how long I've been doing it.

I feel like I'm comprised of a void. I feel like the most vital part of me is dead. I feel like letting myself slip below the surface because then everything wouldn't be so damn hard.

He was barely 40. He spent his 40th birthday in Washington state, asking me to come visit. We hadn't been getting along; in fact, we divorced in late March. The divorce couldn't stop our friendship, though. We still talked almost every day.

He wanted me to visit, and I said no. I said no for many reasons: how would it look? What would my family think? I have two jobs. I have After Prom. I have Hume After Prom. I have the Male Handsome Pageant. Reason after reason that it wouldn't be a good idea. Instead, I had gifts delivered to him every day of his birthday week.

But he didn't want gifts. He wanted his friend.

And I failed him.

I am so angry with myself for that. I squandered my time with him in his last year, although I thought I was doing it for the right reasons. I wanted him to face his health issues. I wanted him to take care of himself. I wanted him to stop the path he was on and listen to me, because I totally knew what I was talking about, after all. If only the whole world could listen to me, there would probably be no war and stuff.

Don't we always feel that we know what is best in a given situation, particularly one involving someone else? I certainly did.

And when he wouldn't listen, I thought that losing me would surely make him face the reality of what his life had become.

It did not work. And now, with the crystal clarity that hindsight so kindly provides, I face what will be my newest demon for the rest of my life: could I have prolonged his life, salvaged his health, by staying by his side every day? If I had been there the night of the accident instead of trying to make him realize that he was on the wrong path and arguing that point with him the whole day and evening of June 3, he wouldn't have gotten in that truck. He would have stayed home.

And he would have had at least a little more time. Not a lot. But a little.

These are the rambly thoughts that speed through my head every day. I made it through the hell of watching my lifetime best friend die. I honored my promise of making sure he had the funeral he wanted. And then the last vestiges of shock wore off and I turned into the person I am now, comprised of wild grief, tears, and nerve endings, alternating with the most horrible kind of numb.

There are other things to face without him. We had just put our house under contract three days before the accident, and now I find myself staring blankly at the life we built within its walls. Every vantage point is a memory. The bed is as if he just got out of it. I can't bear the thought of it being taken apart and removed. The Jello I brought him home before he went into the hospital to help soothe his stomach in the refrigerator. The ice cream that he never got to eat in the freezer.

My last shift at the movie theater, he brought dinner in for the staff, and the top layer of our wedding cake in for me. Surprisingly, it was still good almost five years later. He posted a picture of the feast on Facebook, labeled "Moma's dinner."
He had just gotten out of the hospital earlier that day, weak and beaten down, and still he brought the food to me. He apologized that his visits to the theater had decreased so dramatically the last two years.

He would die exactly two weeks later. And I didn't know.

I have not been able to return to my job at the theater since. I can't bring myself to go back. That is how I want to remember the end. That is how I want to leave it.

I also can't spend another night in the house.

All of this means that I am forced to look ahead and make still more life-altering decisions in a body that finds it difficult to even move. I had planned to leave Nevada, and that is what I am still doing. But that entails so much. A new job. New surroundings. New life.

And for the first time since I was a teenager, my background noise, my focal point, my center...will not be Bill.

I'm. So. Lost.

I want to cry the tears that come from your very core, that make you howl at the injustice and fight your demons with every wounded exhalation. People who see me, who know what happened, are mainly in one of two camps: they don't know what to say or they tell me I am strong.

Here is what you say, those who don't know (and I used to be one of you): this sucks.

Because it absolutely does. The acknowledgment of the vast unfairness of life's twists and turns is almost a relief to those who have born the brunt of the ax of loss.

He is gone. My world has not started to spin again, not even remotely. I want to apologize to those who have anchored themselves to me in order to shore me up: I am not worthy of your devotion right now. Because I am no longer me.

I am made of grief and anger and so, so much regret. Disbelief and rage and void. Stringing words together to uphold my end of a conversation is too hard. Deciding what vestiges of my life to keep and which to give away as I struggle to empty a house is hard. Staring at a tiny plaque in Moore Cemetery reading that Bill Shepherd, Jr. was 40 years, 2 months, and 1 day old is incomprehensibly hard. Those big shoulders were supposed to be able to withstand any burden.

How can he be gone?

So forgive me if it seems that I can't look you in the eye, or if I take way too long to answer a question or even if I ask you to repeat it. While I may be strong, and while I do feel his strength within me, imagining a world that doesn't have him in it still feels like an insurmountable task.