I took up the guitar as I approached fifty and my wife faced her impending death. Angel from Montgomery was the first song I could truly (kinda, sorta) play. With fumbled chords and a halting voice, I played it as her legs failed and her speech disappeared within her tumor-ravaged brain. I played it again on the night she chose to forgo any more visits to the hospital, a newfound stillness on her face while she listened, even as her body withered away. A few weeks on, the simple chords rang hollow as I sat alone in a sepulchral bedroom, but still I played. Again and again and again.

The years they just flow by, like a broken down dam.

Months later, I stood beside her grave in the slanting light of a Colorado autumn, shaking from thoughts of how grief nearly placed me in the ground beside her. I played the song once more while a trio of ratty deer looked on. The following spring, I sat next to our young daughter, fresh out of a second surgery for her own brain tumor, while she said “Dada play the Monday song.”

Sittin’ all alone on a mountain by a river that has no end.

Long before the little girl and her mother came into my life, long before I knew how to finger pick a few notes, I drove alone through a Wyoming snow storm, rewinding another of his songs and picturing my parents’ tears. “We’ll have to see what the lymph node biopsies show.” She too was still in the prime of life.

It took me years
To get those souvenirs
And I don’t know how they slipped away from me.

How do you say goodbye to an essential friend you’ve never met? Perhaps you sit on the porch beneath a radiant moon and sing his music. Perhaps you’re lucky enough to sit beside a new love you never expected, finding a moment of laughter when you mess up the words to In Spite of Ourselves in a brief duet. Perhaps you play Clay Pigeons three times, above all for its concluding line.

And start talkin’ again, when I know what to say.

Eventually, you realize the loss of the friend you never met broke loose something inside you’ve been holding tightly for the past month. You walk beneath that moon and look upon the snow-capped peaks it frames and the breathtaking beauty of it all instead becomes just breath taking. Each one quick and shallow as you think of the little girl across the small river and upstairs in her bed, think of how she cannot afford any more tragedy in her young life, think of how grief and fear are now defining currencies of the entire world. Of how the effulgent landscape around you suddenly feels like an impossibly thin and ephemeral coating that could simply wash away.

Well, I’m sorry my son, but you’re too late in askin…

At one point on the walk, I thought of how a straight line could be drawn from my unmet friend’s death, and those of countless others, to a soulless and floundering president and all who enable him. But the anger wouldn’t flow. Instead there was only heartache, for a man who brought so much light into our lives, and for a world whose own light was flickering amidst a pandemic of division and denial.

Do you look at strangers,
As potential dangers?

The little girl stood upon the porch, shivering in a pair of light pajamas and waiting anxiously for our return. When I lay beside her she stifled a sob before whispering, “when you guys go out in the dark I’m scared the virus will jump out and get you.” I held her for a long time before asking if she wanted me to sing her a song.

Kiss a little baby
Give the world a smile
If you take an inch
Give ’em back a mile
Cause if you lie like a rug
And you don’t give a damn
You’re never gonna be
As happy as a clam.

Eventually I shut her door and slipped into my own bed, but my eyes would not close. At one point, I stood before the window and watched the moon trace its way along a distant ridge before giving way to a riot of stars. I could still make out the jagged outline of piñon pines and junipers in the break between land and sky, and I thought of how the rocks beneath those trees bore the lyrics of worlds past. Of how the mountain they formed had witnessed the ebb and flow of an inland sea. Of how the river at the base of that mountain carried subtle evidence of its presence to a miraculous web of life thousands of miles away. Of how that life would never know of the mountain’s existence and yet, in some small way, depended on it being here. Then I fell asleep.

But dreaming just comes natural
Like the first breath from a baby,
Like sunshine feeding daisies,
Like the love hidden deep in your heart.

Rest in peace John Prine. You meant more to me than I could ever properly say.

Farewell to an Unmet Friend was originally published in State Factors on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.