Friends of Mine

Larry Corpus.

Tony Innis.

Bill Waite.

Louis “LJ” Kirsteatter.

These are the names of friends I have lost over the years.

They return unexpectedly—an old photograph, a distant memory, the quiet recognition of a life that once moved alongside yours.

The years move on, but some friends remain with you, carried quietly in memory.

 

Larry Corpus was the first.

 

He died of leukemia in 1968, when we were still young enough to believe that death belonged mostly to old people. Larry’s death was the first crack in that illusion. Before that, life seemed permanent. After that, something had changed. Even as a kid, you begin to understand—quietly, reluctantly—that the world does not promise anyone a long stay.

 

Years passed. Childhood drifted into memory.

 

Then came Tony Innis.

 

Tony died in 1985. I was finishing my first semester at Eureka College, a small town near Peoria, Illinois, when I learned the news. One moment, I was thinking about classes and the small concerns of college life, and the next, I was on my way home for a funeral.

 

I served as one of the pallbearers.

 

There is something about carrying the coffin of a friend that changes the way you see the world. The weight in your hands is real, but the greater weight is the realization that someone who once laughed beside you is now gone from the living world.

 

It was the first time death felt close enough to touch.

 

Later still came news about Bill Waite.

 

Bill died in 2008. I had not seen him since I moved away from my childhood home when I was eight years old. Our lives had drifted onto different roads long before we were old enough to understand how that happens. Yet when I heard of his death, it still struck something deep and unexpected inside me.

 

Childhood friendships have a strange permanence. Even when decades pass, and the miles grow long between lives, the memory of who someone once was to you never quite disappears. When Bill died, it felt as if a small piece of that distant childhood had quietly vanished with him.

And then there was Louis “LJ” Kirsteatter.

 

Louis died in 2015. His death carried its own quiet weight because I had known him longer than the rest. Some friendships stretch across so many years that they become part of the landscape of your life. You assume, without ever saying it out loud, that the other person will always be there somewhere—another voice who remembers the same streets, the same stories, the same younger versions of ourselves.

 

When Louis died, it felt like a door quietly closing on a whole chapter of life.

 

Each name brings back a different part of the past—places we once stood together, things we said without thinking they would matter someday.

 

What haunts us is not simply that they died.

 

It is that we remain.

 

We go on walking through the years while the people who once shared those years with us stop somewhere along the way. The road continues, but the company changes. Sometimes the silence beside you is where a friend used to be.

 

Human life is a fragile arrangement. We move through it believing—perhaps needing to believe—that there will always be more time.

 

More conversations.

 

More chances to say what we meant to say.

 

But the truth is quieter than that.

 

A life is a brief crossing.

 

A few decades, if we are lucky.

 

And the people who walk beside us for part of that crossing—friends from childhood, from youth, from the long middle stretch of adulthood—leave footprints in us that never quite fade.

 

Sometimes, even now, their names return to me.

Larry — gone too young in 1968.

Tony — the winter I came home from college to carry his coffin.

Bill — a friend from childhood whose memory reached across the years.

Louis — the one I had known the longest.

Friends of mine.

Gone now, all of them.

But not entirely.

Because when a friend dies, something else disappears with them—the version of ourselves that once lived beside them in that particular time and place.

But the memories remain.

And when I think of Larry, Tony, Bill, and Louis, I remember something else too—how lucky I was to have known them at all.

For a while, we walked the same road together.