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2004-12-20 - 10:49 p.m.

At work today, most of us examined our mortality. I was thinking about nothing pertinent when Jill walked in and asked me to come into her office with her. I was wondering why she brought her sister with her into work, especially since they haven�t really been speaking. I only met her sister once, at a Pay Per View boxing match at Jill and Simon�s house over a year ago, and we had a money pool which I didn�t win. My boss did, which I thought was silly, like the devil saying he�s cold and someone throwing him a sweater.

I followed Jill into her office, and she asked her sister to give us a minute alone. I supposed it would be an event filled minute. She shut the door and I looked at her with no idea.

�Simon died.�

And she hugged me for a minute of eternity. She was shaking, and she�s petite and felt smaller than she even used to, because recently she did the Zone diet with Simon and only she stayed on it. She cried, and then stopped abruptly.

�It hasn�t hit me yet.�

I felt bad. I broke down. I told her that I loved her and I was sorry. I�m more sorry that I won�t be at the service, which takes place this Sunday, and I�ll be in NY with my family. It�s horrible to think of her alone without him in that huge house, where the bathroom is bigger than most of my apartment.

He was an addict, and it�s assumed that he died of an overdose of one of the substances he�s been ingesting for the last year, at the hotel in Beverly Hills, where he went each time he left the house and told her he�d be back in a few minutes. Two days later, he would come back. He had seventeen years of sobriety, but not too stable toward the end, because he stopped going to meetings and started using again. Most recently he went to a treatment center in the desert where I used to work in Arizona, and he left the place before he had even detoxed two days. Last week when they went on vacation to Hawaii, they left after two days because Simon was looking for someone to fly him drugs out to the resort from Los Angeles for him. Jill said no way, and we�re leaving.

It wasn�t the first, second or tenth time these things were happening. Daily I would hear about the ruin Simon was creating, at his company, with his friends, in their marriage. At our peppy Carnival Xmas party Friday, she sadly asserted that she was filing for divorce, she had no idea where he was and nothing had gotten better. It turns out he was already dead, she told me today. The housekeeper hadn�t been able to get in the room to make the bed for two days, so I guess in theory he already left her first.

I understood that it was impossible for her to leave him until she was ready. Every day that she talked about another night of drama unfolding, I became less and less surprised. I still tried to talk sense, but sense has no meaning when you�re already deeply rooted in someone.

�He�s acting this way because he�s sick.�

�Well what are you going to do?�

�How do you feel about leaving him?�

�You know you still have choices, right? �

I could�ve said all this with my head lit on fire, it wasn�t registering. If you�re not done, then you�re not done. When you are, you�ll know. And then sometimes you don�t have a choice, you�re simply given a huge push from the universe, and there you are at the next awkward level of your life and it�s got no one�s name on it but your own. So I really commended her making the choice to leave, knowing how much she loved him, no matter what. I was glad she came to work and told me.

�Maybe you�ll stay with me at the house for a little?

�Of course.�

A couple of years ago I was dating a guy who turned out to be less than mature, and on Valentine�s Day I left him, and it really sucked. When I got to work, Jill was beaming and told me about how Simon did everything for her that day that she couldn�t imagine one person could think of, and she felt more in love with him then than ever. He told her he was insistent on giving her the childhood that she never had, and it made her eyes glow when she said it. I was in pretty debilitating pain that day, and could�ve used a little silence, but I knew what it meant to her, and I was happy for her. It worked out well, my best friend�s guy had left her two days later so we were able to celebrate a new level of pain together.

Rarely to never would I trade places with anyone, even when someone I loved has left, died, or gone insane. I agree with the person that said you are always in relationship of some kind to the people that you love and have loved, whether they�re with you or not. People I love have emotionally checked out, been locked up, drugged up, checked back in after ten years, taken their own lives, taken someone else�s life, and some have just deteriorated in front of my eyes. Those were the other people that most of us were crying about today .

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