Nine Years Without Rody
Nine years ago today we buried him.
I wrote about Rudy “Rody” Lee a year after the call, the call I still remember exactly where I was standing for. I wasn’t sure I’d write about him again. I figured I’d said what I had to say. But nine years is a long time, and some of what I want to say now I wasn’t ready to say then.
The thing I keep coming back to lately isn’t the end. It’s when we met in 2007.
We were neighbors in some dumpy Broad Ripple apartment complex. I was grinding through grad school, he was drumming and stitching together whatever jobs paid that month. I finished my MBA in August of 2008, and a few weeks later the market fell off a cliff. I ended up stuck in a job I didn’t want, with a degree I couldn’t really use the way I’d planned, and my confidence was just shot. I don’t think I knew how shot until later, looking back.
Rody saw something in me that I couldn’t see in myself at the time. That’s the part I want people to understand about him. He had this big group of friends already, guys he’d known forever, and he had every reason to keep his circle closed. He didn’t. We became fast friends anyway, and somehow this drummer working odd jobs out of a beat-up apartment was the one telling me, the MBA, that I had it in me. He’d say things and you knew he meant them, because Rody didn’t do small talk and he didn’t do flattery. If he said something good about you, it was because he saw it.
The biggest gift he ever gave me, and I don’t think I ever told him this plainly enough, is that he’s a big part of why I had the guts to ask my wife out. I’d known her for months. I’d talked myself out of it more times than I can count. And somewhere in there was Rody in my ear reminding me I wasn’t the guy my circumstances were telling me I was. I asked her out. She said yes. Everything good in my life since traces back through that one decision, and that decision traces back through him.
He never got to meet the kids. They didn’t come until after he was gone, and honestly, him dying and us finding out we were pregnant happened right around the same time. One of those overlaps that doesn’t feel like coincidence even when you know it is. It was a catalyst. I took a promotion that moved us out of Indiana to Florida, leaving Byrider corporate to go work for a franchisee I knew was a wildcard. It was a leap, and I’m not sure I take it without losing Rody first. Something about that year made it clear that the safe path wasn’t actually safe.
Now I’m a father of two, my blood has thinned out in the Florida sun, and I genuinely love living in paradise. But I look back on Broad Ripple more than I expected to. Those Friday afternoons working from home, knowing Rody was a few minutes away and the porch was waiting. That was a kind of life I didn’t know I’d miss until it was already gone twice over. Once when he died. Once when we moved.
I wrote last time about the motorcycle accident in 2014 and his life living with a Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI), and I don’t need to walk through all of that again. What I will say is that the accident, as horrible as it was, reset our friendship in a way I’m still grateful for. We’d drifted some by then (life does that), and suddenly there he was, needing people, and there I was, with the chance to actually show up. So I did. Or I tried to.
The next few years were Friday afternoons and video games and cornhole and bad sports talk and good music on the back porch. I called it Fridays with Rody in the last blog and that phrase still fits. The world slowed down on those afternoons. He was different after the TBI. He’d tell you he wasn’t himself anymore and he meant it. But he was still him underneath, and underneath was always the best part anyway.
The spring of 2017 is hard for me to think about even now. He’d been sober a year. A year. And then the slip into depression and then a DUI, and you could feel it the moment it happened. The whole thing snowballing, the loop in his head getting louder, the version of himself he was trying to outrun catching up. He wasn’t thinking clearly toward the end. I know that because the Rody who saw something in me in 2007 would have seen that he still had so much to give. He just couldn’t see himself by then. The mirror was broken.
* * *
I watched the Noah Kahan Netflix documentary recently, and there’s a moment in it where he talks about his dad’s TBI. I lost it. Just completely lost it. Suddenly all the pieces of his music clicked. The sorrow underneath it, the melancholy you can hear in every song, the way his art keeps circling around something he can’t quite outrun. And here was Rody, the musician, the drummer, fighting something so similar before he ultimately gave up. It rushed back over me like it was 2017 all over again. Sitting on my couch in Florida, a decade and a thousand miles away from those Broad Ripple Fridays, and I’m crying about my friend like I’d just gotten the call.
That’s part of why I’m writing this now. Grief doesn’t move in a straight line. Sometimes a stranger’s song on a streaming service can reset the whole thing.
Nine years out, here’s what I’ve learned that I didn’t know at one year out:
Grief doesn’t really shrink. You just build more life around it, so it takes up less of the frame. There are whole weeks I don’t think about him, and then a song or a March Madness bracket or the smell of a certain kind of cheap beer puts me right back on that back porch and I lose ten minutes to it.
The memories do fade, the way I was afraid they would. Not the big ones. The big ones are carved in. But the small stuff, the way he laughed, his exact phrasing on certain jokes, the dumb running bits we had, some of it is gone now and I can’t get it back. I wish I’d written more of it down when he was still here. Or even right after. If you’ve lost someone, write the small stuff down. The big stuff will keep. The small stuff won’t.
The thing about Rody that I want people to know, the headline if there is one, is that he was a guy who genuinely saw people. He wasn’t on autopilot. When he asked how you were doing, he actually wanted the answer. In a world where everybody’s half-listening to everybody else, he was all the way there. That’s rare, and we lost a rare one.
* * *
If you’re a veteran, or you love a veteran, or you know someone wrestling with a brain injury, or addiction, or the kind of depression that lies to you about who you are, please don’t wait. Reach out, keep reaching out, and if the first door doesn’t open, try the next one. The VA failed Rody in a lot of ways. Rehab failed him in a lot of ways. But the people who loved him didn’t fail him for lack of love. We failed him because the disease is bigger than love, and that’s the part nobody tells you.
If you’re the friend in this story, the one watching someone you love wrestle with this, keep showing up. Even when it doesn’t seem to matter. Especially then. The Fridays mattered. I believe that. I have to believe that.
Rody, nine years. I still miss you, brother. I still hear you in my head when I’m doubting myself. I hope wherever you are, you can finally see yourself the way the rest of us did.
Save a porch for me.