Someone I'd like to share with you

Thomas Joel Waits. That was his name. On January 14, 1997, he ended his life. He was fifteen.

I don't know how to tell you what this boy meant to me. He wasn't my boyfriend or anything like that. Thomas was my best friend. I called him my little cousin, but really he was the little cousin of my childhood best friend. He and I formed a relationship, a bond, quickly and like nothing I had ever known before - or since to be honest. We fit in with each other when no one else understood. Which probably was a little odd since I was three years older than him. But we got each other.

Thomas, well we all called him TJ. For as long as I knew him it was TJ. Until the very short months before his death. He asked that we call him Thomas. TJ was a name his dad had given him. And even now, even after his death, it feels wrong to call him TJ. Even though it is far more familiar than Thomas to me. But somehow TJ seems disrespectful. So I still say Thomas. Anyway, Thomas was probably the most beautiful person I have ever known in so many ways. There was a light in him that people gravitated toward. And when he took his life I hated him. I hated him for taking that light away from all of us who needed it so badly. But I have come to realize that Thomas felt his death was needed more.

Thomas was trapped and on the morning he decided to kill himself he went to school, life as usual. Except he was sick all day. Not because of what he knew was coming, but because he did not take his insulin. Thomas was diabetic, and he knew what not taking his meds would do to him, which was exactly what he needed in order to be able to complete his day. He spent all day at school in the nurse's office. Before he went home that day he told his friend down the street to come over. But not until Thomas called. About an hour or so after he got home, Thomas called his friend and told him to come over. Let yourself in, he said. He hung up the phone, went to his back yard, and shot himself.

Strangely, at the funeral everyone looked at me with pity. They would come up to me and say, "He loved you, you know." Yes, I know. They would tell me, "He carried only two pictures with him and you were one of them." Yes, I know.

Losing such a beautiful soul was like losing part of myself. And every year, I find ways to keep him alive. If I don't do this, I am afraid that part of myself will die with him. I hope you don't mind me sharing him with you today. He's been gone for ten years now. I hope the man he would have been is proud of the woman I am. I still grieve for him. In a more peaceful way, but grief just the same.

I hope you are at peace, my beautiful boy. I miss you with every fiber of my being.