August 2026: If you can have dinner with anyone in the world

This month's Bear Blog Carnival is being hosted by Khoa, and the topic he chose is "If you could have dinner with anyone in the world, who would that be?". He mentions it can be anyone dead or alive.

This had me thinking - I always struggle with these sort of questions. It's similar to another question people sometimes ask, especially to kids, of "Who is your hero?". With these sort of questions, I don't really have a name that jumps to mind. There's no one I really look up to, not famous at least. Usually people will talk about their favorite super hero if they're a kid, or talk about some great athlete, writer, inventor that inspires them, and they look up to. But... I've never really had that feeling towards anyone. In a similar vein, there's never a celebrity or anyone I look up to enough to believe I'd ever really feel awestruck meeting anyone.

For me, if I look up to anyone, it's my friends. I'm always really amazed and impressed with hearing about what my friends are up to in life, and what they've been able to do. When I answered a similar question years ago, about who I looked up to, the answer was my friend Mike, because he was doing well financially and owned a Jeep Wrangler, and those were the things I wanted (and still do, to be honest). So, for this carnival, my mind wandered to my friends. Unfortunately for me, they're all across the country, or in different countries, and so often when I think about if I could just snap my fingers and make something happen, it's usually hanging out with my friends. My wife teased me a bit, as we were talking about what to do for our bachelor / bachelorette parties, and she wanted the sort of traditional party with strippers and such, where my goal was just simply get dinner with all of my friends, and play board games / video games. She had a response along the lines of "that's it?" but... yeah, I miss my friends and it almost never happens we're in the same spot at the same time.

So, which friend would I like to have dinner with? I took a little bit to think about this, but finally came up with an answer: Jeff. Please note, for the remainder of this blog post, Jeff is the name I'm assigning to my friend for anonymity. Also, trigger warning, drugs and suicide.

About Jeff

Jeff I knew starting in High School. He was a few years younger than me, and we met through mutual friends. At first I was a little iffy on him, but we quickly became good friends, and a part of the same friend groups. He had this way of getting people together, to hang out. Seemingly everyone loved him, and he was an incredible people person. Unfortunately here, he achieved this by being a bit two faced, but people loved him nonetheless. We went on hikes together, hung out, had long conversations, went on adventures, etc. One of our favorite things to do with that friend group was to go to Olive Garden for dinner, followed by Sweet Frog, a local frozen yogurt shop. We went so often the waitstaff started to know us, and other friends would feel honored when they were invited to come with us.

I always really enjoyed talking to Jeff, and getting his opinions on things. He was incredibly smart, though often tried to pretend he wasn't. He had a few weird quirks like that - like he used to pretend he was gay so he could spend nights at girl's houses without their parents knowing. One of the funniest things to me though was this backfiring when someone who was gay developed a crush on him, and he didn't know how to handle it.

Tragedy

Jeff passed away in 2021. It was sudden, and unexpected. You see, Jeff had been a drug dealer for at least as long as I had known him, and also struggled with addiction. That said, he had been getting his life turned around, as far as I could tell. He went through rehabilitation. He had found an incredible partner. He had a second kid on the way. And... he died of a drug overdose.

When we got the news we couldn't believe it. He had been clean, as far as we knew. My best guess as to what happened is that he tried to celebrate something, and his tolerance wasn't what it used to be, and that was it. Part of me then, and even now, still has a hard time accepting it though. You see, we had to deal with the thought of losing Jeff previously already. He got caught too many times dealing drugs, and had been looking at life in prison. He had decided that he rather commit suicide than spend life in prison. As sad as this was, it was hard to fault him given he would've been in his early 20s at the time, or late teens. He, somehow, did not end up in prison and ended up with probation.

So, back to his death. Maybe this wasn't an overdose - maybe whatever he did to not get put in jail, those people got angry with him and killed him. Or, maybe, he was brought into witness protection. His funeral had been closed casket, and so maybe he wasn't really dead, but people needed to believe he was? But... I think all of these are me trying to cope. It's better to imagine my friend out there somewhere, than dead.

I made a post after his funeral, because our friend group went out to eat afterwards. Something like, "even in death, you still manage to bring us all together". Even when he was alive, it was incredible just how good he was at getting people to actually hang out in person, and rally. We had grand plans too after the funeral - my friend group talked about starting a college fund for his kids, or doing something to help his girlfriend, who was now going to have to be a single parent. But... y'know, the best laid plans of mice and men and all that. What I was able to accomplish was making a photo book of Jeff. Photos from the adventures we had taken (I was and am into photography, and so had plenty), as well as photos from anyone who sent me some. I put the photos, some descriptions, and my contact information into the book, so that his kids will know about their father when they grow up. Also, of course, a great thing for his girlfriend.

As time has gone on, without Jeff that friend group has largely fallen apart. We're all still friends with each other, but we never really talk or do anything anymore, other than the occasional catch up message here or there. I miss when it had been more active. To quote one of the friends of that group (though he used it referring to something else), "You go from playing video games and talking everyday, to just... nothing?".

Dinner with Jeff

As I mentioned, the conversations I had with Jeff were always great - he always had a unique perspective on things, and was able to articulate them well. One disagreement we had, which I still talk about today to people, is he believed that people fully understood what they were doing, and so whatever happened because of someones actions was something the person had thought about, and accepted. I, on the other hand, tend to believe people do not fully think through the consequences of their actions, and so often what happens is unintended. The context this came up in was we had a friend in the group who started dating the ex of another friend in the group within a short amount of time (I want to say within like, a month or two). The friend who was going through the breakup had been taking it really hard, and so to see this happen felt like an ultimate betrayal. The friend who was dating the ex, said he had thought everyone in the group would've been okay with it, and him and this girl just got along really well, and so why wouldn't they date? Of course, what made this all worse was the friend and girl had gotten along really well, even while she had been dating the original friend.

So, in this case, Jeff believed that the friend in the relationship knew this was going to hurt the original friend, but chose to do it anyways. I believed that the friend simply did not think through everything, and simply stopped his thinking at "me and this girl get along really well, and we like each other". What makes this even more unfortunate is it created a rift in the friend group, just due to timing. To my knowledge, this friend and the girl are still together to this day, and so they do obviously work well together. But.. yeah it was not a good look.

But this sort of thought process follows me through to today - basically, unless someone proves to me they do think through their actions fully, I just believe that they don't. This fits well with the sort of mindset of "Don't attribute to malice what could be attributed to incompetence".

What to Say

All of this preamble to talk about why I would want dinner with Jeff. I still find myself wishing I could tell him about my life. Getting his opinion on what to do in certain situations. I miss our Thanksgiving and Christmas get togethers. I'd love to know if his bets on Bitcoin would've paid off, or not.

I would want to sit down at dinner, and ask him how he's doing? How are his kids doing? How's the partner? What happened that night, was it really an overdose? I'd want to tell him about my wife Michelle, and what happened between Elizabeth and I. I'd love to know if he could've followed his dream to have become a paramedic. God, I'm sure him and Michelle would have plenty to talk about. She would've loved going to the bar with him. I'd want to tell him about my job, and how well I'm doing for myself now. I'd love to get his opinions on the movie Obsession. I'd want to ask about the afterlife a bit, to be honest. I'd love his thoughts on what's happening in the US right now, and if he had any thoughts or opinions on where Michelle and I should live.

Epilogue

Jeff was the first death I dealt with in life, of someone close to me. I had grandparents, and distant relatives pass before, but never someone I was this close to - someone my age either. It left a void, similar to when you go through a break up. That person's opinions, thoughts, unique perspective on life is just... gone. You'll never get their perspective again. Someone made the comment that no one plans to die - everyone who dies has a full schedule - people they were going to meet, things they were going to do. And that's how this felt - we had plans of things to do, games to play, memories to make. And it's just all... gone. All that remains are the memories and photos.

Jeff if you're out there, or if the afterlife somehow has internet, I miss you, and wish we could've spent more time together.

About this blog post

This post is for the Bear Blog Carnival. It's a collection of folks making blog posts, largely on https://bearblog.dev/, all around some sort of central theme that changes monthly. If you're interested in participating, follow the link above!

Where to find me:

The best place to find me is on my website. You can see other posts I've made, some tech tutorials, and a bunch of other stuff!

Thanks for reading,
- Moose