The Passing of a Friend

Photo by Izzabella DeLaat

By Ken DeLaat

“To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure.”- J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone

This past week I lost a friend to the nasty, despicable bastard  known as cancer, an enemy of the people that has claimed far too many of my friends in recent years. When one becomes a certain age there is always the inevitability of seeing people who have long been a part of your life pass. The deaths of  musicians, actors, athletes and other public figures who were prominent and well known throughout your younger years find their way into the news usually resulting in a tinge of nostalgia and a soft sigh or two. And when seeing an old movie or hearing a song a conversation with someone in your age group might start with “Is (s)he still alive?” resulting in an online search for the answer to be shared.
But, of course, it is  different when someone you know makes that final journey.

Creighton was someone I met when we both found ourselves living in Manistee after spending years in the larger cities we grew up in. I moved there with Lifetime Spousal Companion (LSC) Lil a little over a year after we married. It was my counseling job at the local agency that landed us there and Creighton arrived having taken a job with the local newspaper. A large contingency of young people had moved there around the same time, working at various professions, and we all seemed to find one another. They were good times. Times we believed might never end.

But they did. Lil and I moved on as did many others including Creighton who found his way to other small towns where he took other news jobs. He had many of them over the years because he was at heart an excellant investigative reporter who always seemed to be able to ferret out a local scandal or two. Trouble was, in small towns when a newspaper is caught between printing stories that might upset advertisers, and the possibility of losing revenue...well…let’s say his resume continued to grow lengthier.

Eventually Creighton decided to leave journalism behind and he took his computer skills to the private  sector. But he never stopped investigating. He just turned it into a different type of inquiry. He explored a number of spiritual paths and on those far too  rare occasions when he and I would get together he would share what he’d learned. There was always an air of excitement in his descriptions of the most recent path he had ventured on. Our conversations were rich in content and never, ever boring. This past year he postponed our get togethers due to a variety of illnesses he was dealing with, then called one day to tell me he had been diagnosed.

I visited him at his home a couple of hours away where, as always, he lived alone. He wasn’t driving so I took him to the store where he bought the few foods he could tolerate. After that we spoke several times by phone as he told me of going through chemo and the subsequent struggles the treatment brings. After one hospitalization he was sent to a rehab facility and Lil and I visited him there. When he returned home I called to set up a time to visit and he told me it wasn’t a good time. That he would let me know when to come and promised to call. When we signed off I told him, as I always did when we parted, that I loved him and would wait for his call.

It was our last conversation. I received a text from his sister that he was hospitalized again, not doing well and transferred to a facility. When I texted back to see where he was, she let me know he had passed. She also said there was to be no service. He had once told me this was his preference and knowing him as I did, I understood.
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Creighton was a brilliant journalist and forgot more about writing than I will ever know. He was a kind soul who loved nature, loved the dogs that came and went throughout his life and lived with a certainty that his death would be a transition. It would simply be his next journey and the culmination of a lifetime of searching for answers.
Like the investigative reporter he had always been.