Eric.

My friend Lauren had one of those dorm rooms at State that was more like an apartment. Six girls shared two bedrooms and a bathroom and a living room area.

It wasn't much but to a bunch of 18-year-olds it felt very grown up, so Lauren played "host" during a lot of our freshman year drinking parties.

One night, I don't know, maybe her parents had just given her money or something she bought a fifth of everyone's favorite poison just for them. Mine was rum.

The group that night, per usual of my freshman year at State, was a mixture of old friends from high school and new friends.

It. Was. A. Great. Party. Except, having a fifth all to myself proved to be too much and something happened to me that had never happened before. I got sick. Really, really, really sick.

So much so that my friends left me behind on Lauren's couch.

At one point I woke up to find Eric sitting next to me. It was a comfort to see a friendly face until I tried to sit up and proceeded to get sick.
Without even missing a beat Eric grabbed a garbage bag he had sitting at his feet and pointed my head in the right direction.
I was crying because I'd never been this sick before. Mostly, though, I was apologizing because while I'd known Eric since seventh grade we weren't exactly the kind of friends who puked on each other's shoes. Until that night.

If you knew Eric than you know what his laugh was like. It was possibly one of the most recognizable, enjoyable sounds on the planet. An easy, dry, steady, deep laugh that was just so him.

And that night as I barfed rum and coke for hours and watched tapes of "Friends" through one eye, Eric laughed his amazing laugh, rubbed my back and assured me he wouldn't hold the night's events against me.

That was the last time I drank rum, but thankfully for me, not the last time Eric helped me.

Through the years Eric and I would run into each other here and there. Mostly he listened while I blabbed on about my most recent crush or current project at work.

He was a steady in my life.

When MC and I moved back to Lapeer last winter Eric was in his last year of law school and preparing to move back to town himself. We saw him almost every Thursday at Liz's bar. We celebrated birthdays and talked about life and college and high school. We had game night.

The last time I talked to Eric he was teasing me about sending out a mass e-mail. But the thing was I had only send the e-mail he was talking about to four people. He was one of them, I told him because "Eric you're my friend, my close friend, not just a friend I mass e-mail." He laughed.
That night we talked about how many kids I wanted to have and why his parents decided to stop at two and how his parents met and so on. Before he walked out the door I hugged him and said "See ya!"

Eight days later when Liz's mom came to my office to tell me Eric was gone I was lost for words. That night when I found out Eric was gone because he wanted to be gone I was lost for words.
Even now, a week after his funeral I find myself unable to say the right thing, so instead I'm just going to put it out there that Eric was a great guy and I will forever miss him.