June 10: Love, Loss, and Everything in the Middle

Yesterday was my 2nd wedding anniversary. It’s kind of like a birthday you know. You wake up and it just feels kind of different. The actions of the day are for the most part, pretty similar to the actions of any other day. Work goes on. Kid’s go on. Time, as it always does, goes on. But nostalgia is a funny thing and knowing the significance and memories of that date always gives it a special feel. June 10th. This year, a Monday. Kind of like any other day but at the same time, kind of not.

On June 10, 2017, I married my high school sweetheart. Formerly Jessica Golay. Now Jessica Ward. Mother of 2 little Ward kids. It was a special day. The kind of day you wish you could trap in a bottle and open up whenever you needed some good energy. One of the coolest parts about a wedding day is that it’s the only time you will have all the people you care about the most in the same place with you at the same time. In retrospect, that’s kind of the beauty and sadness in the guest list of a wedding. It can’t be duplicated. It’s a one time thing with a short window to enjoy and enjoy it is exactly what we did. June 10, 2017. A great day.

Unfortunately, I spent June 10, 2019, almost to the exact second, in the exact place that I had spent it 2 years earlier. Blessed Sacrament Catholic Church located off Douglas and Roosevelt in Wichita, Kansas. My seat this time only being about 45 feet from the same seat I had then.

Many of the same people who were next to me at my wedding were there as well. Good friends. Old friends. The kind of friends you don’t have to see or talk to all the time to pick up right where you left off. Those are the best type of friends. If you’re lucky, you have a few of them.

Except this time, we weren’t catching up at Blessed Sacrament for a celebration. We were gathered for a culmination. The culmination of the life of one of those old friends, Edward Daniel Howse.

Dan was born in January of 1992.

He died May 23, 2019.

He was 27.

Dan and I met my freshman year of high school at Kapaun. There’s a weird dynamic that comes into play in a city like Wichita when you have multiple “feeder” middle schools funneling into one larger high school. Everyone has their set friend groups from their old school, but that melting pot kind of evolves as you get to high school. Suddenly, new people start getting added to your circle. We’d never hung out until Kapaun and Dan was the first “Blessed Sacrament” kid I knew.

I remember vividly staying the night at his house on Pershing street in College Hill. His basement was littered with wires and cords running from one instrument to an amp and back to some other instrument and another amp. In addition to that, the TV was hooked up to all the Xbox instruments needed for Guitar Hero. When Dan would get bored with Gibsons and Fenders, he’d put Guitar Hero on expert level, put the guitar behind his back, and blindly bust out a few solos on the game.

Being a kid who had only ever tried and failed to play a recorder in grade school, watching Dan play any instrument seemed like chaos to me and poetry to him. He just kind of picked up a guitar or played the drums or played the piano. It was no big deal. Natural. Almost like he was born with it.

That same spring, Dan played baseball with us. As is with a lot of early high school experiences, freshman year sports are a weird dynamic as well. Everybody kind of gets a chance to play, but you can start to see who is going to stick with it and who probably won’t moving forward. That’s not a knock on those who don’t, it’s just part of the broader figuring out who you are process. Even though he had that sweet lefty swing, I think Dan realized he probably wouldn’t play the following year. His baseball career was coming to a close.

In one of the last games of our freshman year, Dan got the start vs Southeast. I remember him coming up to me in the dugout before his first at bat and asking if he could use my bat, a brand new Easton Stealth that only I had used that season. I’m not proud of this, but I wanted to say no. Probably did at least the first time. I’m an oldest sibling and the only boy. I wasn’t used to 1) people asking to use my things and 2) actually letting them do it. But Dan used that charismatic charm and won me over.

He ended up using my bat and went 3–3 or something on the day. He kept coming to the dugout laughing and telling me he would have played all season if I would have let him use it earlier. It makes me smile now just thinking about it. He was kidding of course, but the way he acted was so… Dan.

As high school progressed, Dan and I spent less time together. That’s by no means a bad thing, we just found our different circle of friends and interacted when they crossed paths. School Dances. Pool Parties. Summer Break. When I think back on a lot of fun memories from a fun time in all of our lives, I remember Dan. Black Jeep. Backwards Black New Era Hat. Polo Black cologne. Seems like yesterday.

I won’t pretend that Dan and I were close in recent years. That’s not the case, but he certainly fits that bill of not needing to see him all the time to be able to catch up. I probably ran into Dan 10 times or so since graduating from Kapaun. A few times during college and more times at random spots all over town after. Sometimes it was during Thanksgiving or Christmas when you expect to see somebody you hadn’t in awhile. That was always cool. Almost more enjoyable though, were the times it wasn’t expected. Those random nights when that sly smile and those unmistakable dimples would softly say, “Hey Mike, how’s it going brother?” and follow up with a laugh and a hug. No matter how distant the interactions became, that’s how I remember Dan. Always a guy with the smile. Always a guy that could get a laugh. I knew he was fighting some battles, but he never showed it.

As much as anything, my memories of Dan take me back in time. Times that seem so present yet continue to become more of a memory than a reality. Times when a new friend could grab a video game guitar, throw it behind his back, and captivate a whole room. I miss those times and I’ll miss them even more knowing the lanky kid who made them all happen is no longer here.

Thanks for the memories, Dan Howse!

Michael

6/11/2019