Memories of Joshua Westhaver

The world, the Portland theatre community, many people I care about, and I lost a singularly wonderful person from our lives yesterday. Joshua was a smart, caring guy who truly invested himself in the work he did and the things he believed, and he deserved nothing but the absolute best the universe could muster for him. That, unfortunately, was not what he was given in the last, shitty hand dealt to him. There are reams of people who were far, far closer to the man than I was, and my heart goes out to them and especially to his family in this time of shock and sadness.

I was about to write that it was impossible to not be happy to see Josh, but that's not quite right. It wasn't possible to not be happy about things in general when you saw Josh. For my part, I could be having a ridiculously bad day, and could indeed be immersing myself in the ridiculousness of my bad day by venting about it to him in some histrionic manner, but even that was always laced with a certain unexplainable joy of commiserating with him. I'd be happy to have had a crappy day, essentially, because Josh turned complaining about it into such a joy.

None of that really covers it. As an example of what I'm trying to get at: on the last day Josh was really with us, I regret to say that I didn't see him - but I heard what I've overheard lovingly described in recent days as "that ridiculous laugh" elsewhere in the building, and even just that cracked me up and kind of made my day. Even before everything that happened in just the hours after, and somehow even despite that, too. I wish it could cover the next many, difficult days as well.

[crossposted]