Missing You
It is so hard to express into words how you feel when someone you loved passes away. I guess I really am experiencing this feeling for real this year and I am finding it challenging to explain or comprehend. I suppose grief is the all encompassing word that defines your overall response to it all but it is hard to know what that even means.
Let me also just begin by saying that I hate thinking that people may be saying to themselves right now: “oooh another person Ben knew died…let me guess...he opens MacBook Air…he goes on Firefox…he opens up Google Docs…he furiously begins writing this ten minutes after receiving the news...he swiftly copies and pastes the text from Google Doc to Substack…he clicks post…he shares on all social media platforms…he froths at mouth…”
Well…maybe you are right. But I don’t know??? What else can you do??? I do not know. Would an exploitative one man show be more honourable??? Again maybe this is just me judging myself but if there is at least one person who reads this who may be thinking this, well these two paragraphs are for you. I am contemplating all of that too and I do feel lame but I do not know what else to do. 8 Mile taught me to call myself out first. Anyways I know how horrible of a transition this will be to the next paragraph but yeah…
My friend Jordan Fricker died on November 8th 2022. He was thirty years old.
My first vivid memory of Jordan was way back during a Fall recess in the year 2000. I was in Grade 3, George W. Bush had just won the presidency and it was the dominating conversation on the playground. A bunch of us hung out on the monkey bars that day and discussed whether or not they should recount Florida.
“No seriously there is something fishy going on there. They must recount. Recount them all I say!” My Grade 3 Kitchener-Waterloo Democrat friend said.
“Why don’t you get Bill Clinton to drive you down to Florida and you can recount it yourself? He's a total nut job. I bet he would just drive you down there too because he’s just a total fucking nut job and an absolute fuck up.” My Grade 3 Kitchener-Waterloo Republican friend replied back.
Just as I was about to chime in with a retort of my own, which if my memory serves me correctly was to steer the conversation into a more Jean Chrétien direction, we were rudely interrupted by a strange kid who had climbed all the way up, metres into the sky, to the monkey bars we were sitting on. He had a furrowed brow, a look of determination, and the rosiest cheeks I had ever seen in my life.
We stared at him and he stared at us right back. He appeared to be on a mission from God. Without even giving us a chance to say hello he opened his mouth to spread a powerful five word message:
“Look what I can do.”
He then proceeded to swiftly flip his body upside down and balance from those monkey bars using only the strength of his eight year old calves. The kid had an impressive hang time of fifteen seconds before immediately plummeting to the ground. A yard duty teacher caught all of this from the corner of her eye and sprinted past the immobile and hurt child right into the doors of our school to find a landline to call 911. This was the year 2000 and the cellphone had not come to Kitchener-Waterloo yet.
I watched as the paramedics came down to our playground. They picked the young man up, put his wind-knocked-out body onto a stretcher and wheeled him up to an ambulance. I was immediately mystified and in awe.
It is a bird…it is a plane…no it is Jordan Fricker.
That was Jordan. he was always doing something unbelievable. He wanted to show you the things he could do because he could do so many things.
Jordan could do Claymation. When I visited him when he was in Hamilton during his first year at McMaster I went to his apartment, and there he was spending most of his time meticulously creating clay-animated videos in his bedroom. These were the days where smartphones had very small amounts of storage and we didn’t know how to use iCloud yet so I am also not sure if he might have been using a digital camera or a webcam produce this. He put so much care and effort to make sure his clay’s frame by frame movements looked smooth and fluid. He was putting in Nightmare Before Christmas hours. Honestly even looking back at these videos now I still cannot believe he could do it, but of course he could, he was the son of a magician after all (Bruce Fricker).
(One Of Jordan's Claymation Videos)
Jordan could make music. He went from being a bass player in our legendary high school band: Gluten Free, to its rebrand as The Narrows, to composing and recording his own music as The Frickers’ Present (A Vulnerable Narcissist). He put everything into his most recent songs, layering sounds and his voice to kind of take you inside his head to show you what it might sound like in there. He released a lot of music over the past couple years and I have been having a hard time with it because his spoken-word that he uses a lot makes it sounds like he’s right there with you. I wish I listened to more of it while he was alive so I could talk to him about it and how it moved me but I cannot now. I like “No ones listening ep1” it is a hard listen for me to but I believe it captures Jordan.
Jordan could also do extremely precise Jigglypuff and Gollum impressions that were both authentic and respectful to the characters. He could go from “Jiggggaly Puff…Jigggallly…a-lee a-lee Puff” to “Stupid Hobbits” real quick…it left me speechless and wanting more every time. I was constantly asking him to do those voices because they provided me with so much joy and hope for a better world. I started asking him to do them too much though, and I think I may have been a part of the reason he retired them at the end of Grade 12 despite my constant begging and pleading for him to bring them back. He left his audience wanting more.
Jordan’s humour was so niche but always made sense. It was so him, but also so relatable. I enjoyed it so much. Sometimes Jordan and I would not be in touch for a few months but whenever we spoke again we would click and he would always make me laugh. I loved how he got his nipples pierced on his 18th birthday. I loved his theories about how Kitchener-Waterloo made the wrong decision by choosing Light Rail Transit over Rapid Buses. He hated this choice for some reason since it was announced in 2009 and still thought it was the wrong decision in 2022. I actually do not think he was that bothered about it much anymore but I would always bring it up when I talked to him because I liked to hear him go off. He would always get so passionate.
Jordan was so passionate for others. He was always generally curious about what you were doing and how you were doing. His general curiosity and caring for how people were made him quickly connect with anyone on a deep level. I would come downstairs at a friend’s house the morning after a sleepover and Jordan would be right down there at the breakfast table having what seemed to be a deep conversation with sometimes a random friend’s mom. From my perspective these conversations seemed more comfortable than any conversation I have ever had with my own mom yet. Jordan and I had a lot of comfortable conversations together though, and I would say that a good chunk of them took place inside Tim Hortons.
In total, a whole year of our lives were most likely spent in the Fischer-Hallman and University Tim Hortons location right on the the Kitchener-Waterloo border. It was our Cheers. It did not matter what night of the week you were there you would probably find at least one representative of our Tim Hortons based friend group of Tony, Marcus, Mitra, Andrew, Jordan, Me, Amy, Dave, Colin, James and many more, drinking coffee. Someone always had to be there to keep an eye on things and to make sure everything was running smoothly. Sometimes we even took naps there and got yelled at by the night baker with the moustache named Andy. I am one hundred percent certain that we are 75% responsible for that location not being 24 hours anymore.
We did not even need to be at a Tim Hortons though. We could hang out just fine at Zehrs parking lots. Under bridges by train tracks. Drainage ditches. We just needed each other, the environment did not matter at all, as long as it was also off of Fischer-Hallman.
The last time I talked to Jordan was on November 7th 2022. We talked on the phone for 40 minutes. We did share some laughs together. He talked about how he wanted to start asking bands that he interviewed on his radio show about their thoughts on very Kitchener-Waterloo specific municipal politics issues.
“Ben, I am going to ask this local metalcore band what they think of Ward One City Councillor Scott Davey.”
I wish I could say the rest of the discussion was as pleasant, but it was not. Jordan was struggling. He was a man who had been through a lot in his short period of time here on earth. I wish I could have been more helpful. The last words he said to me were “Bye Ben” and I just said “Bye Jordan” back to him. I wish I had said “I love you,” but I did not, and the following day Jordan passed away.
It is just so brutal. Only 30 years old. Once again I just wish I could have done more to help. It is so easy to say that you wish you could have done more after somebody dies but how much help were you to them when they were alive? That is something I will just have to live with now.
It is truly a tragedy. People should not die so young with so much left to do. Jordan was one of the most creative people I knew. He felt and poured himself into everything he made. I wish I could have seen what kind of things he would be making into his older age.
There is no bright side to death, and I hate to say it but especially youngish death. Sure after someone dies you get to meet with other people close to that person and connect with them on a deep level, you both get to know more about the person who you lost through talking together. I think we would all choose to throw that all away and just be strangers or acquaintances again if we could just get back who we lost.
I have found myself after both Jordan and Nick’s deaths just scrolling through my phone searching for anything in my camera roll that I may have missed, sifting through old emails, looking through ancient Facebook albums where the uploader didn’t tag anyone, all in the hopes of finding something new. Unfortunately everything always comes up short after you have looked through it all. I have seen all the digital memories I could see and now I just have the ones inside my head to look back on.
I do not know how to go forward any which way. There are just so many songs and things that remind me of both of these people. When I close my eyes to picture either Jordan or Nick I see their smiles and I hear their laughs. I remember talking to Jordan about Nick’s death and he was so shocked and thought it was so fucked up. God damn and just a few months go by and now he is gone too.
It is just so weird to think how people come and go in your life. Maybe you have a falling out, maybe you move away, or maybe you just have not had the time for a while. One thing I will not be able to get over is that at least right now most of these people who come and go—at least in my life—are still alive and out there somewhere. I wish these two were out there too, I cannot even begin to comprehend that either of them are entirely gone.
People obviously lose people every day. I am not trying to say that my life is harder than anyone else's or that my grief is worse or anything like that. It is hard not to feel selfish or over-analyze yourself during times like these.
I feel like an insane empty lame loser for continuing to tweet and posting Instagram Reels and TikToks after both of these guys have passed. I worry sometimes that in an afterlife I might see them again and they might not want to talk to me based on how I behaved after they died. But then I think about who they are, who they were, and how that almost one hundred percent would not be the case. Maybe they would cringe but I know they would both still probably accept me.
I can hear Jordan say “Ben you fucking idiot” followed by his signature laugh, smile, and vein popping out on his forehead.
I can hear Nick approaching me quietly and politely saying “I liked the Substack article…”
If you know you know, but that is the way I could see it going down in my head right now.
I just would like both of them back, and not just in the dreams that I see them in. I want to see them with my own eyes. I would like to be at a friend’s apartment, maybe we are all watching videos on YouTube Chromecasted onto a Vizio Smart TV and all of a sudden both of them walk in from out of nowhere, and everything is totally normal.
“Oh yeah those are my two friends who live way up there now. I am happy they came from so far away. I did not know you guys hung out. What is up guys?”
Of course that is idealistic, unrealistic and most likely will not happen. I hate to be pessimistic like this, but damn son this is the only real time I have really wanted an afterlife. I hope to God that science is wrong and we can just see each other one day as long as I do not go to Hell.
I wish I could run after you two in an airport.
You are both about to board a plane and I am not too far sprinting after you. I scream “Wait! Don’t go!” and get the attention of both of you, the flight crew and everyone in our vicinity.
I go up with my massive Celiac arms and bear hug the both of you (even though I feel so uncomfortable hugging people and I think you both might find this insane) and I say: “It was you Nick and Jordan, it was always you Nick and Jordan.”
Again I can be as creative and hopeful as I want here, but it does not fix the emptiness that I and many of us feel as we mourn the death of either of these two people in our different stages and our different relationships to them right now. I guess all we have right now is now and we just have to try to celebrate the memories and the spirit of them when a lot of the time it feels so hard to find joy.
I do not know what else to say besides I hope this Substack Article was honourable and I hope you guys are doing okay wherever you may be. I hope there is a place for you to be. See you sometime in the future I hope. I am religious now.
