My friend Travis died on Thursday.

we had lost touch over the last year or so but because still saw his brother on a fairly regular basis I would ask how he was doing and last I had heard, he was healthy and had a job he loved and was working hard to mend his relationships. Travis was hilarious, a  sweeter than sweet tea on the porch on a Sunday afternoon, a gentle hurricane of a human being.  

When I met him I had just moved back to Atlanta and was working at the dream center’s children’s ministry. I also worked in the kitchen and I met Travis because one Friday afternoon he stopped and asked me “hey what’s for dinner” and we became fast friends. I admit that at first I had a bit of a crush on him. It was almost impossible not to, he oozed charisma and literally could light up a room. We bonded quickly over a love of tattoos, Red Hot Chili Peppers and cooking. He always gave me grief for being short and I would give him a slug in the arm and tell him to knock it off. I spent about six months living in the same building and working at the dream center with Travis. He’d often show up at our apartment door asking to borrow a movie just in time for dinner and I’d always send him back down with a plate of whatever we’d made for dinner.

I have so many beautiful memories of Travis but the like a line in my favorite Switchfoot song says “every blessing comes with a set of curses”. Travis was a heroin addict who had been waging war for years with the demons of depression, trauma and addiction.  

Sometimes he was hard to love and he often broke our hearts and would end back on the street using. But through it all those glimpses of who he could be would peek through. The reality of addiction is that despite the obvious sins of the person who uses, they are in fact still people, people who love and are loved by so so many other.

Maybe I’m just a sucker for the underdog but I think part of why this hurts so much is because I saw who he could be when he was free from the chains that had held him down for so many years.

 During one of the last conversations we had we were talking about the struggles he was having recovering from an overdose that had left him in a medically induced coma for over a month. I remember him sobbing as we sat on the tailgate of a box truck behind the dream center as he poured out how frustrated he was that he had lost so much cognitive function. Regardless of your opinion of addiction I know he tried, I watched him fight hard and pay the physical and emotional toll of addiction.

If there’s anything I’ve learned from this experiencing of being friends with and losing Travis it’s that “love alone is worth the fight” Love is never without risk and the more boldly we choose to love the broken, the addiction and the forgotten the riskier it becomes, and even though it didn’t end the way that any of us hoped it would.  I hope that he knew he was loved, that he would know that we fought for his heart for so long and that we will continue to fight for those for whom “love alone is worth the fight”

The funny thing about loss and pain is that it can harden us against those attachments that caused us the pain of loss, the only and best way I can think to honor the memory of my friend Travis Wayne Backus, is to love people without fear holding me back and to cherish every moment like the next isn’t promised.

I’ll miss you friend.