I lost a best friend, fellow vagabond, and gifted poet to a long battle with cancer. We traveled and performed together for years. We joked over homemade-hotel-room drinks about how the $31 we raked in from the donations for the night’s house concert, or whatever it was we could drum up, weren’t even enough to pay for the liquor we’d bought before the gig. And he walked with me through the shadows of the “relative loss” of my young daughter through divorce. (Although, now in her mid...