Why 2025 Will Remain Both My Worst and Best Year Ever
- andreasachs1
- 2 days ago
- 5 min read
By Charlie Haycook / Boston, Mass.
I have three voicemails from my mother that I will never listen to.
They came between 4:33 a.m. and 6:45 a.m. on Wednesday, April 30th. I only know what they say due to the voicemail-to-text feature. One sentence told me everything I needed to know when I finally woke up at 7 a.m. to feed the cats.
“You can come up today, but he will most likely be gone by the time you get here.”
The year 2025 started on so many hopeful notes. My then-fiancée, Emmy (frequent Insider contributor extraordinaire), and I were jumping feet first into planning our October 25th wedding. As stressful as wedding planning is, we made sure to remember to have fun with the process and to plan the perfect wedding for ourselves. We already had a cake and desserts, our venue, our officiant, and several wonderful comedic bits planned.
Since we’re both comedians and actors, there was no way we were going to have a completely serious wedding. My favorite of these bits was planned as the very start of the ceremony. We were going to have our Flower Gentleman do the standard scattering of flower petals around then, at the end of the aisle, pull out a bag of baking flour, present it to the crowd, and hand it to my dad. He had the goofy, punny, dad-jokey sense of humor that guaranteed he would be the perfect recipient for this. However, we agreed to keep it secret from everyone except our Flower Gentleman, so that it would be a true surprise.
He never knew about it. I didn’t tell him. I’d hoped he would make it long enough to be at the wedding.
On top of wedding planning, I was starting a new adventure by regularly performing improv comedy with the newly revived ComedySportz Minor League team in Roslindale, Mass. ComedySportz is competitive improv comedy played in over 30 cities across the U.S. and in Manchester, UK. I started exploring improv as just a hobby back in 2022 because it seemed fun. I certainly did not intend to get an entirely new social life out of it. Or find the itch to perform and make people laugh semi-professionally. Or find my wife in one of those classes.
Emmy took on the role of reviving the Minor League team as a way to develop new players before they joined the main cast, and I was excited to be part of the inaugural team after trying out. ComedySportz has become one of my favorite things to watch and do and holds a truly special place in my heart, so naturally I wanted to share this with my parents. Being New Hampshire-based, it’s hard for them to make the weekly shows at 6 p.m. on Saturdays, but Minor League shows were scheduled to run on Sundays at 1 p.m. Perfect way to spend an afternoon!
Our debut show was on June 15th. Father’s Day. I went to support my team and my fiancée, but I couldn’t perform. That day, my world was not funny and upbeat.
Dad had been sick for most of the start of 2025 with what seemed like a very persistent flu. It took a fateful trip to urgent care for a completely unrelated issue to find that his heart was arrhythmic. So off he went to the cardiologist, who put him on some medication and told him to report back how he was feeling in a few weeks so that they would know how to proceed. I talked to him a couple of times during this period, and he was low energy, not moving quickly or far without running out of breath. But he was still himself.
Everything went downhill after he fell.
He ended up in the hospital, and that’s where he stayed for almost a month. We watched the Red Sox home opener on April 4th from his hospital room while he sipped a Frozen Coke from Burger King. When I went to visit him in the hospital during the rest of April, it was my job to bring him a Frozen Coke.
When we eventually started talking about hospice, one of the first questions he asked was whether he could have root beer floats there, since they didn’t serve them in the hospital. They told him he could have one whenever he wanted. He didn’t like the idea of hospice, but I could tell that knowing this changed his mind just a little bit.
He passed at some point in between those three voicemails.
I only remember small snippets of the end of April through…maybe June, at the earliest. Even then, time exists for me in a few tearful fragments of first times without him up until September. I do remember that it truly hit me that this was our new reality when I looked at our wedding guest spreadsheet. He was still an “RSVP: Yes.” I didn’t want to change it but wanted accurate numbers for our vendors.
I asked Emmy to change him to “RSVP: No.” She did. That was when one of our signature drinks, The Haycook, was conceptualized. “A Root Beer Float Martini. In honor of Richard.”
Our wedding was a dream come true. Any other words just aren’t good enough to describe how wonderfully everything came together.
Even though he wasn’t there with us physically, we made sure he was there in spirit. And in spirits. I don’t drink, but our guests said The Haycook was a surprise hit.
He kept a Beanie Baby gorilla on his car dashboard. It held the electric candle on our memorial table.
My Aunt Dot, his sister, received the plush bag of flour that we had ordered for our Flower Gentleman. Seeing that happen was why my voice got shaky and choked up for the entire ceremony, besides the obvious nerves.
In a snap, our wedding was over. There were 1,738 pictures to go through and find the best ones. It’s devastating not seeing him in any of them, but his presence was felt by all.
My dad was a warrior. He was compassionate. He was a storyteller and a bottomless well of useless knowledge. He could make you laugh with even the worst jokes that you’d heard a million times.
Experiencing such an incredible loss within months of my wedding has taught me a lot about myself and about life. I choose to enter 2026 focusing on what matters most. I put in notice at the job I’ve outgrown after returning from my wedding time off. I’m going to build the best marriage with my wife, who deserves the world for sticking by my side this year. I’m going to spend meaningful time with friends, telling stories of hope and healing during D&D or just laughing at anything. I’m going to lean harder into the things that challenge and empower me, especially acting, comedy, and writing.
All that to say that, in 2026, I choose to be more like my dad.
Charlie Haycook is a Boston-based writer, actor, and improv comedian who’s looking for that next fulfilling professional opportunity. His favorite thing to do is to sit with his wife Emmy and watch their five cats do shenanigans, followed closely by playing D&D and performing at The Rozzie Square Theater with ComedySportz Minor League and many other productions. Charlie is a lover of history and delights in sharing his personal ghost encounter stories with whomever wants to hear them.