Bret Baier defends his constant interruptions during his Kamala Harris interview: “I needed to redirect her” variety.com/2024/tv/news/bre…

I remember when my childhood best friend was in a car accident. I was ten years old when the call came. A corded yellow landline at 2 a.m. They were hit by a drunk driver and her mother went through the windshield. She was decapitated. My friend awoke upside down and crawled through the back to reach her mother. She held her head as the ambulance arrived. I remember attending the funeral. It was weird and uncomfortable. Everyone around me wept and it smelled like lillies, which was supposed to be a happy smell, but from that moment on...it was death, and decay. While the families mingled and shared sad platitudes, I convinced her to sneak upstairs to the funeral director's office and steal the buttermints from the fancy silver footed bowl on his desk. We laughed breathlessly as we stole down the stairs, pockets full of pastel pillow mints. Giggling at our criminal mischief, oblivious to the mourners and the lillies. We sat in the front row because that's where family sat and she wouldn't let me leave her side. She let out a gutteral scream and threw herself on the casket "mommy mommy mommy". I grabbed her and hauled her back. Her horrified family gasping for air. I physically held her down while the preacher said words. Words that didn't matter because her mother was gone and the casket was closed and none of it fucking mattered. We went out back back to the cold empty playground and we swang. We swang on the stupid swings and I made her laugh with my stupid jumps and my stupid voices. And she cried. And I sat there. Upside down on a rubber swing. And we were quiet. And 30 years later she still messages me and talks about those mints, and the swings. Because the words don't matter. The platitudes and the sad side hugs. The emotions don't matter. I sucked at it. I could replicate it but it was never real and I learned that day that what matters is presence. Companionship. A steady anchor in the raging fucking storm of broken humanity. And that has always been me. I may not get it. The weeping. The screams. But I will sit with you in the darkness. I will steal the buttermints and I will swing with you in silence. And I will be. I will be.