This summer was a whirlwind, filled with hours upon hours of learning the ropes at my new job, exploring the island of Nantucket and all it has to offer, and finally getting to enjoy dinner at a normal hour with my husband. But there was one moment that really knocked the wind out me and frankly, it still makes me sad to think about it. 

It’s crazy to think that, because technically this was a person I didn’t know. It happened far, far away from where I am. I guess that it doesn’t technically affect me in any way, but it still shocked me to my core. 

One late Saturday night in July, I felt compelled to check Twitter at 1 A.M. Now I’m on Twitter, but I’m not like on it to the point that I usually check it upon going to bed and waking up in the morning. As Steve lay snoozing beside me, I started seeing tweets gradually appearing claiming that a young actor in Vancouver had died of a drug overdose. I was confused, because at that moment I couldn’t think of one celebrity who was Canadian (although I know there are plenty of them). After what seemed like forever, it was confirmed that it was Cory Monteith, the 31 year-old actor best known for playing Finn Hudson on one of my all-time favorite television series, Glee. 

I was crushed. How did this happen? He had gone to rehab earlier in the year, but it wasn’t like he was Lindsay Lohan. No one really knew he had a problem. I tried to wake up Steve to tell him, and he just kind of moaned, “are you serious?” and fell back asleep. I took to the internet, hoping that someone, a fellow Gleek perhaps, would also be awake that I could commiserate with. 

I stayed up for like another hour trying to gather any info I could. It felt so weird to not know this person, yet be so invested in their story and feeling like you should have seen signs of trouble. I mean, this was someone I have never met. Even now thinking about it, it seems silly to still be this upset. But for the past few years, Glee has been a huge part of my life. Like many others, it did feel like we were friends with the kids in New Directions, if not for anything than that they reminded you of people you were actually friends with in high school. For me, a lot of what happened on that show was my life in high school, minus the teen pregnancies and singing in the hallways.

To say I’ve been kind of obsessed with Glee since its debut four years ago is kind of an understatement. I’ve liveblogged entire episodes. I made Steve dress up with me for Halloween as Finn and Rachel:

when i went to work that day, he had no costume. i came home & he had made this.

I also somehow coerced him into incorporating the theme to our holiday decor:

the “l” is for love.

Which became our Christmas card that year:

And there were multiple season premiere parties:

worst picture ever, i know. gimme a break, it was my first television premiere.

now that’s how you throw a party. a high school tv show-themed party.

Which led to more photoshoots:

let’s remember, this was pre-miley sexually harassing a foam finger days.

There was even one time that the Glee concert movie came out in 3D and we were convinced that we couldn’t watch it without the deluxe viewing package (that was a fun $30 charge to explain to Steve).
 

just when you thought it couldn’t get any cooler.

what better way to celebrate your upcoming nuptials?

But mostly it was just me, tuning into my favorite show every week, buying the cd’s and listening to them in my car every single day, defending it on the internet when people accused it of “jumping the shark” (and by people, I mean Steve). And now it was just like it had ended. Of course the show is continuing, but it will never be the same without Finn. At least, not for me. 

So in honor of Glee’s tearjerking farewell episode tonight in honor of Finn Hudson (and Cory Monteith), I wanted to share a few of my favorite performances of his over the years. 

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This was the moment that the show really shifted for me. Not in a bad way, but in a “this is what happens in real life after you graduate” kind of way. All the essential couples broke up, which resulted in one of the most touching group numbers in the show’s history. I find that this song can either be really beautiful or gut-wrenchingly sad, and in this episode, it was both. Most of it turned out to be in Finn’s imagination, but he really took the lead in this song at the beginning, and he was the one I found that I couldn’t keep my eyes off of during this performance. 

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Now we think of Kurt and Finn as brothers, so it’s hard to remember back when the show first started what an awkward relationship they had. Besides the fact that Kurt was in love with Finn, their parents ended up dating and getting married, forcing them to share a room together and admit their feelings to each other. Kurt confessed his crush as Finn quickly rejected him and called him the f-word. Things were touchy until their parent’s wedding, when Finn had a major moment of self-growth and accepted Kurt as family. Yes, it was slightly weird when Finn sang to Kurt at the wedding- isn’t this song about a girl? Wasn’t Finn supposed to be singing to his mother? But it didn’t matter. It was adorable. Rachel swooned, we swooned, and all was right in the world. 

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Let me just start out by saying that I am obsessed with the Madonna episode. It was one of the first “themed” episodes which has since been kind of driven into the ground. But then it was exciting, especially when the Queen of Pop was concerned. The thing I loved about this song is that it was definitely unexpected- of all of Madge’s hits over the years, how many people would even remember this song as being part of her expansive catalogue? After spending the majority of the episode treating the girls like crap, the guys of Glee realized the error of their ways in a five-part harmony around the piano. It was a really sweet rendition of a relatively unknown song, and little surprises like that were what made the show so special. 

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