My friend is dead.
Taste, discretion, and the limits of what I myself know now will limit what I can say, so suffice it to say that he was very young, and I believe there is a strong chance he was a victim of 2020-and I don’t mean Covid. The truth is, the frustrating, sad fact is, we don’t know how he died. That’s a simple, matter-of-record, fact. Autopsy/toxicology report won’t get back till January at least.
And, which is more, which is worse, we don’t know why he died.
First, the first. That’s simple. Los Angeles has quite the backlog bright now, for obvious reasons. The hospitals are at full capacity and the coroners have their hands full. He died in his home and we don’t really have any specific reason to believe it was from Covid (would a toxicology report be needed in that case? Would it show the virus? These are not rhetorical questions. I honestly don’t know), but I do think it’s this pandemic and its consequences may have been a contributing factor to his decline in health and ultimate demise.
But why? Well, there’s the whole Problem of Pain, theodicy, and all that. I’m not going into that here. Mankind has had thousands of years to ponder that, and I doubt I’ll solve it in this blog post. After my friend died, I did go out and buy a copy of C.S. Lewis’s “A Grief Observed”, which chronicled his own struggle after his wife Joy died. One of the greatest Christian apologists we’ve ever been blessed with and my own favorite author, I sought comfort and insight into his words.
I was struck by his naked vulnerability and painful honesty about his own uncertainty. It certainly resonates. The way Lewis describes the sometimes selfish nature of the grieving process strikes a chord. He also described that even a firm belief in Heaven doesn’t immediately salve the pain of losing someone who is not with you now. Whatever happens on The Other Side, the mother will never hold her dead child in her lap again, and he and I saw our last movie together. Uncut Gems, right after we watched Hubie Halloween. Not a bad night.
And perhaps this is a selfish post, in that I am examining my own feelings and process rather than saying anything about the deceased or offering comfort to his other friends and family. But here it is.
I have not shed a tear. Not for him, nor indeed anything else since I first found out, over a month ago. I’ve gone numb. I thought tears might be cathartic, because that’s what people do. I think about the things that happened to me before that made me cry. Getting lost trying to find my way home. Visited a family friend who had just been paralyzed. Nearly crashing the car on my first driving lesson. These were all years, decades ago. For whatever reason, I’m much more likely to cry at fiction. The end of Oscar Wilde’s The Selfish Giant. Ace’s final plea to Batman in the Justice League episode, “Epilogue”. That Sainsbury’s advert about the Christmas Truce.
But none for my fallen friend, so far. I found that odd, and not for the first time. How vulgar is it that I expressed grief more visibly for Logan than for my own, real grandfather. But what can I say? We don’t control our own knee jerk reactions. Still, I did think I should cry. It felt appropriate. I tried to evoke it. There is a subreddit called r/baww for this specific purpose. Images, videos, and text posts posted to elicit a salty emotional reaction. But I get there and 90% of it is mawkish schlock about sad dogs. So contrived, so obvious, so maudlin. Didn’t do a thing for me. It’s like ‘Lil Brudder, such over-the-top shameless tearbait you’re more likely to laugh than cry.
Absence makes the heart grow absent. I hadn’t had such a constant companion since my last romantic relationship, an area that has also grown stagnant(er) as of late. With this friend, we *would* hang out constantly. See a movie every week, make plans, take trips together. etc. That was in the time previous. The Sweet Herebefore torn apart by this terrible virus and the atrocious consequences. Our trips to Wrestlemania, Tijuana, and Mardi Gras were canceled. Our volunteer service, where we met and spent so much time together with our other friends, was off. I could no longer volunteer as a librarian at the senior center either, or go to yoga. I don’t know what else he had. At any rate, our contact dropped significantly. I only saw him about once a month this year.
I can only speculate about his fun level these last few months, his very last. From our increasingly morbid conversations, I doubt it was very high. Whose was? But the greater point is that this blasted year cut our interactions down so infrequently, and unpleasant or less fun ones at that, to the point where negative experiences overshadowed the positive, or shouted louder anyway. That’s a hard cruelty to digest, that my final memories of my friend be so colored by misery and melancholy even before his sudden death.
I’ve been hoping for some catharsis. No, that’s not it, now that I type it. Maybe I’ve seen too many movies, read too many books, immersed myself in too much fiction. Because while I keep a stoic, nonchalant manner while talking about this tragedy or handling his affairs (such as when I visited his apartment and packed up his stuff, nodding off the polite condolences of the building management and neighbors), I do still hope for one of those dramatic scenes you see where the grieving character finally lets it all out, tears and revelations.
So maybe it’s not actual catharsis I want, but a scene of catharsis. Like those convenient dramatic moments where the teargates let out at the end of a Christopher Paul Curtis novel or Don Draper breaking down. Or yes, that short film I wrote, The Batting Cage, where Colby, who has lived through an entire unnamed apocalypse and seen his entire family die, has his weepy moment looking at an abandoned batting cage that reminds him of his dad. Beats like this can be very satisfying in fiction, which is contained and controlled. And short, relatively speaking. You can have your 300 page novel or two hour movie or 10 minute short and write in a cozy emotional moment at just the right time, the climax if it’s a drama, just before the end. But life just goes on and on. It’s not that there’s not enough time for such a climax, but that there’s too much. Where on earth would you put so significant a two minutes or 30 seconds or however long, and not expect it to be swallowed up by the everyday mundanity that precedes and follows it?
When we finally do know, could it come then? I don’t know, because I don’t know. Will simply the factual knowledge of the logistics of death evoke some feeling? Is that even something to hope for? At any rate, I will give Covid credit for that. It’s doing a damn good job at prolonging the misery. Or lack thereof.
I’m 33 years old and I’ve never been to a funeral. I used to joke “And hopefully I never have to”, but that’s not funny. By my estimation, after three grandparents, an aunt, a professor, a college staff member, a deacon, and another volunteer, he would be the ninth person I’ve known personally to have died. Nine. Some have more, some have less, but what’s obvious is that that number can only ever go up. I’m just about out of fingers.
Well, you’ve reached the end of the post, and what did you expect? After that shamefully indulgent admission that I was trying to make myself cry, what else can I say? I don’t have wisdom or insight. That’s the point. So I’ll finish with a Bible quote:
“In my Father’s house there are many mansions. If not, I would have told you: because I go to prepare a place for you.” (John 14:2)
And a bit from Shadowlands, accompanied with the last image of that film. I don’t know if this was an actual C.S. Lewis quote, but it certainly sounds like Jack and its moral applies.
The pain now is part of the happiness now. That’s the deal.
That’s about it. If I feel anything, that means he meant something. Everybody knows that. But the thought I’m circling now is that if I’m trying to make myself feel more than I do, that’s pretty much the same thing, isn’t it?
And hey, we’re both comic book fans, so close with:
Poi si torno all’ eterna fontana, old friend.