In Memoriam

Tom and I, in better times.

I am sitting in the tiny red folding chair at the small blue folding table where two of my kids eat breakfast each morning. The red chair is the chair that nobody wants. They want the blue one, but sadly we have one red chair and one blue chair and so most mornings begin with a fight over who gets blue and who gets red, but it's really a fight over larger issues like fairness and justice.

I look ridiculous sitting in this red chair. It is too small for me, and my knees rise above the blue table. I sit here on the phone, in the chair that nobody wants, looking ridiculous, having a ridiculous conversation with my friend. We are talking about how our friend is dead.

"I can't believe our friend is dead," I say to my other friend over the phone.
"It's crazy. He was so healthy," says my friend. "It's so sad."
"It's just so weird," I say. And I mean it. The news saddened me and surprised me. But more than anything else, it feels weird that our friend, the friend who we were going to see on Wednesday, is dead. It's weird that we will not see him on Wednesday or ever again.

Tom is the name of our friend who died. It is inconceivable that this has happened, and for a while I cannot bring myself to talk about his death. I cannot mention that word. But it eventually becomes difficult to talk about Tom without also talking about how he is now dead, and so I link those qualities in my head, Tom, my friend, is dead, and I have no words to describe how I feel.

We talk about Tom like friends do. We praise his good qualities and we lament missed opportunities for growing closer. We share small vignettes. We point out his faults. We don't feel bad doing this because nobody ever expects their friend to drop dead without warning one morning during breakfast, and although this has just happened to our friend, we don't believe it and so we talk about him like it is a regular Monday and we will see him soon.

I am looking at a picture that was taken years ago. I am standing with Tom, my dead friend, and many of our other friends after a frisbee tournament. We are all happy and tired and dirty and our only concerns in the picture are "Where are we going to eat?" and "What are we going to do now that the summer is ended?" These are major concerns at the time. I look at the picture and I miss Tom. He is next to me, he is putting his arm around me, we two at the center of the picture, because we two are the captains of this team, we are the leaders of the most important group of people in our lives, but now he is gone, and though we haven't shared a moment like this in years, there is no chance of us ever sharing a moment like this again, and I cry.

There is no reason for my friend to be dead. This is what makes it so impossible, so implausible, so weird. He is a few steps north of forty. He is active. He stays in touch with people. He has three kids. Being dead does not fit his lifestyle. It is a giant inconvenience to him and to everybody in his life. But it has happened.

I am on the phone with another friend.

"Hey, how are you doing?" I say, knowing how he is doing.
"What the fuck," he says. He is likely in tears.

This is an accurate assessment of the situation. I am largely unable to process the information that I know to be true unless it is presented i short chunks. "This is so sad." Yup. "What happened?" I don't know. "What the fuck." Yes, I agree.

I am with my kids. It is the evening sprint, the time after I arrive home from work but before they go to bed around 8:30. Playtime, dinner, bath, story, bed. It is routinized. Normally I enjoy this time with them. It is a chance for me to hear about their days and reflect on the glorious bounty of good fortune that I enjoy.

Tonight, though, I am not in a good mood. I am short with them and should any Parent of the Year judges have been watching, they would have marked many demerits. The two older kids are annoying each other on purpose. When called to account for their actions, they claim victimhood and blame the other. This pattern repeats a few times. I threaten to separate them into different rooms, using a louder voice than they are accustomed to. They get quiet and manage to bother each other a little less. I am mollified for the moment.

They finish dinner and then it is time for baths, but they dawdle and so I am aggravated again, aggravated that my 5 year old and my 3 year old do not listen intently to everything I say, do not heed every command I am throwing at them tonight. I am irrationally annoyed with them for this. They eventually make it up to bathtime, and though I am usually easygoing once they have hopped into the tub, I am not like that tonight. I am barking at them to wash themselves and not to splash each other and when one of them splashes water into the other's eye, I say I don't care who did what, and I mean it--I am just so tired of dealing with this shit night in and night out, and I just want them to get out of the tub clean so that they can get into their PJs and go to bed. I try to convince myself that my state of mind has nothing to do with my friend being dead.

But that is, of course, false. It has everything to do with him. I start to think about him again, and I think about some of the stories he would tell about playing with his sons, model trains their favorite activity, the four of them, and how he would say that he would have gone through everything again because he loved them so much, though I knew his life had not been an easy one for years, and this makes me feel even worse about myself because I am yelling at my kids because I cannot grasp the fact that my friend is dead, my friend who would likely give everything he had to spend a few more days with his sons who he has left behind. My own son knows something is wrong and says "Daddy why are you using so many mean words?" and he is right, I am. I can't explain it to him. It is so sad, it is so weird.

I can't explain it to him because he is 5 and because I haven't come to terms with Tom, my dead friend, being dead yet. He was my friend, someone I had known since before I could drink, someone whose wedding I had photographed. We had traveled to Italy together. I had helped him move; he had helped me move. We played ultimate together. We drank together and we ate steak tips together. These are things that we had done. It was nothing special, nothing that would make for a compelling movie, nothing momentous. He was my friend.

Perhaps we had seen less of each other in recent years, families and obligations stretching thin the elastic that formerly bound us together. I never sweated the stretching elastic, though, because we were friends, and because I knew that at some point he would come back to what he had left behind, because that is what happens with elastics--no matter how far you stretch them, they always spring back. It was only a matter of time. I waited and I groused about it, though I didn't push back as much as I could have. He was a friend, after all, and when your friend needs time and space then you give him time and space. Because that's what we all have, right? We all have time. But then the elastic broke and today it became clear that it could never be restored, and I wondered why I had ever let the elastic get so strained, why I had waited, why I had believed that we all had time, time, time in our favor.

I am at a bar with another friend. We are talking about Tom and it is the same conversation I have already had with other friends. We are not breaking any new ground. We talk about mortality and marriage and the Celtics and whether we have wills in place. Drinking seems appropriate, and I order the expensive scotch because the price difference between the cheaper, good stuff and the expensive, better stuff is so trivial compared to everything else I have been thinking about today. Money be damned.

I am hungry. I ask the waitress whether I should order the fish and chips or the steak tips. She says steak tips, a perfect and horrible choice, since this is the meal that Tom, our dead friend, would order whenever we went out to eat. The waitress, of course, does not know this, but for a second my fog clears and I have my first moment of clarity the entire day: what better way to memorialize my friend who has just died than by sitting here eating steak tips and thinking about him. It makes perfect sense. For a moment I am ok. And then the fog comes back and nothing makes sense again, it doesn't make sense that he wouldn't be the one eating steak tips and drinking a beer, like old times.

It is the next day. I am standing in the shower, ready to start my day, hoping that this day will be better than the King of All Mondays that I just withstood, and I begin to bawl. I lose it, right there in the shower. I am unable to stop crying. I cannot bear that so many people have lost so much. I think of his kids, and how they will have to grow up without him. I am less concerned that they will now grow up without a father than I am that they will have to group up without him, my friend Tom. He was so special. I miss him. I haven't seen him in weeks, my friend who I was going to see on Wednesday and who is now dead, and I miss him because I will not see him on Wednesday, or ever again, and none of it makes sense.