Does that picture seem familiar to you?
If so, you probably saw it six months ago when I wrote a favorite memory of my friend Tom. Friday marks the one-year anniversary of his death. It, and the image which tops the blog entry in my second link, are used with the kind permission of his widow. I didn't take them myself.
I wish I could have.
One of the things you drill into yourself as a writer is the need for structure. Whether you're putting together a novel, a short story, or more words than any normal person should write about comic books from the 90's, good writing requires structure. Just like in architecture, you can have the coolest idea for the most incredible building ever, but if it lacks the basic support it needs to remain standing, you're going to end up with a giant pile of rubble, bent nails, and broken glass. Maybe you can pass it off as a modern art installation, but by that point it's a question of marketing and outside my realm of expertise.
Death destabilizes all of us because, as human beings, we crave structure.
Our brains are hardwired to find patterns. Every minute of every waking hour, whether we realize it or not, we are processing everything we experience in the form of a story. It bombards our senses as they query the 5W1H (Who, What, When, Why, Where, and How) necessary to construct a narrative, a story, that allows our brain to sort, categorize, and make sense of all the senseless things going on around us. We usually don't have complete information about any of these categories, but our brains are remarkably good at filling in the gaps and extrapolating from incomplete data.
When someone dies though, it throws a wrench in the works. Suddenly everything we've ever known, all the information provided to us by this individual, their part in our story, stops. Grief is our brain craving, crying out desperately for, input, then crashing when it can't find the signal it knows should be there. Death interrupts not just the story of the deceased, but our stories too.
Because our brains are pattern-seeking machines, because we evolved to relate to a constantly-flowing stream of information comprising our life's story, loss of information destabilizes that pattern. We unconsciously kick into overdrive. Our brains go nuts, demanding answers to questions for which there are none. The structure of our story falls apart, because no matter how much we know about the death of the individual upon which we are focused, there's one question that can never adequately be answered.
"Why?"
"Why" is a multi-layered question. It's an infinite recursion, and endless regression. No matter how much we explain, no matter how many layers we slather on to our Dagwood-looking sandwich of an answer, the question can always be asked, again, "Why?" Anyone with a toddler learns this in short order.
We may know with perfect understanding "why" someone died. Modern medicine is quite good at digging into the reasons behind the cessation of brain activity and organ failure that signals a person has died. And they'll relate that information to friends and family:
- The tumor was inoperable.
- The cancer had spread too far.
- We couldn't stop the bleeding.
- Water aspirated into the lungs.
- The bullet damaged the brain.
- Multiple organ failure due to advanced age.
There are a litany of whys.
Beyond the physical, though, there's a metaphorical. Not, "Why did this person die?", but rather, "Why did it happen now, this way, today as opposed to six weeks from now or two days prior? Why to him, and not to someone else?"
There's no answer for those 'Why?'. No matter how we torture ourselves searching for the answer, no matter how many platitudes we use to assuage our raw emotions, no matter how many times we're told, "It was just her time," or "God works in mysterious ways," or "He had accomplished what he came here to do," we're still left unsatisfied. The structure is incomplete.
It will always feel wrong. There will be emptiness. The data will forever be incomplete to the point that even our sophisticated, pattern-seeking, error-correcting brains cannot compensate for all that white noise, all that blank space, that now-vanished load-bearing wall in that corner of our minds. When it comes crashing down, hours, days, months, or even years later, our system overloads, rational thought ceases, and grief results.
One year on, Tom is still missing from my life.
Permanently. Irrevocably.
It's not logical. In the past year, I've cried more tears over Tom's death than I've cried over the deaths of close relatives. I hadn't talked to him since 1996. I hadn't seen him since my senior year of high school. He was "in my life" only to the extent that I knew he was around, doing his own thing, raising a family, approaching his 40th birthday.
Regardless, we were very close in our teenage years. I considered him one of my best friends from high school. Whether he realized it or not, he helped me put in place some very important structure to my own story, my own life. And when I learned of his death, the shock tore out some significant beams which I didn't even realize had been supporting a part of me for the last twenty-five years.
Wisdom (or maybe it was Cinderella, or was that Counting Crows?) says you don't know what you've got until it's gone. For me, when it came to Tom, this was more true than I realized, because here I am, one year later, and I'm still fighting tears.
Forty-some years into this life, I've discovered the best way to fight tears isn't to strip off my shirt, thump my chest, and taunt them to "Come at me, bro!". That may be what our culture teaches, but it's not what works. No, my prescription for fighting tears is laughter. And Tom, when he was around, was an effective antibiotic against depression, because he could make anything funny.
So here's the memory of Tom I'm using today to fight back the tears as I venture deep into my own structure, assess the damage, and begin the repair process yet again.
Some days after school, I'd go with Tom to hang out with him and his siblings at his grandparents' house. Tom's grandparents were amazing people, having immigrated to the United States from Hungary after the Communists came to power there in the 1950s. His grandfather (who was also named Thomas) served in the Hungarian artillery corps during World War II, then worked for Dow Chemical here until he retired. Tom's grandmother was also insanely smart, having worked for Eli Lilly after they settled here in the States.
Tom's grandparents spoke and understood English (albeit with an understandably heavy accent), having lived in the US for forty years at the point when I first met them, but when they were at home, I often heard them converse in Hungarian. I couldn't understand it, but Tom would occasionally translate something for me if it was worthy of a laugh.
About two doors down from where his grandparents lived, there was another house with a much younger boy who lived there. I don't remember his name, but he was probably eight or so years younger than we were, and I recall Tom's younger brothers playing with him from time to time. One day when Tom and I were outside, doing whatever it was a pair of fifteen year old boys do when in grandma and grandpa's back yard, this neighbor kid called out to us from two yards over, waving, to say hello. He then asked who I was, and Tom said, "He's my friend."
"What's your friend's name?" the boy asked.
"Bob, OK? His name's Bob!" Tom yelled back before I could say anything. "Now shut up and leave us alone!"
"Hi, Bob!" the boy yelled, waving even harder. A short time later, his mom called him inside. "Bye, Bob!" he yelled at me, waving more.
Note: my name is not, nor has it ever been, Bob.
Tom and I got a good laugh out of putting one over on a seven-year-old, and went about what must have been some serious philosophical conversations between teenage males. An hour or so later, my mom arrived to pick me up and take me home.
Cut to a few weeks later, when I'm back over at Tom's grandparents' house. We walked to the comic book store down the street from where they lived, then walked back to the house, and as we're going in the front door, guess who should see us from further down the sidewalk?
"Hi, Bob!!"
Tom hustled both of us inside before we'd have to suffer the indignity of conversing with a child, and we settled down in front of the television in the back room to play Secret of Mana on the Super Nintendo. Before long, though, there was a knock at the front door. Tom's grandfather got up to answer the door. Standing there was the kid from down the street.
"Yes?" Tom's grandfather asked.
"Is Bob there?"
"No," I heard Tom's grandfather say after a short pause. "There is no Bob here."
"Oh. OK."
The door closed.
Twenty or so minutes went by, and there was another knock on the door. Again, Tom's grandfather answered it, and again, it was the kid from down the street.
"Can I talk to Bob?"
"No," Tom's grandfather said, "there is no Bob here."
"Oh. OK."
The door closed.
Tom and I, at this point, are snickering to ourselves at how badly we've put one over on this kid.
Ten minutes later, there's another knock on the door, and you can see where this is going. Again, Tom's grandfather answers the door, and again he's met with a thoroughly confusing question:
"Can Bob come out and play?"
"No," I heard Tom's long-suffering grandfather say, in his thickly-accented English. "No. No Bob! There is no Bob here! You go home and stop bothering me!" The door slammed closed before the neighbor kid could reply.
Tom's grandfather then spat out something angrily in Hungarian, and walked back into the other room. Tom busted out laughing, and I did too, just because Tom's laughter was infectious. "What did he just say?" I asked. Tom refused to tell me, saying only that it was not very nice, and no matter how much I begged and cajoled, he never gave in.
To this day, I've no idea what awful epithet Dr. Thomas L. Krudy hurled in anger at being continually disturbed by the kid down the street. Tom wouldn't repeat it, nor would he translate it. Now, of course, I'll never know, and there's a good chance Tom wouldn't even have remembered if he was still around for me to ask. But honestly, at this point, I'm glad he never told me.
It's a hell of a lot funnier that way.
Once again, Tom gave me a gift I didn't even know I'd received until I looked back on it all these years later. Thanks for that, man. I miss you. I love you. I wish you were here to share in the laughter.
And look: just like that, I'm not crying anymore.
A tough but heartfelt read brother. Tom sounded like a great dude. It’s a miserable situation and I truly feel for you.
Great memories though bud. Tom would be proud to have such a lovely tribute.
Very sorry to read about your loss. Your friend looks like Vin Diesel. I was confused at first because I seriously thought it was Vin Diesel.
This elegant piece has a definite Stand by Me feel; maybe you should write a long short story about it?
PS -- it was Joni Mitchell in Big Yellow Taxi who wrote, "don't it always seem to go, that you don't know what you've got until it's gone" in like, 1971. But I'm sure that's not original either.
Thanks so much, @janenightshade. Tom had a thick head of hair back in high school, so I always kind of do a double-take when I see pics of him with it buzzed down so low. I'll take Vin Diesel as a compliment for him, since he played football and lifted weights. :)
Non-fiction into fiction is a path I've attempted before, and I have never felt I succeeded with it. There are stories, and there are memories, and unless it's on a very superficial level, I have trouble mixing the two effectively. Just not that good a writer, I suppose. :)
Ha! Yeah, I guess I didn't make the joke obvious enough, since I linked Counting Crows' (and Vanessa Carlton, on backup vocals, I want to say...?) cover of her song. Pretty lame attempt at humor, but I'll own it. :D
Oh, I didn't click the link. I didn't realize CC did a cover of Big Yellow Taxi? My bad, so sorry!
I think you are a much better writer than you give yourself credit. But maybe you just have to grow your mind into that mindset? I didn't really seriously start turning my experiences into fiction until I was 48.