Goodbye, My Friend

I found out today that I lost a friend. I had not known him long, and we exchanged more punches than words in the few short months we lived in the same state after we met. As a second-degree black belt, he was my senior both in rank and age, but he was easy to befriend. He had a quirky sense of humor and an easy-going personality that belied the tragedy in his life. His undeniable charisma caused students young and old to love him as an instructor, and I admired him as a sparring partner and a friend.

The recent recession was more than just the highlight of the evening news to my friend, and he was forced to pick up and move on in search of opportunity. I was comforted by the fact we would be able to keep in touch, but although I quickly befriended him on Facebook, we never really got a chance to talk again.

Death is a fact of life, although for me it seems to also be an unintentional writing muse. We all bury family and friends, but for someone in my line of work, there is also the occasional student or former student who leaves the world much too soon. Between losing students and losing friends, death can become a grim fixation. I guess even before entering the teaching profession, the loss of my paternal grandparents pulled the rug from beneath my happy-go-lucky feet and left me staring into the abyss.

Speaking of grandparents, I have delved back into genealogy recently, which means I have spent a fair amount of time walking back and forth among rows of tombstones, looking for my ancestors’ final resting places, or the resting places of other people’s loved ones, for whom I volunteer to locate such graves and take a picture. My wife finds this pastime utterly morbid, but I do not feel that walking through graveyards is macabre. A cemetery is rich in history, and I find it a joy and a challenge to pull people’s life stories back into relevance when they were one step from eternal obscurity.

It seems there has been an endless stream of moments in my adult life which have forced me to reflect on the brevity of life and the human desire to make a difference. I have walked among rows and rows of headstones, many with writing worn away by wind and rain. The people whose graves those stones mark, their contributions to society, and often their vary identities, are lost forever to history. Those we lay to rest have trusted their fragile identities and contributions to posterity to our memories. I watched my friend make the world a better place, one front kick at a time. While I did not know him long and did not scratch the surface of his identity, I did watch him make a meaningful difference in several people’s lives.

As a former newspaper editor and a current English teacher and writer, I used to be a true believer in the written word. I believed very strongly that there is something magical about well-written prose, and therefore freedom of speech (especially written speech) is a powerful and empowering right. As a college newspaper editor, I believed perhaps too strongly in such magical properties of writing, leaned too heavily on perceived invulnerability to consequence, and relied perhaps too naively on the belief that simply exposing perceived injustice would rectify that injustice, that simply writing the correct words in the correct order would spark the incantation that would cause evil to burst into flame and turn to ash, like a vampire ambushed by the golden rays of dawn. Along with those powers, I may have even thought that recording my memories of someone would contribute in small part to their immortality on this Earth.

I am not sure if I believe writing is as magical as I once did. As I have grown a little older, both my beard and my viewpoints have taken on shades of gray. I find myself asking questions more than giving answers. It seems to me an evil that my friend is dead, but no amount of writing will change this fact. I doubt I have ever written prose that has truly changed a man’s opinion, and I doubt much less my ability even to do my friend’s memory justice. In fact, this is a poor attempt at memorializing a man who seemed larger than life, yet who I all too late realize I did not really know. But as I go through life, I find there are a select few people I have met who have truly inspired me, in whom I have found some facet of their person I wish I could emulate. Mr. Cody Weeks had a charisma and a gift for teaching that truly inspired me, and for that I am grateful. Rest in peace, my friend.

Website: The Demigods are Dead

Edward Moore Kennedy was laid to rest this past weekend. Along with this passing of a historical figure came the usual reflection of a life lived in the limelight. Superlatives sprinkled the plethora of eulogies; euphemisms by the dozens polished over the rougher edges of a life run ragged by the living. I write about this event neither to canonize nor to critique its person of focus, but to delve meaning from the event itself. What does this mean for most of us who were not related to nor represented by Senator Kennedy?

For us the living, those unscathed this time by personal grief, this event is yet another point of reference in the historical backdrop of our lives. The media has been recounting, over and over for the past few days, the profound events marking the milestones in Kennedy's life. Personal for him, historical for us, the death of one brother in war, two by assassination, a series of bad choices which ended a woman's life and his own aspirations, all are events which have ignited countless conversations at dinner tables and in classrooms, events which have helped to define a generation.

I am not of that generation. What I feel at these events of growing frequency, is the severing of links to a past I never knew. Black hearses and antique caissons carrying the players of our historical drama, as "I remember when" fades from all too many voices lost forever. History becomes two-dimensional right before our oft-distracted eyes.

What events will mark my time here? The historical and the personal do not intertwine for me; I am an observer only. I have seen space shuttles explode and towers fall and world leaders meet their natural death. I was around before there was Internet. I've lived under six presidents, two popes, and one King of Pop. I loved baseball before the players' strike — before steroids.

I take comfort in seeing Rep. Patrick Kennedy misquote a Robert Frost poem in the eulogy he prepared, reciting from "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening," while claiming the quote was from "The Road Less Traveled." A grieving son is entitled to make mistakes, as are we all. But there is something profound about scions of history stepping off of their pedestals and acting human unexpectedly. The demigods are dead; I've watched the marble figures of tomorrow shed yesterday's flesh and have their last parade. President Nixon, Princess Di, Mother Teresa, President Reagan, Pope John Paul II, President Ford, James Brown, Michael Jackson, Ted Kennedy, and others, all have made their final curtain call as I looked on from afar.

Watching these celebrity services is watching our lives previewed on a grander scale. We will all have our turn to grieve in the pulpit, and we'll all have our turn to lie in the box. Most of us will mourn without an honor guard, without a midnight vigil, without streets lined with people, without pilgrims to the grave. We will hurt no less, have lost no less, love no less. We watch, over and over again, as the story unfolds. We are observers of life. I don't want the milestones of my life to be a parade of flag-draped caskets down Main Street, nor the honey-tongued eulogies of tabloid celebrities. I don't want my cherished memories to be of historical events watched on the television screen. When someone asks me, years from now, where I was when notable events yet to come unfolded in their due course, I hope I can tell them I was somewhere else, doing something worthwhile, leaving the observing to someone else.