Death of a Friend
During the early Fall of 2017, an old friend of mine died. He lived in Gloucester, Virginia, near the coastal region between the Rappahannock and York Rivers. One river, then, retaining its Native American name, and the other claiming allegiance to the 17th-century Duke of York. In American history, the names left to us by the conqueror and the conquered extend even to the names of our rivers. Division and alliance, dogmatism and compromise, tolerance and racism — all of them at one time or another show up as painful gaps in a nation’s attempt to survive peacefully and equitably. But the gap between life and death, the one that we all face, and the one I faced when I heard of my friend’s passing, seems nearly unbreachable. Six years have come and gone since he died, I miss him, and I’m having trouble closing the gap his death has opened.
His passing was significant to me because I’ve reached the age where the death of those I’ve known for years can’t precisely be called untimely or too young, although both of these phrases occurred to me. He didn’t reach the average lifespan for his demographic, but he was in his sixties, and aside from being deeply saddened by the news, I was also shocked to see how quickly I transformed my grief about his death into an anxiety about my own. A stunningly self-obsessed move from grief to selfishness and made with lightning speed. Not only did my friend pass, I thought to myself, but my own generation, and me with it, is coming to the end of its run.
We both were born and raised in Danville, a small, mill town in southern Virginia, although I live now in Fayetteville, Arkansas, in the foothills of the Ozarks. Fumbling to understand the dimensions of what had happened, I checked the weather, a kind of breachable gap that I could close. The day of my friend’s death here in Arkansas was a mild, clear day. The temperature reached 75 degrees, still five degrees below our average. Back in Gloucester, where he died, it was 78 degrees, which coincidentally was also five degrees below the region’s average. Gloucester and Fayetteville were windy that day too, and the wind arrived in both towns from the northern quadrant. It seems important to me that I record this.
Now that I think about it, the last thing we shared, although we didn’t know it, was an unseasonably cool north wind. Death comes that way sometimes — cold and unexpected.
He and I were the same age, and we passed through high school together in the late Sixties, the last time I was close to him. It was a decisive decade to be in high school. We were young enough to believe that our idealism was not in the least idealistic and old enough to have a driver’s license to road test those naive ideas about the world that awaited us. The soundtrack to our lives was being written by some of the most talented musicians and political observers of the twentieth century. The struggle over rights — Who gets which ones and who doesn’t — had reached the headlines of even our small-town newspapers. The war in Vietnam was being waged doggedly by Presidents and politicians in spite of the growing will of a country that saw the war as both savage and indefensible. I registered for the draft, after considering whether I might qualify as a conscientious objector. My priest — I was raised Episcopalian — patiently led me to the correct conclusion that, while I vehemently opposed the Vietnam War, I wasn’t against all forms of war. So, I got my draft card and ultimately a high draft number. I stayed home.
My friend’s oldest brother, however, left the country with his parents’ blessings. That kind of family resistance to an unjust war struck a deep chord in me, and his family’s unity in this divisive issue increased my friend’s stature in my estimation. He knew things I didn’t know about sacrifice and endurance and political resistance. He didn’t talk much about his brother’s decision, but when he did, I always detected in his voice a kind of equanimity that I still remember. With an understanding that was new to me, he bridged the gap in his family left by his brother’s absence. I’m still grateful to him for his quiet instruction.
High-profile assassinations (John Kennedy, Malcom X, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy) crowded that decade, and I remember feeling that the violence in Southeast Asia was somehow related to the violence here at home. I couldn’t work it out exactly, but at some point, I came to believe that focusing on different kinds of violence diverts our attention from a central fact: violence is violence. However we label it, when violence visits our lives, we suffer. My friend was always good with his hands. He built new things, he improved old things, deftly using tools that would have left me gravely wounded. I once asked him why he liked doing that kind of work. “I don’t know,” he said, “I’d just rather make things than tear them down.” Over the years, I’ve come to see that comment, and the sensibility behind it, as one of my first encounters with nonviolence.
The Beatles’ ninth record, popularly known as the White Album, came out in November, 1968, seven months after King was assassinated, and the range of musical styles covered in that double-album opened up a broad sound-spectrum that asked us to hear it in ways that we had never before heard music. The fact is that “Good Night” and “Helter Skelter” lived together on the same double album, and for reasons that still elude me, it sounded right. Dissonance was part of that decade’s music, of course, whether from Hendrix’s use of feedback or Miles Davis’s early experiments with electricity in Miles in the Sky. There was no easy formula for listening that could corral all the changes the musicians brought to their art.
But the music, however we heard it, told us to do two things: first, to listen carefully and, second, to wonder why the world had ended up the way it had. In short, listen and question. That is what the music said to us. And that is what my friend and I did. We listened together, and we questioned together, and with my friend as its quiet center, a group of us came together and believed that, with the music behind us, we could change the world
That didn’t happen. But when my friend died, I realized that listening to this music with him had shaped me in ways that turned out to be permanent. We listened all night long in cabins surrounded by tobacco fields, pastures, and ponds — not just to the music, but to the world around us as well — and then we asked questions. We started trying to close the gap between the world as it was and the world as we thought it ought to be. Idealism again played an outsized role in our plans, but with my friend, even the most unreachable goals — let’s live on your family farm and make a commune and grow our own food and live independently for the rest of our lives — were brought back to earth by his simple insistence on building, on making one thing at a time. On squaring his corners.
So we built an A-Frame on his farm with a wood stove for heat. And a stage where we had a little rock festival one weekend. We protested the war, we made signs, we rode bikes to school on the first Earth Day, and we recorded on my reel-to-reel the bands in the high-school talent show. We got organized. We started an underground newspaper that, I think, ran for two editions. We made cornbread on the wood stove, smoked pot, and talked with little understanding about large things: war, peace, ecology, poverty, racism, and civil rights. As I said, we did what the music told us to do.
My friend was always turning ordinary things into better versions of themselves. And he was good at it. My first car was a red 1954 Willys Jeep, and it cost me $800. I bought it in 1969. When my friend saw it, he said I should paint the hood and front fenders blue with white stars, and the back section with red-and-white stripes. I immediately agreed. He made the stars-and-stripes stencils, and one afternoon, in his driveway, we changed my battered, old Jeep into a four-wheel-drive American flag. I would have never dreamed of doing it, and even had I dreamed it, I wouldn’t have had the technical abilities to pull it off. My friend had both, the dream and the ability to make that dream come to life. To close that gap between them.
The only picture I have of him — an old black and white that another friend took for the high-school newspaper — shows me in the Jeep, backing up, looking over my shoulder, and my friend sitting on the hood, facing forward, smiling as if amused that I was going backwards, making no progress in the physical world that he negotiated with such finesse. Typically, when we got together, I showed up with an idea I’d read about, and he arrived with a thing he’d built. I’m sure now that I must’ve seemed as exotic to him at times as he did to me.
After high school, I went to college in North Carolina, and my friend stayed back in Virginia. On trips home during vacation, I saw him less and less, and after I graduated from college, I never saw him again. He wasn’t on Facebook or any other social media, and I always romanticized that decision. Every time I play the White album — it’s on regular rotation around here — I think of him. His memory now serves as a bridge of sorts between “Good Night” and “Helter Skelter.” By simply making things in a turbulent time, my friend became a mediator of sorts, a still point in a volatile world. When I heard he was ill and had only a short time to live, I called him. He told his close friends that he didn’t want a lot of phone calls, and even though I knew this, I called him anyway, got his voicemail, and left a message: I’d heard he was very sick, I said, and that I wanted him to know that I was sorry and was thinking about him.
I called again a few days later, and he answered. He seemed annoyed that I was getting back in touch at this late date, so our conversation was brief. I told myself that I had done the right thing by showing him that I cared, by trying to close the great gap of time that had opened between us, but over the past few weeks I’ve begun to doubt the wisdom of that too-easy, too-available phrase. Done the right thing. Maybe I was only feeling guilty that I’d lost contact with him and that I felt a great deal of pain for having done that. Maybe I wanted to ease that pain. Maybe I was thinking about myself. Again.
Over the decades, I never went a month without remembering him, and since he passed away, I’ve been wondering why this was so. His life was such an eloquent expression of Sixties culture that whenever I listen to the music that we loved, or read anything from that decade, or even try to saw a straight line across a sheet of plywood, he comes to mind. And I remember how easily he sawed that line, and how he grinned at me as I tried to do it, and how gently, but authoritatively, he took the saw from my hands.
No one reads Delmore Schwartz much anymore, but his most well-known short story is called “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities,” and I often think of that story when I think of my friend. The narrator, through elaborate structural devices, renders in detail his father’s courtship of his mother. At one point, his father, attempting to impress the woman who would become his mother, exaggerates the amount of money he had made during the previous week, even though it was an amount “which need not have been exaggerated.” For some reason, I’ve never forgotten the sentence that follows: “But my father has always felt that actualities somehow fall short.”
I think of this sentence when I think of my friend because he knew the responsibilities that came with dreaming, with transforming a decrepit Jeep into a glorious American flag, but most of all, when I was with him, I was aware, and deeply so, that the actuality of what we were doing together never fell short of anything. That given our dreams and our abilities, we had fulfilled the one by using the other to do it. After all, he was laughing, even as I decided to go backwards in my American-flag Jeep. My friend stood effortlessly between ideals and realities, closing the gap between them, and most often, leaving his friends the feeling of completion, of a job done as well as it could be done, given what we had and what we’d originally hoped to achieve.
There is no finer feeling in the world. I never forgot it and because he gave that feeling to me, and to all of his friends, I never forgot him.
It’s hot here today as I write this. Ninety-two degrees, with the heat index at 100. The wind’s arriving from the south-southeast. It’s a few degrees cooler back in Gloucester, and the wind’s coming in from the north. If you ask the weather vane, my friend and I are no longer in sync, at least not today.
When a person who has loomed large in your life dies, no matter whether you kept in touch or not, your world changes just a bit. A gap opens, but another one closes because you know that your friend is gone and won’t return. But you’re also aware that he’s responsible for a part of you, and you’re certain now that you look out on the world in a specific way because you knew him. You liked how he looked at the world, you took a few things to heart, and you carried them with you. Which is only to say that he showed you a part of the world you would’ve missed had you not known him.
That the weather in Fayetteville and Gloucester was very similar on that early Fall day gives me great comfort. The day he died was the last opportunity we had to share anything, and though I didn’t hear of his death until a day later, at least the weather took notice and reflected the fact that we had once been very close, believed similar things, and traveled together, taking direction from each other through a glorious and tragic decade. I miss my friend, and I suspect this feeling of loss will always live inside me, whether I take special notice of it or not.
Either way, his absence, and the gaps he left as well as those he taught me how to close, are now part of my weather.
