I bid farewell to another high school and college classmate this week. He was not the first and most certainly won’t be the last in this war of attrition that is life, but this time felt different than the others.
The first was over 50 years ago, fairly early in our six-year stint at Boston Latin School. Technically, I guess he never reached high school. We had been classmates since the fifth grade, a friendly, somewhat awkward kid, which didn’t really distinguish him from the rest of us, but he had glasses so we nicknamed him “The Professor” or simply “Prof.” I think that it was leukemia that took him, so he was gone from our midst for a long time before one day they told us he was gone. We said a prayer and we went on.
Next time was the call that came a couple of weeks after we all had graduated from college. There had been a one-car accident in Florida. We met throughout that summer, making phone calls, sending out letters, raising funds to establish a scholarship in his memory, because that’s what you do. We learned the difference between raising enough money to give a scholarship and enough to establish a scholarship. We talked about his parents and what they must be going through. And we went on to start our careers and lives.
It was about 10-15 years later when the phone rang early one morning as I was getting ready for work. He was the first kid in our class in high school to have a calculator, which he sold to me for $5 when he got his programmable HP calculator which we used to count down the seconds left in class. (I never got the hang of reverse Polish notation.) Turns out selling calculators and then computers was what he loved to do. He sold me my first computer, a Packard Bell, when I was working on my dissertation in 1988. He had pulled his car over to the side of the road a couple of blocks from the hospital and that’s where they found him. Was he driving to the hospital? We’ll never know. He wasn’t married. We thought about our own young families and what if it had been us. We checked our insurance. We went on.
The “in memoriam” list got a little longer at each five-year reunion. One or two more from our high school class of 200 and a proportional number from the 1,600 in college. Some closer friends than others. Some you haven’t thought about since high school or some you didn’t even know in college, but classmates all.
And there were others over the years, other friends, colleagues, mentors, and of course, family. Family where you watched first your grandparents’ generation and then your parents’ generation. Family where you watched the random teardrop become a trickle become a steady stream and then a trickle again, until…
1993, 2000, 2004, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2013, 2013, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2023
So, when the e-mail arrived on Tuesday evening sharing “Sad news” for the third time in the last two years, it hit different this time.
We gathered and paid our respects. We compared notes and shook our heads at the realization that until last Wednesday he might have been the healthiest of us all. We pulled some chairs into a circle because we can only stand for so long these days, and we reminisced. We shared memories of broken rules and broken hearts and broken glass and thankfully, very few broken dreams, and we laughed.
Then we shared some of those stories with his children, and we promised to send them photos so those memories would go on.
Rest in peace, my friend.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
Embrace the Absurd 