The original date of publication for this essay is Sunday, June 13th. It is the 48th of a year’s worth of essays, published on Sundays.
Last week’s essay: On the Seasons
It was an afternoon in August, and I was sitting on the toilet when I got the call. I wasn’t expecting it. I knew things were bad, but I didn’t know they were that bad. My buddy on the other end was a wreck, and how could he not be, he’d been spending every afternoon with the kid and his own old man was getting terrible news from the doctors every week.
I wasn’t sure when the funeral would be. It was that gray zone where summer’s ending and some folks have gone back to college but not everyone has. Some friends of mine were going to a bowling alley/arcade thing the next suburb south. I took a longer route than I needed to. I had a Sara Bareilles CD in the deck. I listened to the most mournful song on there, the one about someone floating around up in the sky feeling broken. I listened to it over and over and over again.
He wasn’t someone I knew well. Found out at his funeral he’d been born the day before me. It was packed. A girl I hadn’t seen in a few years had driven back from Tuscaloosa for it. Nobody knew what to do. One of those days where seeing someone you didn’t expect to see could push the tears over the edge of your eye. My buddy who’d called me said something at the wake, something like, “It’s ok,” and my mom hugged him and said, “No. No, it’s not, but you will be.”
I didn’t know him well. But he was smart. He was witty. He had the best sarcastic smile. He turned a good double play.
***
It was an afternoon in July, and I was sitting at my desk when I got the text. I was blindsided. I thought it might not be real, but I knew that it was. Him, of all the people. The most lively of all of us.
He was four years older than me, but he’d done a master’s program and stuck around the choir. He had a clear voice, a joyous voice, upright and light and assured. Crisp, I guess you could call it. He was all those things, too. Clear. Joyous. Upright and light and assured. There was a story about how he’d found a hurt baby squirrel on the quad one time. Housed it in his dorm room until it grew up a bit. It would sit on his arm, and when it met someone and he liked that person, it would run out his arm to his fingers to say hi, but if he didn’t like that person, up it went behind his neck.
The other driver ended up pleading guilty to something that’ll get you twenty years out there. Sedatives in her system. More than the prescribed dose. Crossed the center line. He didn’t have a chance. One of his friends survived. The other didn’t.
His wedding was a few weeks away. He was buried in his wedding suit. I didn’t go to the funeral. Had an event for work I didn’t think I could miss for it. Someone in our class said they were putting together a broader note from all of us, so I sent my note to them. I think they flaked. Didn’t give it to the family. I don’t know my note would’ve made much of a difference. I suppose I could still send it. It’s one of those things where it was helpful just to write it, though. Just to make some sort of acknowledgment of it, even if there can’t be sense. I wrote about how he and some other guys from his era had stayed with my roommate and me when they were back for a football game my senior year. I wrote about how infectious he was, and how much he made a guy want to be a better person, and how honored I felt to have him in my home those two nights, and the morning in between.
I read his Facebook page periodically those weeks, and someone dug up a letter he’d written to them years prior, a letter that read like he could have written it from the beyond. He mentioned a Sufjan Stevens song in the letter. I guess he loved Sufjan Stevens. I listened to it every day for a while. I still listen to it now and then. It’s comforting. A song about being welcomed home, and having been home all along.
They buried him back on the family plot in Charleston, the Charleston in West Virginia. I imagine there are wildflowers there.
Next week’s essay: On These Essays
😢