Author’s Note: Drafted several months ago, this piece sat in my Drafts folder until now. For what it’s worth . . .
-Marlow
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Three of our friends, not just acquaintances but friends both younger and older than us, have passed recently in sudden and unexpected ways. Regardless of its pace, dying like American baseball can be seen as a game with a lot of waiting in it, a contest with increasingly heightened anticipation of increasingly limited action and outcomes. Another friend is in this game’s devilish batter’s box, and the 100 MPH fastball and wicked slider pitcher has his count at 0 and 2. He recently got on base via a walk. This piece slowly evolved as a result.
During my life, the only way we Americans noticed anything was stealing from us, drafting us into the military during an unpopular war or killing us. Well, taxing us is not “stealing” in the legal sense, and 61% of us didn’t pay any Federal taxes in 2020; so, they and we generally didn’t mind. The draft’s been gone for half a century, so no-dice there. Same for killing despite America’s ongoing fentanyl and COVID plague death crises, our murderous defund the police crime spikes, the Russian war in Ukraine and the Chinese Asian wars to come.
What we do pay attention to is smaller and more discrete and quite unexpected. Those of us lucky enough to have lived this long know when someone we care for dies and we’re not expecting it, we don’t lose them all at once; we lose them in pieces over a long time. Sorta in the way the mail for them slows in dribs and drabs and then stops altogether being dropped into the chute or box after they pass. Their laughs, tics, comfortable sense and place in our lives fade. Gradually, we accumulate the parts of them that are gone. Just when the day comes — when there’s a particular missing part that overwhelms us with the feeling that they’re gone, forever — there comes another day, and another specifically missing part.
Our memory is a dark monster in these matters; we forget — it doesn’t. It simply files things away in some dusty, ratty cave archive under a lonely mountain in Utah. Un-asked and un-commanded, it keeps things for us, or hides things from us — and then it summons them to our recall with a will of its own. We think we have a memory; but it has us.
So, we dream on, putting our inner humpty-dumpties back together again, re-inventing the departed’s lives as we move forward. We give many of our departed sainthood and galaxy guardian club membership. We imbue them with what we loved and strip them of what we feared. They become brave or lost as we dream on and on with them becoming the best this, the perfect that, as our dreams escape us almost as vividly as if the deceased are still with us.
All this remembering, re-imaging and re-imagining them allows us to see the whole person – even before the oldest photos of them and well before we first met them. A whole life, I mean. We can picture them when they were much younger because there were always gestures and expressions that are ingrained, ageless. If we’re lucky, we are gifted to see the whole them.
As more time passes, it’s the people who knew us whom we want to see. They’re the ones we can talk to. When enough time passes, it matters not what they did to us.
Down the line, loss leads us to become almost frantic “here and now” opportunity seeking hogs. We start taking every opportunity given us, even if we are blessed with too many opportunities. One day, we now finally understand, the opportunities will stop.
We reach a point after so much personal loss, where being afraid about looking clingy, selfish, or cowardly to those in our lives who are still with us is the worst reason for doing or not doing something. This requires many edits to our thinking, feeling, and behavioral coding. We innately got that as kids early on — we were perfect humans. That lasted until the grownups got their hands on us. Our work now becomes stopping our careening towards the current succession of anticlimaxes and infinitely unsatisfying and disagreeable human endings and to begin focusing on the great wonders of human companionship we were and are blessed with.
This last is worth being fanatical about.
And so goes our belated search of lost time.
(I mean the people we will always remember, the ones who changed our lives — in the end they never really go away.)
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