Friday afternoon (a couple weeks ago) I went to a memorial for Barry, a friend I used to work with in years long past who died two months ago of colon cancer. It wasn’t a religious service, although there were certainly those there who expressed religious sentiments. Rather, Barry had expressed the wish that his friends and family get together to have a really fun party. So there was food and music and an open bar. There was a sentimental slide show of photos from his life. People reminisced about Barry and caught up with old friends they hadn’t seen in a long time. And to the extent that you can say this about what was still (in effect) a funeral, it really was a lot of fun.
What made this possible, of course, is that Barry was such a great guy. He was full of energy, had an indomitable laugh, and warmed to people quickly. Barry was the kind of guy who was always at the center of his social circle, just because if he liked you he accepted you as family straightaway. Friends were regularly over to his house, whether for a few beers or for golf or to help him put in a retaining wall so the hill behind his house wouldn’t collapse in the rain. His kids grew up with the kids of his friends and neighbors, just because he – and his wife, to be sure – were so welcoming. The stories went on and on.
I guess it is only natural, when you go to one of these things, to wonder what it will be like when it’s your turn? I have long since said that I have no intention of expressing an opinion about what my family should do for me, on the grounds that “funerals are for the living anyway, so you guys have to decide what you want to do.” But also I don’t want to get sucked into planning something big that feeds my ego and then have nobody show up.
It’s a real possibility. We heard short talks from Barry’s brother and sister, and also from three or four of his old college buddies … with whom he had remained close ever since. Where are my old college buddies? I haven’t the slightest idea. I haven’t kept up with them. There’s one friend from eighth grade with whom I am still vestigially in touch, although we don’t write each other a lot; ironically my boys hear from him more often than I do because they and he are all on Facebook, which I am not. Who else, since then? Work friends, mostly, but even there I haven’t really kept up with most of them. Half a dozen of us (from the company where we and Barry all worked together) still get together three or four times a year for lunch. And of course if I dropped dead now, when I’m fifty, there would be people from my current company or people who remembered working with me at my previous company who would stop by because it’s the nice thing to do. But there is no way that I have ever kept – or will ever keep – in touch with a galaxy of good friends the way Barry did.
I thought about this for a while, and I realized it’s not just accidental, and its not just laziness. (Well, part of it is laziness but not all of it.) The fact is that I compartmentalize my life almost instinctively, to the extent that I never really drop all the boundaries with anybody. Of course for years I haven’t wanted to bring anybody from work home to meet Wife, because her social skills are so bad and she can be so offensive or embarrassing. (Also our house is a sty, and the boys have picked up on this. In elementary school they used to have their little friends over un-self-consciously for play dates; but once they entered middle school the visits stopped like they had been cut off with a knife.) Even in the early years of our marriage, when she was a little less embarrassing and I loved her a lot more, I was really careful about the people I invited home … ever since the disastrous night in graduate school when I invited a number of friends from my department over and she went into a racist monologue against Mexicans that left all of us – me included – stunned and speechless. But there is more to it than that, because I compartmentalized my life well before I even met her.
When did it start? How far back does it go? I’m really not sure. Gosh, could I blame it all on my father telling me not to tell my friends at school that he and my mother used to smoke dope? Tempting, but unlikely because it’s too specific and too superficial. More plausible, I think, is that it may have grown out of my chronic experience of being not understood.
It happens in big things and little, but in some ways it is the story of my life. It seems like whenever I have argued with D – whether over some pointless political topic or a serious emotional one – somewhere near the core of the argument she has misunderstood something I said and taken strong exception to it. (Isn’t it great how I can make all our arguments Not My Fault that way? But in retrospect that’s how I remember them.) My whole marriage to Wife has been one long dreary sequence of occasions where she has not had the slightest clue what I was trying to say … and in fact one of the very earliest posts in this blog, back in December 2007, complained about exactly that. Whenever I have to ask somebody a question at work, I always ask it two or three times in two or three very different ways, because I have learned (and now take it for granted) that nobody will have the slightest idea on the first pass what I am talking about or why I should want to know that, of all things. My favorite English teacher in high school once commented that I had a “strong inner life” but shit, of course I did … because most of the time there was no-one I could talk to about the things I was thinking. I can even trace this thread as far back as third grade ….
I had a great third-grade teacher. She was a little short lady (though I didn’t recognize that at the time because she was taller than I was) who clearly loved her job and took a real interest in teaching us. Besides the usual round of spelling and arithmetic and scissors-and-paste, she would read us stories and sometimes she would give us things to think about. One of the ways she would do this last was to gather us all around sitting in a circle on the floor, in the corner where she would read to us, and then giving us a saying or famous quote and asking what we thought about it. Was it true? False? Could we think of anything in our lives that would make us think of this quote one way or the other? And then we’d discuss it. Great stuff.
So one afternoon she called us around, and she proposed the topic, “We would be very unhappy if all of our wishes came true.” Now this very topic was one I had already thought about a lot, so I knew I had something to say. I put up my hand eagerly.
Hosea: Oh – oh – I know!
Teacher: Yes, Hosea, what do you think about this?
Hosea: Well I know this is true, because sometimes if I’m sad or upset about something I wish that I had never been born – but I know in reality that wouldn’t make me happy because actually I really like being alive.
Dead silence.
Dead, awkward, embarrassed silence.
Dead, awkward, embarrassed silence during which Hosea came to the sudden, awful realization that nobody else in his third grade class had any experience at all of the rare but recurrent, soul-shaking suicidal ideations that he had already (at the age of eight) long-since accepted as a familiar fact of life.
Ooops.
And then some other student spoke in a small mumble about something he had wanted for Christmas that broke the next day, or about his pet bunny, or something. I don’t quite remember what it was. And the whole discussion picked up from there as if I had never spoken a single word.
And over time I guess I learned not to. Over time I learned to be very good at keeping people on the outside. At being the most polite, charming, helpful, friendly outsider I knew how to be.
It has kept me from stumbling into the same kinds of awkward embarrassing silences any more – and I think the wellbutrin has helped too – but it also means there won’t be many people at my funeral.
I don’t expect it any time soon, of course, or I’d invite all of you. Well, and I suppose I would have to leave instructions and a password to my executor to log into this blog and post the date / time / place. Hmmm … is that something I really want to do? I think that right now my will still names Wife as my executor, so maybe not ….
How about if I think about it another time?
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