One month ago, my best friend from childhood, Lee, died suddenly, unexpectedly, and his death completely threw me for a loop. I was surprised, shocked, sad and confronted.
But that accomplishment is not the heart of the matter. The heart of the matter lay in Lee’s capacity for play, love, spontaneous imagination and howling laughter. There was the creative magic.
Lee was a model man. A terrific athlete as a captain on the Williams football team, baseball outfielder at the level of the Cape Cod League, expert skier at the level of Ski Patrol and I’m sure a phenomenal rugby player till he was 40. Lee was attractive, strong, virile, and in general, a man’s man. From Williams Lee went to Boston University law school and graduated #3 in the class. He then went on to a successful practice at Day Burry Howard in Stamford, Conn. as a commercial lawyer. Lee was a man out to accomplish much. And he did.
Notwithstanding his ‘upstanding character’ demeanor, Lee had a keen sense of how absurd life is and how comical people are as we strive to look good and make it in life. The scenes of laughter seemed endless. When we would riff on one absurd comical scene in life to another, it got going so fast that we would laugh til we hurt.
Lee died, unexpectedly from my perspective, of heart failure in Tufts Medical Center on Dec. 5. I have no idea what heart failure actually means as we were writing often during covid. All l I knew from him is that he was working out and seemed to be in good shape. I was shocked and deeply saddened to hear otherwise from Beth his wife.
In the aftermath of his death, I came to realize that one cannot come to grips with the death of a best friend from childhood unless one also comes to grips with death itself, which grip is simply critical and foundational for living life. I realized that when someone dies, here’s what really happens: their physical body stops working.
That happens.
But, I saw, that their felt, visceral, unique impact. their expression and presence in life, does continue on in us who knew him and for anyone impacted by Lee. Lee’s “life” may have very little to do with the fact that their body stops working.
It began to occur to me that a person’s impact, their presence, their very being does not actually die with the end of their physical life, never has and never will. That is actually quite obvious to many cultures especially indigenous cultures, though in USA 2022, we seem to speak about and relate to death as if it is not at all clear what happens and what does not happen. Not what we believe through faith or otherwise; rather, what is observable in every day human experience.
I could see that a person’s impact, their felt presence and who they were (and are) foundationally being does not stop when their body stops working. Their impact, presence and their being….who they were, what they stood for, the contributions they were and made, their foibles. struggles and blind spots, and their unique self-expression live on, quite naturally, in us and in the world. In particular it lives in the US who are committed to honor the deceased by taking on and discovering the unique gifts the deceased provided in our own lives .For example, Thomas Jefferson and Martin Luther King are human beings whose bodies clearly stopped working. Yet the presence and impact of these men is everywhere around us. And I can ( and do ) to this day take, honor and develop from Thomas Jefferson his endless curiosity with nature and from Dr. King his visionary courage and the guts to make a difference, to move the needle, no matter what. I can adopt, incorporate in my own life, that which they inspired in me. We peoples do this all the time.
In this pain, this shock and loss of someone we love who is dying and passing on, or has died, it is very, very easy to miss this distinction as to what happens at death. and this distinction is in fact the case when we look. Peoples’ bodies do definitely stop working at the point of death … and we can be uncontrollably sad and grief-stricken that their physical presence ….their voice, their touch, their laughing and crying, their upsets, the unique looks in their eyes, the child in them, what they cared most about, their favorite ways, the work they did, the things that moved that they touched. and their deeply felt impact on our lives, are viscerally real phenomena that can be felt, seen, heard, touched and are deeply missed. That is the deep pain of loving and losing someone close. We want them here and close, physically and personally. That is the pain of life when someone very close to us passes.
And yet something else happens as we mourn our loss. Somehow those we love and those we lose find a way to be present and real in our lives even after they pass. My father who was/is also a friend of Lee (Lee was family to us), has been dead for since 2004 and yet his presence and impact are very alive and real in many people’s lives, not just mine as his son. I am counseled and challenged by his voice almost daily. His presence is vivid, vital and undeniable., and other than touching him (which of course I too long for at times ) I feel, see and hear his active presence in and impact on my life in many ways, almost indistinguishable from his days as “alive.”
To miss this distinction as to what lives on ….the presence, impact, the commitments, the love…from what dies at the point of death … their (our) physical bodies … may be to miss life itself. Many, many cultures, are very clear about this distinction and arguably are better equipped to be with the ending of life as we know it than maybe we educated Americans are. and We highly evolved Americans think that we a r e our bodies. Yep, my body is what I point to when you ask me to point to “me.” We are so closely identified with our bodies that other expressions of who we are, before and after dying, can seem often dismissed. I came to consider this: Maybe people h a v e a body ( say, a body as a kind of skin envelope in which our creativity, expression and contribution are housed ) and yet people a r e not merely or perhaps even fundamentally their body…….I h a v e a hand and yet I a m not my hand, i.e., I am not simply the same as, or merely reduced to, that part of me, that aspect of me, that I call my hand. I am, whether alive or dead, much more than my hand or for that matter, this envelope that I call my body.
A n d yet ………we all arrive in life inside this wonderfully familiar package we call our body which in turn is courted, attended to and presumed to be, in our All-American go get ’em culture, as the very heart of, essence of, who you are, of whom one is, of whom I am.
Historical note: When my parents were aging and dying in 2004 and 2005, I asked myself what is this dying all about, at bottom, and I came up with 4 things that I saw were the domains of immediate concern, of what matters to people most around death and here is what I saw. We humans seemed most taken with, concerned with:
Our emotions, thoughts and memories ….. our internal states,
Our relationships (including spiritual relationships )
Our logistical challenges (what and who needs to now move, from where to where) and
Our financial impacts (how does money need to come and go ).
Prior to death, in the dying stage, the concern for physical and emotional well being /comfort is very front and center whether at home, with assisted care, the hospital or hospice.
All of these concerns are real and essential and a topic for another article. It is manifestly worth taking the time, dear Reader, to write out loud what is death to you, you as individual and the nitty gritty details of how you envision your own death, for y o u, ….yourself,…, b e f o r e it happens (it will) and also what is death to you as a human being, as part of a larger species called human being. One can empower oneself and others, authentically, to be or become, appropriate, effective and empowered with this stuff we call death. W can to this without shielding our selves from the raw, sometimes devastating, emotional impact that is there for all of us when we confront the loss of any loved one, to death and dying.
Whoa, whoa……….easy…back to Lee.
So as I started to confront and get through the sadness and surprise of finding out Lee had passed away, I began to examine the assumptions that were informing my life with him. The first thing I noticed is the lack of urgency or intensity to re-connect with Lee directly. Given Lee had retired and was living a bucolic life with a great wife in the Berkshires, I made the assumption, which was not with out some evidence from others, that he wanted to be left alone and I should respect that and keep my distance. In retrospect I see that to have been something I may have missed. Why? There is abundant evidence that when people retire, especially men, their staying connected closely with other people and engaged in participating in activities that stretch, engage. challenge and pleasure them has undeniable impact on their well-being and health. In fact, in the book, Anatomy of an illness by Norman Cousins, the former editor of the Saturday Review, Norman explicitly used laughter, specifically Candid Camera tapes that he watched, to assist healing himself from an inevitably degenerative and most often fatal condition called ankylosing spondylitis. When people get inspired, get lit up, they lighten up. There’s less stress, weightiness, serious significance or even grimness at all levels of life. Allowing oneself to be playful, and being/feeling young again has been proven in scientific studies to impact physical well-being usefully on many key measures. So what is my point?
The re-igniting of our playfulness and our laughter, our magical riffing off of each other, might have allowed for a new level of physical and emotional well-being for both of us. And in retrospect, I might have acted differently with more confidence and clarity of purpose to re-connect with Lee.. It wasn’t as if we did nothing, as we did our letter writing. However, what we did may have in part missed the point; it may have remained circumspect and respectful perhaps to a fault whereas the real point was to intrude into what Einstein called ” the illusion of separateness,” this being apart justified by time concerns ( too busy) and the space concerns (too far) that seemed to keep us apart. Let the play and magic of re-connecting begin…starting with simply the laughter, the re-kindling moments of deep trusting and affection, the rejuvenating magical riffing of our youth to re-emerge. reaching out and connecting as we age is appropriate, effective and fun……….laughter may in fact be the best medicine.
This realization left me bigger than any regret I might have had and almost grateful for the sadness waking me up to who Lee and I were as kids for each other, and remained as buds in “old age.’
Reaching out simply works for everyone as we age. The chance may not come again.
Takeaways: life is inherently urgent and in some sense everything is at stake all the time. Yet there’s a way to be with that confronting state of affairs that leaves one in action rather than thinking about it. This particularly speaks to friends, especially friends we have from our past who constitute an (in)active Network of joy, learning, appreciation, recognition, and often, unseen opportunity. If I knew in 2020 and prior what I know now my actions would have been far more committed to interrupt the predictable “drift” of pretending my past friends don’t really matter now. They do matter and matter alot.
This upset and reflection precipitated by Lee’s sudden and surprising dying has allowed me to Think Through death itself and share what I’m discovering with you. I hope/intend to catalyze your own thinking, your own relationship with your own death, , your own preparation, your own freedom to be with what is a necessary and even fulfilling part of life for which you and I can be well prepared and empowered …..long before it happens.
Last: one of the ways one can honor people we love or care about or knew in their passing is to see what we found unique or extraordinary about them, what we might call a quality or way of being they demonstrated in life. I take on “honoring”( to honor is to accord ‘sacred respect’) what they literally were, gave, contributed, expressed. Here are the 4 commitments I am making to honor Lee, his life and his passing to the other side of life.
Number 1: the amazingly powerful and empowering relationship one gets with a ‘ got your back no matter what’ brother.
Number 2: the thrill and juice from competition especially athletic competition especially with teams.
Number 3: allowing for the Devil-May-care unsaid, near defiant attitude of young men who are facing, for the first time on their own 2 feet, the Vietnam war, money, sex, children, work, and the management of this thing called the young man’s ego all the while pretending to have it all together.
Number 4: and by far the biggest and most consequential, the commitment to create pathways for our children and grandchildren, I mean all of ours, so that they have a shot at the magic, the Wonder, the love of life that we experienced and on a planet that can support and welcome that.
I commit to exploring and developing these ways of being as one expression of honoring Lee, what he stood for and what he still stands for. He and I will continue to be in conversation just as he was with me when alive and yet we weren’t near each other.
Last, Sleever, as we named you in junior high school, see you on the other side. Make sure God knows what she’s getting into.
