On A Friend
I’d like to be unorthodox this week and write about a friend named Gary, who passed away suddenly and recently. I can’t express the life of a person no matter how much time you give me, but I’m going to try anyway because if not me, then who else? He had few friends; he was the last of his family’s name; and those close to him prefer to memorialize his name, but not his life–and so I’d like to carve a piece of the universe for him, that he might live a little longer.
I write here what I know of him and hope his Story will lend itself to deeper thought. If it doesn’t, the fault is mine: Every life, properly explained and fully expressed, as Plutarch so brilliantly does it, can reflect the reader’s own, and allow her to change direction as she wills.
Suffice it to say, heartbreakingly, that his is a life of tragedy, manifestly unfinished and unfair,—and that, as they say, is Life.
If you ever saw Gary on a bus, I wonder if you’d notice him. By the end of his life, he took a lot of buses, and I’m not sure how many people were eager to start a conversation with him, or how many he was eager to start, himself. He was about 5’11, 160 pounds, and looked & acted very much like the guy you imagine got bullied a lot in middle and high school: round, thick glasses; bald-ish; skinny as a twig; occasionally a shirt mis-buttoned; terrible back posture; and a deep, but not necessarily attractive, voice. He often didn’t smile unless he was around people he trusted, and his eyes, though they were actually an attractive shade of blue, often showed aloofness, which dampened their natural brightness. In all my twelve years of knowing him, I never really saw his eyes light up the way a child’s does. Something inside him kept him quiet. It’s as if he was compelled to suppress himself for the whole of his upbringing that the child in him was crushed beneath it, never to express himself in quite the same way.
I remember a few times where I could swear I saw a boy in him: one time we were walking from the garage to the apartment complex we lived in, and he mentioned that he used to take karate, and showed us a move or two which, I was convinced, wouldn’t knock out a poodle. That it came out of a man so thin and so athletically unpracticed left me feeling awkward for him. Those moments happened occasionally, and they felt positively Frankensteinian in nature. It was a boy trying to speak the language of “Adult” in his own boyish way, from the lens of an “Adult.”
This came out in other ways, too. He loved, loved loved loved, as Jews so often do, to talk. His opinion was never minced, never diced, never rendered unclear to the ears of any man or woman, no matter how big and scary or small and meek they were. And he didn’t just say what he wanted to say: he said it *over* you. He had an inner script, and it had to be finished, come hell or high water. When he started talking, his big ears stopped working, or so I suspect: his drive to be heard overwhelmed every other desire of his in the whole world. It annoyed the hell out of some, even those close to him, but if you listened closely, you always felt that inner need to be heard, that deeper subtext, and just to behold it for what it was was overwhelming. It soaked your own soul with its domineering nature, and left you reeling from its rawness and its sincerity. Perhaps I can just relate deeply to that need, and so never really tried to suppress it, or to stop it—there was too much in there to want to stop, and in all honesty, I always found its humanity beautiful.
He had his particular subjects of passion, with which I became moderately well-acquainted: He was a staunch conservative of Israel, writing often in American-Israeli papers about everything from refusing to revert back to the ‘67 borders to dealing with the inevitability war against existential threats; he was as into music as anybody could be, spending the last few years of his life trying to revive his polish ancestor’s compositions; and he loved Judaism more than just about anything in the world. Through and through, he was Jewish. He never let himself forget for even a moment the traditions and history he came from. About this last subject, he loved to be dramatic. For some reason, I remember him mentioning one time that if anyone ever tried to get him to convert, even on punishment of death, he’d take death first.
When the divorce hit, he came over after work a number of times to help draft documents for the case. When he noted how hard a time my mom and I were having, he took us out to restaurants and tried to make us laugh, and often managed to at least make us smile with his bad jokes, after which he would remark, through awkward silence, that he ought to not quit his day job for comedy. He always came over with a gift of some kind, and was always tremendously respectful. He was as generous as anyone could be, in his own way, and he never asked for anything back, other than our company. That was indeed his love language, if there ever were one: just to sit together with people he loved was enough, no adornments needed. Though, I should say: He constantly remarked that someone or something was beautiful, when he felt it—and always, did he mean it.
He and I especially bonded over our favorite dessert: A souffle with chocolate fudge in the middle. Sharing in that dessert remains one of my very favorite memories. Nothing ever quite made him so happy, or made his belly bulge a little past the whole rest of his body. It was pretty comical actually, but we realized how properly that whole look fit him shortly after knowing him.
When 2008 hit, Countrywide went out of town, and so did his paycheck. I suspect he always regretted, despite never having said it aloud, that he made work such a priority in his life. He never felt noticed or recognized for his efforts, even though he often held himself back from going to the bathroom just to finish one more assignment, or one more obligation. He rarely, if ever, got a raise, and was not properly paid for all the overtime work he had to do. And to top it all off, when the company went out, he could not find another job for years. This isn’t because he wasn’t eligible for others—far from it: with Countrywide went his health insurance, and, as Fate so loves perfect timing, he got sick. Really sick. And at the time, no one could figure out the problem.
I remember when he was rapidly losing weight. The scale plummeted from 160 to 115. He came to visit us one day, and we fed him all the fattening food we could, and he indulged voraciously, desperately, like an animal clawing at its last thread of life. As it turns out, he was diabetic, on top of a number of other issues which have now escaped my memory, and so that one binge day sent his blood sugar level spiking up to 897. If you know anything about blood sugar, you probably think I’m lying to you. I thought he was lying to me. The doctors said they had never seen anyone actually live through a blood sugar level of 897. That he went to the hospital so soon after probably saved his life.
But his was a life destined for more frustrations: the medical bills hit, and he couldn’t pay. First went his car. Then his home. Then some of his stuff. He gave us a few things to hold for him, in the hopes that, when he got his life back together, he’d take it all back and make it part of his home again.
He moved to a shelter. His first roommate was abusive, and that went on for some months. His next roommate was a druggie. Sometimes he had multiple roommates and sometimes he had only one. It went on like that for a couple years. He made one close friend from the whole experience, who to his dying day I understand he kept in touch with. While he was there he started to develop cataracts, so that he had trouble reading things he loved to read, things that took him away from the life he was living. He lost some of his teeth, for multiple reasons not worth reciting here. He lived in dirt, blood and tears, and he’d sometimes reach out to try and talk about it, and sometimes it’d all just come out, and other times fears and tears would just come out instead. We tried to support him as best we could, with what we had at the time.
He managed to get better, so far as health went. God knows how that happened. He finally started gaining weight again. He got his cataracts fixed, and then he could see again. He moved out of the shelter into government-subsidized housing, got a fridge (you wouldn’t believe how hard it is to get a goddamned fridge if it means asking the government for it), and tried to make something of this fresh chance at life that he was given. He went back into writing and music. He started painting. He was able to walk without support again and take the bus without worrying. He got certified to work with others who went through traumatic events themselves, in group counseling. He worked briefly with my company. He went out with his best friend and they would take turns paying for lunch.
He promised that someday soon, diabetic or not, we would attend a concert and afterwards go out to eat his favorite dessert at his favorite place. The last time he said this to me was in January (though he insisted upon it many times beforehand), and the last time we spoke was in February.
Then, in March, he stopped answering his phone. Actually, it disconnected, since it was a pre-paid phone, and we had been calling enough that it ran out of minutes. We’ve gone a few weeks without contacting him before—our contact often came in bursts, but when we noticed that it’d been a good month without any response, my mom decided to go and visit him.
He’d been dead for anywhere from four to six weeks before April 26th. No one knows how he died exactly, but all we can make of it is that he just fell over and died in his apartment, and no one ever bothered to check up on him. The neighbor was the first to find out. The smell of corpse is what got him wondering. He was 55.
When we called the coroner, we found out that we were the very first to even ask about him. No one had bothered to contact him, or find out about how he was. No one but us remembered him.
Plutarch writes that the way a man dies is as important as how he lived. Reading it, and reflecting upon it, it feels so true. But suffice it to say that I can’t conceive of a more unfair, painful death, for a man who tried his best to do good, awkward though he may have been, and stubborn as he was. He, like all of us, was flawed, but flawed in a decent proportion, certainly not a man so flawed that he deserves a death so disgraceful that his body should decompose outside of the dust to which it ought to return.
I wonder lately how to honor him. I intend on looking into any projects he left behind, and seeing if I can help nudge them in the direction he wanted; perhaps a scholarship could be someday named after him. Who knows? After only a week, I’m still reflecting, and I’m sure I’ll find something.
But that’s where this story ends. I only hope that he was, in those moments before he went, at peace.