I learned this weekend that an old friend of mine had died and it keeps creeping up and saddening me. It’s strange because this is a high school friend and I haven’t seen him or spoken to him in probably 40 years or so. And it would be highly unlikely that I’d every speak to him again even if we both lived to 100.
But still, knowing he is gone is a bummer.
I guess the worst part is how he died. If he’d had cancer or a heart attack or something it would be tragic but, y’know, just one of those bad things that happen. But the facts are much sadder. Basically he drank himself to death.
He’d been dating the woman he married last time I saw him; heck they may have been married. After that he got a good job, got a nice house, had a couple of daughters who grew up and gave him grandkids… and then he started drinking heavily. After he was arrested a few times for DUI, he lost his good job because he couldn’t get to it. Then he got a local job but lost that one, too. He lost the house, the wife and kids split, and he wound up back in his boyhood home. His parents had died a year apart from each other so he was living alone in the country with no driver’s license.
He’d been in rehab for a month, but when he came out he was right back to drinking. Three days later he got drunk, fell and hit his head and laid there, alone in his childhood house, for a few days before someone found him. He was still alive but his brain was swollen and he later died in the hospital. I got all this background from the friend who took the time to seek me out and tell me S was gone.
I still remember him as this good looking, easy-going young dude. We were really tight through high school. There were 4 of us and we had ‘our’ table in the cafeteria and later on when we could all drive, we’d cruise around at night, drink beer, smoke, chase girls, go beach riding, skateboarding and throw the Frisbee around. Just normal stuff. We weren’t angels but we weren’t bad kids either. Just regular guys. He got me out of a few bad binds over the years, and vice versa. The four of us were always watching out for each other.
We were all into model rockets in a big way too; he had an incredible attention to detail and his rockets were always gorgeous while the rest of us were just slapping ’em together to shoot them off as soon as possible. That has always stuck with me…how much time he’d spend on something that generally had a limited life span, model rocketry being what it is.
Since those days, I’ve done nothing significant in my life and I often feel remorse about that. I’m not the hero of anyone’s story, just a generic background character. And I felt kind of bad about that. But now I see how much worse things can get. I don’t know what happened to S between then and now; I don’t know what kind of demon he had eating away at him. And I wonder if we’d still been in contact if I could have helped.
All too late now. I read his obituary and the picture they had was of an old man (he was 63 or 64 when he passed). I guess that means I’m an old man, too. I just kind of find it hard to believe.
Notes on the AI used in this post. Image created at DeepImg with the prompt “A well maintained and realistic graveyard. Close up to show just a few graves. Daytime, clouds in the sky. A few trees. No people or wildlife. It should look like a real place. No buildings, just a few graves.”
I am very sorry for your loss. I’ve seen a few obituaries for high school friends / acquaintances in recent years and also wonder “what if”. For what it’s worth, the way you touched my life makes you very much not a background character from my point of view.
Aww Gwyn! That’s like the nicest thing anyone has said to me in a long time. Also it must be getting dusty in here /brushes away something in his eyes.
That was a sad but thought-provoking read. Thanks for sharing your experience and your reactions to it.
I’ve had five friends die, that I know of, so far. The first was when I was still in primary school. She had a congenital heart condition and didn’t make it into double figures. The most recent, a few years back, I only heard about when I sent him a Christmas card and heard back from his sister that he’d passed a year or two before.
I still think of all of them, not infrequently, and when I do, I wonder how many others I’ve long since lost touch with might have gone the same way. In this age of social media and instant communication, you’d think we’d all hear such news right away but I suspect we’re most of us siloed away in our own niches which rarely intersect.
Whether I’d want to know is another question…
Yeah I hear odds and ends about people I knew but wasn’t super tight with. But still, maybe I spent 8 years with them in elementary school or something. Generally those have been due to disease of some sort which is still tragic but that feels unavoidable, more or less.
Like you say, I think in these cases not knowing might be better…it’s not like we can do anything about it, so let’s let these old friends live forever, and forever young, in our memories.
Unrelated: I have no idea why WordPress decided to moderate you…. sorry about that, it should ‘know’ you by now!
On the moderation issue, your site is behaving very oddly for me at the moment. I just replied to the Daredevil post and that comment didn’t appear either, so I assume it’s in moderation as well. That’s not so surprising – it happens periodically with WP sites.
What’s more worrying is that yesterday, when I went to post the comment above, all the fields for name, email and website were pre-filled, as usual, only they were filled with Naithin’s details, not mine. That’s never happened before. Luckily I noticed and changed them. I wonder if, had I not spotted the error and just hit Post, the comment would have come through as if from Naithin? And it made me wonder, too, if there’s anything stopping any of us impersonating someone else, assuming we know their correct details, which in most cases would be readily available just from looking at the About page of their blog…
Thanks for making me aware of this issue. I’ll have to poke around and find out what is going on. I have some pretty solid ideas.
I do see your comment on the Daredevil post, but only when I’m logged into the site. I’m using a service that caches pages as static HTML and I assume that is the issue here.
I REALLY appreciate you letting me know this is happening because I’d probably never have noticed it myself since I’m always logged in.
I’m so sorry to hear you lost an old friend, but I think I’m reading something else in this post and that’s a little death of your younger days. I feel that too, and maybe that’s why I’m reading into it. Where does the time go, right?
I’m sure to many that you’re more than just a background NPC, Nim! Thanks for all you do in our little blogger community. I always appreciate your comments.
For sure that is part of it, too. Today I browsed through the list of obituaries on the site of the funeral home that is taking care of my friend’s remains, and I found 5 or 6 other people I went to school with who had died in the past 6 months or so. Just getting to that age.
Even sadder was how many people were listed that were quite a bit younger than me. Life is precious, I guess is the lesson here.