A parent outliving a child is an entirely different sort of grief, something most of us, mercifully, will never understand. When an elderly parent dies after a long, (hopefully) full life, there’s sadness, naturally, and even incredulity that the loved one is gone forever, but there’s also a sense of “fairness,” an acknowledgment that the life cycle has been completed, as well as, quite often, relief (for both the sufferer and for those who had to witness his or her suffering). But if on some basic level any death can’t help but seem “wrong,” the loss of a child can only feel obscene. Talk to a parent who’s suffered a son or a daughter’s death—even years later—and the strain to convey even a portion of their sorrow is agonizing to witness, incommunicability the most eloquent expression of their anguish possible. It’s probably not a coincidence that the two couples I know who suffered the death of a child each ended up divorced. It’s possible that they might have split up eventually, but both of the husbands admitted that their partner’s presence couldn’t help but be a daily, corporeal reminder of their child’s death and a shameful, if undeniable, element in the breakup. No one was responsible, it was never a matter of blame, but a new partner, a new home, a new life made them hurt just a little bit less. And with suffering this great, a little can feel like a lot.
Sorrow as a consequence of all manner of familial loss is ordinarily a foregone conclusion. But an argument could be made that the love one feels for a friend, a real friend (“One of [whose] most beautiful qualities,” Seneca wrote in his Letters from a Stoic, “is to understand and be understood”) is in some ways superior to familial love. Our parents have to love us (as we, though perhaps not to the same degree, must love them), just as we are compelled to love our own children. Biology-based, nature-necessitated unconditional love is just that: unconditional. But a friend is a choice (“The soul selects her own society,” Emily Dickinson wrote). A choice made against great odds. Whether good, bad, or (as is most often the case) a maddening mix of both, we all have families. But to find one genuine friend—to discover one person we choose to align ourselves with for life—in a world crowded with what often seems only workmates, neighbours, casual acquaintances, professional contacts, and people to whom we would prefer to remain strangers, is a rare triumph. And to be deeply mourned when death decides that the friendship is over.
As difficult as it would have been to believe at the time, the first friend of mine who died, died young (I was the same age—thirty—when it happened, which seemed, if not ancient, at least bordering on incipient middle-age). Our relationship had always been aggressively ambivalent: a very real, very deep connection based on a mutual love of the right writers and righteous musicians and a shared belief in how serious having fun is and how much fun being serious can be, equalled by an intense competitiveness born of an insecurity that said that two people coming from the same small town couldn’t both possibly go on to create fulfilling lives in the big city based on a love of beautiful sentences, high harmonies, and high ideals. (“It is not enough to succeed,” Wilfred Sheed wrote, paraphrasing La Rochefoucauld; “a friend must also fail.”) One minute you were relieved and emboldened to be looking at someone who truly understood, who really got it, and the next minute, there was that guy who thought he was some kind of big deal, that pretentious little shit from Chatham, Ontario, who thought he was better than everybody else. I don’t have a biological brother, but this was what I imagined having one was like: a lot of laughing, a lot of yelling, and a lot of affection and aggravation so tightly tied up together it was hard to tell sometimes which was which.
When he died—when he died by suicide—we’d had no contact for three years. It wasn’t any one incident or argument that led to the freeze; we’d both independently come to the same conclusion: there simply wasn’t enough oxygen in the room if we both wanted to breathe as deeply and freely as we needed to. He’d long since moved to Montreal, and I was living in Texas when I got the phone call from a mutual friend saying he’d died. I was shocked, of course, but can’t claim to have been unduly despondent. Three years without the exchange of a single spoken or written word when you’re young seems like centuries, and I was knee-deep in the muck of my own life, struggling, like most people approaching or just past thirty, to discover the mud-obscured path I was supposed to be travelling. I talked to my wife (who I met through him) about it, I sent the family a condolence card, I got back to work on my novel. If anything, I was bothered I wasn’t more bothered.
I needn’t have worried—life rarely lets you off that easy. More than two decades later, I still have the same basic dream (although much less frequently now, only a couple of times a year). He’s there, I’m there, and I’m surprised to find he’s alive. I either ask him why people think he’s dead or how it’s possible for him to be deceased yet right here standing in front of me. He never answers. I also usually pay him some kind of oblique compliment (noting the quality of his home library or record collection is a common one). Not enough to make either of us uncomfortable, but enough that he knows I respect him, something, I realize now, I never did—or did enough—when he was alive. For a long time I wondered why, now that I had the chance, I never asked him anything about the fact that he’d taken his own life. Twenty years and many more deaths (including a couple other suicides) later, I don’t wonder anymore. “Whatever can happen at any time can happen today,” Seneca wrote. The mystery isn’t any longer how this or that death happened or why, but that we were ever lucky enough to be alive at all.
Death tends to be most common as a topic of conversation and food for reflection when we’re young, old, or ailing. Although death is usually far removed from childhood or adolescent experience, for that reason alone it’s easier to talk about. Also, because it’s, if not forbidden, at least discouraged as a topic of conversation (like sex), it’s even fun, feels slightly scandalous, to discuss it. Who didn’t toy around with the “Would you rather be shot or stabbed?” question, the “If it had to be one or the other, would you rather drown or suffocate” game?
The desire to be scared in the form of watching horror movies is another one of youth’s ways of flirting with the enticingly unfathomable. In my case, “watch” isn’t the appropriate verb—“gorge” would be more apposite. Not just because it’s more accurate, but because it better captures the tang of my cinematic gluttony. I couldn’t get enough of vampires who bit, mummies who choked, werewolves who clawed and tore, prehistoric monsters risen from their frozen tombs by hydrogen bombs (and man’s nefarious hubris) and driven to stomp, smash, and skewer. Granted, the thrill of the fright was often diluted by the implausibility of the plots or the wooden acting or the dead (and not in a good way) dialogue—or, frequently, all three—but underneath all of the amateurishness there was still the tingle of good old terror. In retrospect, this more than occasional improbability likely aided in maximizing the films’ fright factor. If I hadn’t been intermittently reminded that the werewolf looked more like a college football team’s overly furry, frowning mascot than a half-man, half-wolf killing machine or been made suspicious of those flying saucers that resembled the tinfoil pie plates my mother used for her baking, I might not have been able to stay plunked in front of the television until movie’s end. A little bit of laughter—especially derisive laughter—help makes the terror go down.
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