January 7, 2025

Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1407

What are we owed about the story when our friends die

Good morning. Hello. How are you? Holding up okay this… Tuesday? I am okay. Jane is still with me. Delayed school start. The way they do things down here is they delay school start two hours, when it’s wet and freezing, to give the roads time to warm up and have the ice melt. The curmudgeonly Alaskan in my grumbles that there’s barely any ice on the roads and it is fine, but of course no one down here knows how to drive on it, so I guess it’s reasonable to take the precaution. Messes up my day, though, though not as bad as it messes up the days of those that have to commute into work. And, of course, there are four different counties here in the Triangle, so your boss might not even grasp that you have a delayed start, if they live in another county. Big ole mess. I blame capitalism. Jane is sitting next to me playing cities skylines. We have 44 minutes before we pack up and head to school.

We are listening to the new Mogwai single, “Fanzine made of Flesh.” Stuart Braithwaite (had to check the spelling on that last name, more bonkers than you realize at first glance) called it a mix of Abba, Kraftwerk and Swervedriver and that does seem decently apt. I miss Swervedriver man they were great live. Saw them on the Raise tour at TTs. They were the big NME hype band. Place was packed. Fire marshals came, the venue literally had 50 or so of us hide in the basement till the fire marshal left. I had only been in Boston a year and hadn’t been to tons of club shows yet. I thought this was normal. I was there with an Alaskan girlfriend who had run away from the state to come be with me. We were, briefly, happy, but it was never going to work out. Fucked me up, and, I suspect both of us, for years. Kids.

Anyway, we’re here to talk about death today. There’s trigger warnings all over this one, I don’t think it’ll be that bleak, but be warned.

Another friend died last month. I found out Christmas Morning. I have alluded to this in my new year’s entry. He was the fifth or so friend to die last year.

Dave Bird was an amazing man. Brilliant, kind, funny, a philosopher and a gentleman. He was mostly a cab driver, for many reasons both genius (he knew all this – gestures vaguely – was BS and a scam) and kinda sad. He was an alcoholic for most of the time I knew him, which amounted to, oh, twenty, twenty-five years.

In all of that time, Dave and I mostly lived in different states, but for two stints totaling, mmm, gonna say two years or so, we lived in the same town, and he was a life saver: a good friend, a brilliant listener, an excellent analyst of your problems, and, like I said, hilarious and kind on top. He kept me sane in that town. When I was living elsewhere, I would fly into town and Dave would pick me up at the airport, when he was working, when he didn’t have a DUI. Some trips he would be reclusive and I wouldnt’ see em at all. Sometimes I’d have to ask my sister or the cab company where the hell he was. But most of the time we would meet up, and it would be amazing.

How did Dave die? Well, I don’t know exactly. What I do know is that he struggled with alcoholism, he was my age, men my age start dropping like flies. I know he was “doing better” but had had some setbacks. I know he was down in the lower 48 visiting family when it happened. I don’t know, I don’t know.

I was watching a TV show last night that addressed this. It was so weird. I have been dwelling on this exact topic for weeks, in the case of Dave, but actually years, I am realizing. And I finally got my thoughts in order enough to write about it, and was going to write about it today, and for the first time ever, I saw someone address this peculiar phenomenon in a TV show last night. So weird. It’s a show about a woman whose exes are all dying off one by one, its called “Laid,” a cover of the James song is the opening music, it is a bit clunky in its clearly new-director direction but it is mostly brilliant and has some bits of television I have never seen before.

Anyway, when the first ex dies, the main character says something along the lines of: “why are people so vague about how people died? Why do we just… not get to know?” And… this? This! This.

I am realizing it all started with one of my best friends, Jill, who died, oh, god, maybe 20 years ago now. Before that, I had friends die, but I knew exactly how they died: Lokelo died in a car wreck. Val died of bone cancer with all of us at her side. Frank was shot. One friend was mauled by a bear, I thought, but might have been a gun accident. Okay that one, these days, bugs me too, but at the time, I didn’t know it was up for debate (GMHHAY had a hand in uncovering that lie, and I will always be grateful for that).

But with Jill, to this day, I don’t really know exactly how it happened, and it gnaws at me.

And there are several more: no idea what happened. Or some vague idea: a history of depression or substance abuse and it may or may not have been suicide or an accident or a bathtub or a total coincidence, who knows.

It is hard when this happens, I do not like it. I have never liked it. It gives me anxiety, it keeps me from having closure, it keeps me from learning something or finding meaning or comfort.

None of this is new. None of this is unique to Dave. I am feeling it with Dave, to be sure, but that is par for the course, and mostly I just suffer this in silence, even if I share with you guys the news of their death and what they meant to me.

Two things have happened this time round, however.

First, I had an absolutely mortifying incident involving family. I was not thinking clearly, I was talking about the death on the page of an old friend, who used to date Dave. If I were thinking clearly, I would have realized that because they dated for a good long while, of course there was a good chance that she was friends with members of Dave’s family. But I was not thinking. I was wrapped up in my own feelings on the topic, and my own frustration with “needing an answer.” I commented with words to this effect: that I hated not knowing more in these situations, that I disagreed with families who “cover things up” or do not give details. It was a dashed off comment to someone I assumed was in the same mental state. It was not meant to be a… well, I mean, I would never actually confront a family about their decisions in this situation. I would silently disagree and know it was none of my business. And if I did need to confront them, well, let’s just say it I would do it in a much more delicate manner than this.

And so it came to pass that Dave’s brother was reading, and commented. It was not a mean or nasty comment, it was polite. I was mortified. I apologized. I told him that I was choosing my words generally and dealing with this a lot in life, it wasn’t confined to him or his family’s decisions. We worked it out. It was fine. I mean, embarrassing, but fine. Good reminder about how much Facebook sucks.

And this lead to the second thing. It got me thinking. What is the right answer here, truly? Is it… ethical for me to need to know more? Should I? What is going on in my brain here? Why is that the family’s problems?

And I realized that it is just a huge amount to unpack:

This was not the case with Dave and his family at all (I cannot emphasize this enough), I am speaking about another recent experience here, but I cannot help but feel when it is parents that make decisions for single friends is that the friend would not have chosen the parents to be the decision makers in this situation. It is a real shame in our society that single people don’t make wills, that people in authority consider parents “next of kin” by default, regardless of the friend’s relationship with the parents. I have seen this many, many times: where the parents make decisions that every single friend knows that the friend would not have wanted. This can extend to telling friends the cause of death: the decision to keep the friends, who had a closer relationship than the parents, in the dark is an insult to their memory as a true, whole individual and when that happens, the resentment, I find, can last years. This is hard. I do not like this. I have friends long past where when I think of them, the first thing I think is how the parents did them dirty at their funeral and it sucks.

Then there is… the story of us. Our friends, they are in our lives for decades. They come and go, but they’re never truly gone until they die. Good friends know that they can go decades without being close but they are still close, and circumstances could change where they will be close again once more. A lifelong friendship, even a lose one, even a causal one, is a giant ball of potential.

A death kills that off. It is hard. It is shocking. It… fundamentally changes our reality, and we naturally demand answers.

Of course, answers will do nothing to change that new state between you and your friend. No matter how they went, they will still be dead.

And yet… every friendship is also a story and humans fundamentally cannot stand a story that just stops, the last pages of the book ripped out. We have spent decades with these people, the human psyche demands some sort of closure. Not knowing how they die, I find, makes that much, much more difficult. I don’t know why, I don’t know if it’s me. But looking now, across 50 or so dead friends through the decades, 100% the ones where I don’t know how they died, I still feel some lack of closure.

There is also a feeling that’s more selfish, more morbid: maybe if I know exactly what happened I can avoid it. This is, of course, kind of stupid. I have been, in the past, a big ole drunk — probably not an alchoholic, but close enough that we would be splitting hairs to debate it. I am routinely depressed. I am routinely overweight or close to it. I am also totally fucking afraid to die. For all my added wisdom over these 50+ years on this planet, I have made zero progress on that front. Should really get around to that. But I am scared and not ready. My subconscious, then, when people die, is looking for a reason why it didn’t happen to me: oh, they mixed it with pills or oh, they didn’t have a support network, or oh, they didn’t get enough physical activity or oh, they had a heart condition I do not have, or oh, they didn’t take their cholesterol pils. I am morbidly obsessed with the exact mechanics of it because — any old drunk can tell you this — there were nights where I am too drunk, and laying in my bed and not sure if I’ll wake up, and I need some sort of confirmation that I am.

SO. That whole line of thinking is depressing AF and dark but more to the point, it is not the problem of the families involved here. They do not care the exact mechanic of the death, they had a loved one who had problems, they didn’t make it, the problems killed them not the exact This One Weird Trick. This is my problem, and no one owes me a solution to it.

And then there’s another way to look at it, of course, which is the point of view of public health. I do believe that covering up suicides and deaths from opiods or alcohol and calling it “natural causes” covers up the extent of the problems in our country, it stigmatizes these people, and makes families feel shame that they do not deserve. We should be better about this. And miscarriages. We all know this, though, and it’s a different situation when its your kin. Who am I to judge the actions of others.

I think there’s an aspect to thinking about how people want to be remembered as well. “I want to remember them in their prime.” This makes perfect sense. But I do not think it’s a circumstance of telling others how they died. My father died of PSP. It was long and brutal and it came with a realization that the disease had been taking him years before we knew what happened. It’s been four years now, and I almost exclusively remember my father, these days, before the disease started… diminishing him. This would go on whether or not I knew how he died?

It is paradoxical, but I actually believe the opposite: It is easier to remember a person in their prime when you know exactly how they died. This is not a moral defense of insisting on knowing, but it is definitely my lived experience. The ones I remember the darker days are the ones where I still have questions. And I fucking hate that, even if it is just my own problem.

So, looking at all that as a whole: I don’t think it’s unreasonable to have the opinions I have. I think it is absolutely unreasonable for me to expect answers, and I think it is absolutely unconscionable were I to — intentionally or no — convey these opinions to someone in the immediate situation of making these decisions. I am mortified and sad I injected myself into the family, even accidentally.

But I do think — and my wife already knows this — that no matter how I go, I want you all to know. Maybe it will help. Maybe it will provide closure. Maybe it will put a cap on my story that is stupid or absurd and overshadow my whole life but I don’t think so and I am willing to take that risk. You guys can go ahead and talk about it.

All right I gotta take my daughter to school now.

Another mix of the best tracks of January 2024 I hope you enjoy this Timehop into one year ago.

Tomorrow we will get back to noble pedestrian domesticity I promise.

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Thanks for reading.

And hey! Maybe buy one of my books!

Good Morning, Hello, How Are You vol 1.

Agency: The definitive guide to starting a consultancy

The Economics of Star Trek

Man Nup: A Groom’s Guide to Heroic Wedding Planning