For a Friend
A meditation on an untimely death
Perhaps you've experienced situations in life where you see the seeds of disaster being sown, or a disaster is unfolding in front of you and you don't know what to do or are powerless to stop it. Your parked car begins sliding down an icy hill, the kitchen is catching fire while you stand paralyzed in terror, you see your kid tumbling off the top of jungle gym while you are too far away to stop it. Or maybe you've watched a loved one, over the course of years, go down some dark path.
This can be traumatic, and it can leave one thinking to themselves “I should've done something”, or “if I'd only done this…”. You cannot unring a bell, and it is next to impossible to know exactly what could have been in some alternate reality.
Even still, sometimes, you can't help but wonder.
Let me tell you a little bit about a friend of mine. This is a fellow I grew up with since elementary school, lived within walking distance of, and moved in the same circle of friends for many years. We weren't super close friends, but we were definitely pals.
My earliest memory of him was at one of my birthday parties as a kid. He was new to our school, and had a kind of mystique about him. This was when Nike was really taking off as a fashionable brand, and this dude was always rocking it at a time when most of us couldn't get our parents to make the hour’s drive to the nearest mall where you could find the good stuff.
I had invited him to my party, but I wasn't sure if he would show. He did, and I was thrilled. I got this sense of prestige just by him deigning to appear. And I knew that I was at least cool by osmosis when he arrived with the Nike swoosh trimmed into the hair on the back of his head. Awesome.
Time went on, and he only got cooler. He always had the best clothes and the coolest stuff, which, to a young boy, is pretty rad. He was really into bmx and loud, edgy music, and was a great drummer at an early age. But he was never an asshole, kind of laid back and fun in a way that was appealing to everybody. He had lots of friends, and lots of girls fawned over him. In our childhood and young adulthood, I don't know if he could have been much cooler.
Then high school came, and new elements entered the equation. A couple things to look at here: time and place.
This was the early 2000’s, the era of Jackass, Warped Tour, and Slipknot. These things were the gold standards for cool for a lot of people, especially young guys like me and my friend here.
Unfortunately for us and many others nationwide who didn't know any better, by idolizing these things we were buying into a culture of recklessness, substance abuse, self-destruction, absence of responsibility, and the myth of eternal youth. Clout rested with who could drink the most, do the most extreme things, and who was most willing to bust their head open for a good laugh. I was there, and those were the times as I remember them.
Then, there was the place. In a small town out on the prairie, unless you're into football or 4H, there is only so much to do. And by the time we hit high school, we had already done it all. To my friend’s credit, he did lobby the city government to build us a skate park, which turned out to be a great place for us to congregate and entertain ourselves instead of terrorizing the community at large.
But once we all got mobile with driver’s licenses, that kind of went by the wayside. Now that we could get around, we had an activity available that is a cornerstone of social life in mine and many parts of the world; getting fucked up. Bouncing from party to party or just driving around with a case of beer, we didn't do much socially that didn't involve danger, illegality, and booze. Our patron saint Steve-O would have been proud.
And following the small town brain drain that happens after high school, as the young people with prospects and a compass go off to earn their credentials and begin putting their lives together, those left behind often have nothing better to do than party, supporting that lifestyle with either a wage job or by mooching of off family, wage earning friends, or the taxpayer. There are ways out of this, but many get sucked into this deep, dark hole.
It doesn't seem so treacherous at first. After all, we are pretty well acculturated to normalized substance abuse by the time we reach adulthood.
Most family or social gatherings feature at least one cooler full of beers, and plenty of admonitions for you to go grab one. Many community events are sponsored by booze companies or local distributors, festooned with the logos of all your favorite beers. One may even see, as I did, your town’s mayor stumble into the pizzeria way after closing time to pick up the pie he forgot he ordered hours ago while at the bar, and then slide back behind the wheel and drive on home. Excessive drunkenness is usually laughed about and egged on, almost celebrated.
This is more or less common in different places, but this is how things were in the place and time in which my friend and I grew up. It ain't pretty, but that was the milieu. We are trained early on, through observation and normalization, that alcohol is a prerequisite to socialization and being part of a community.
And now he's dead. I'm not privy to all of the details, but I know that he went out for a night of partying, got dropped off at his place in the early morning hours by himself, and was discovered by a friend a few hours later on the floor, dead.
The next few things I’m going to say are not said to put any kind of shame on his name, but are nonetheless hard truths that cannot be ignored. My friend was exceptionally talented, possessed a truly kind and generous heart, and I loved him, and he loved me. I know because he would tell me so every time I saw him. It sincerely breaks my heart that I will never see him or hear his voice again.
But I can't think of many instances that I’d seen him in the last 15 years where he wasn't shitfaced drunk and/or high.
Again, I don't feel at all good about saying that. But it's true. And if I'm going to deal with grief and mourning and all of this in a real way, then I cannot ignore that.
I don't know about you, but when something like this happens, when a young man dies suddenly before his time, my first thoughts are “how?” and “why?”
And unless I am just going to throw up my hands, do some thoughts and prayers, and move on without thinking too much about it, I have to reckon with what I saw of him and his lifestyle and behavior over the years leading up to this.
We weren't super tight after I left town, but we crossed paths every so often. And my appraisal of his lifestyle and the company he was keeping left me unsurprised when I got the news of his death. I’m not saying I’m above any of this, mind you, as I’ve been in some greasy situations myself. But other friends of mine who were not forever on the party train that interacted with this fellow would come away with the same thoughts about his trajectory: “this isn't going anywhere good.”
So, then, if this was easy to see, where were the checks? Where were the brakes?
Well, here we come across another uncomfortable truth. People who, like I was, are trying to lead responsible, productive lives cannot spend too much time traveling out of town for illicit drug deals or closing down the bar a couple nights a week. Those who do spend their time that way, although they may have been your good time buddy back in high school, typically are not oriented toward productivity and responsibility. You cannot do both. So if you're trying to stay on a healthy path, sooner or later you have to drift away from the party people.
So where does that leave people like my deceased friend, people with good hearts and lots of potential but who can't or won't leave the booze and the stuff and the party alone? Good influences get filtered out, and they're left with people who also don't want the party to end.
And in that circumstance, where is the voice of moderation to come from? Who is there to say, “hey man, I think you've had enough”? Nobody, that's who. Anybody who would counsel restraint has seen where this road goes, and they've jumped ship to avoid succumbing to a similar fate. So what you are left with is only the people who will bum you yet another smoke and hand you another beer.
Because what else can those people do? In a zeitgeist where socializing and getting tuned up are inseparable, practicing restraint and abstinence alienates you by default. And nobody wants to be alienated, especially in a small community where there are only so many friends to be had.
And so, I suspect the thinking of a party animal during a pang of conscience as they see themselves or a friend careening toward self-destruction goes: I can either speak up and put the brakes on all this and probably lose all my buddies, or I can get a buzz on and ignore the elephant in the room.
Ah, fuck it, man. Let’s do a shot.
This is a cycle and thought process that should be understandable to almost any adult. And yet it happens all the time, all across the country, all across the world. Clearly, it's not an easy problem to solve.
Some people do break the cycle, one way or another. Some don't. My friend didn't.
I'm not in a position to point any fingers for what did or didn't happen to save my friend’s life. As I said, we weren't that close in recent years, and I don't know what kind of interventions were employed by the people around him. My intention here is not to assign blame, and I have a huge amount of sympathy for anyone who has done their best to intervene on behalf of a loved one and failed.
But these are the dynamics that I see at play, not just with this one friend here, but with many people all over the place, particularly in small town America. It's not good, and I don't see it getting better any time soon.
You know what I’m talking about here. You know somebody. Somebody who fits all of this, a brother or a cousin or a friend. It’s all over the place, this demon that stalks among us. I guess I’m trying to paint a picture of it so that we can better know and avoid it going forward.
I've said a lot of uncomfortable things here, but I stand by them. I don't have a lot to offer in the way of solutions, but I do recognize things that we do and ways we behave that let this cycle which generates a lot of untimely deaths keep on going.
And one of them is ignoring uncomfortable truths that stare us right in the face, and sticking our heads in the sand so that we do not have to answer hard questions.
This was my experience at my friend’s remembrance event that I attended a couple weeks ago.
Again, I have no interest in blaming anyone for what I am about to describe. Indeed, if I am being honest with you, dear reader, I too am complicit here.
The event was in the early afternoon, and as I approached the entryway, I was met with a garden of draft beers and cigarette smoke. Inside there were families and kids, it wasn't a party or anything, but the bar was open and people were kind of behaving like it was a high school reunion. It was an occasion to see people you hadn't seen in a while, which makes people happy, and that's fine.
But all these people, freely imbibing the instrument of my friend’s demise gave me some pause.
Not enough for me to abstain, mind you. I was working on my second gin and tonic when the glasses were raised in my friend’s honor following a speech by a family member. But the irony wasn't lost on me, and I didn't feel great about myself or the room in that moment.
Did anybody else there have those same thoughts? Here's the part of the affair that has really been bothering me. I don't know what anybody else was thinking about the whole thing, because nobody was talking about the guy that we were here to celebrate and remember.
Surely somebody in the room was, but I had a lot of conversations that day, and nobody really brought him up in any serious way. Again, if not for the photos and personal effects on display, you would have thought you were at a high school reunion. The conversation was all jobs, kids, current events. Not a word about the tragic death of our friend.
But I was desperate to have that conversation, to express a lot of the thoughts that I've expressed here, and to see what everyone else thought about the matter.
It wasn't until after the event was officially over and I was lingering in the parking lot with a few others, sucking on a cigarette and finishing off my diluted cocktail, that I was able to coax a few people into a discussion about our departed friend. I was able to keep the conversation afloat for 5 or 10 minutes, but eventually succumb to subject changes and short attention spans. Oh well. I tried.
Maybe that wasn't the right place for those conversations. After all, it was a “celebration of life”, not an “convention on the circumstances of death”. But I guess I just felt like there were some important lessons for all of us to learn from discussing our friend, his story, the realities of life in our little corner of the world and how treacherous it can be, and everybody seemed willfully averse to doing anything like that. Perhaps this just wasn't the time or place; or perhaps we just didn't want to think about our small roles in this tragedy or the changes that we could or should be making in our own lives in regards to all of this. Or maybe nobody wants to be the person to bring it up.
In my view, it wasn't any one thing that killed my buddy. Kindness and honesty are often at odds. I'm not doing it to be mean or insensitive, but I'm leaning into honesty here. There were definitely choices my friend could have made that would have left him still with us today. But he's not, and most of that rests with him. And surely, in some alternate reality, those of us around him theoretically could have done or said things that may have taken him out of the frying pan and away from the fire. We can't bear full responsibility, but a lot of us handed him a lot of beers over the years. I'm not going to forget that anytime soon.
And then there is the part of this that is largely out of anyone’s hands. The realities of life out here are often dark and have a way of sucking people in and not letting go. We can grieve and mourn, have our thoughts and prayers, but the beer gardens and the drugs and self-destructive social conventions aren't going anywhere. And as long as that is true, then we should not be surprised when young people are dropping off prematurely.
I don't have any silver bullets to offer you here, dear reader. I’m not advocating for prohibition or anything, and I don't think any of this can be solved with legislation or anything like that. The best piece of advice that I can come up with is to keep yourself accountable, if not to yourself, then to something; God, your family, your dog, whatever. Something. Anything.
Well, not just anything. You’ve got to pick something good to devote yourself to that keeps you going and keeps you accountable. I think having to answer to something outside of oneself has a way of leading you to make decisions that manifest in a better life for you and those around you.
And I also think that the trick may be to stay away from the man-made things; ideology, booze, science, toys, surrogate activities, things like that. These inventions do not always develop in recognition of the the natural order of things, and that doesn't go anywhere good.
So keep an eye on your loved ones and yourself and don't be afraid to look reality in the eye, no matter how ugly it may be. The uglier it is, the more you need to look at it.