A few months before I received a text from R’s sister telling me he had died, I’d received an email from him. The email appeared in my inbox in January and by late March or early April he was gone. I’d been busy then and put it off. Once things slowed down I’d write him back, I told myself. The email wasn’t overlong, just asked if it’d be possible to meet for a Zoom call soon. I’d sat for a Zoom call with him a month or two earlier, very awkward. He’d been receiving treatment for brain cancer. Chemo and surgery then chemo again. He spoke highly of the physician with whom he met with every couple of weeks at, I believe it was, Johns Hopkins.
When we’d talked earlier that winter, he’d asked about my brother. He and D had met by Zoom a week or so prior and D had later told me it was uncomfortable talking with him. R spent the better part of an hour weaving in and out of his resentments about no one expressing interest in his writing. At a party he had met a “famous” editor or writer and had forced into her hands a few folded pages of his own writing, asked her to read it, give him feedback. He didn’t seem to have any sense how much of an imposition that was, D said. While that kind of gesture was totally in keeping with the R we knew twenty-five years earlier, I had to remind D of the cancer, the surgery, how these might effect behavior. R had always carried around grievances and had always been by nature depressive. If people phased out of contact, he labeled it rejection and would hold to that for decades without reconsidering. When I met with R on Zoom weeks later, one of the first things he mentioned was how D had seemed eager to end their call. How long had they spoken, I asked. An hour, he told me. I tried gently reframing his view of the call by reminding him just how busy D was, how he ran a non-profit, did ad-hoc work in the community as well, et cetera. None of these explanations seemed to register, and there again I was reminded of the condition of his brain. How ill was he? He seemed not himself. His speech stilted, pocked with odd tags, often beginning and ending sentences by addressing me by name, as if to remind himself who he was talking with.
We’d been close friends thirty years ago. Through Facebook he’d found D and I and “friended” us around 2014. I’d flown to Washington D.C. for an event in the fall that year and we’d made plans to meet for dinner. We took a two-seater on a open patio and caught up with each other. He seemed reserved, maybe irritated. It didn’t take long before he disclosed resentment towards D and I, that we’d ceased contact in the mid-90s. He phrased it in such a way that you would’ve thought we’d cruelly abandoned him. I was twenty, twenty-one, D a year younger, and R, though young also, was a few years older and still living in Cleveland and working at the grocery store where in our mid-teens we’d first met him. Life got busy, I told him, and this was before the conveniences of the internet. Should I apologize? No harm was intended, I told him, I promise. He didn’t seem convinced. Hard to set aside a grievance over the course of a single conversation, if it’s been held onto for decades.
There were troubles in his marriage. He would never speak about it directly. He had a daughter with a woman and they had moved first to Michigan then to D.C., where he worked as a curator at a gallery or museum. It sounded like a fine path, nothing to regret, and very much in line with what he’d been interested in, back when I knew him. But it wasn’t enough, wasn’t fulfilling, his tone seemed to indicate, as he narrated the course of his life as it’d progressed from when we’d last known each other. He’d always wanted to be a writer, fiction, poetry. I’d gone off and attended college to study those, had published a few books. But even worse, I’d seemed to have been connected to some sort of creativity consistently, either through drawing or music-making or writing. This was the idea he held in his head, one born of simple comparison. He seemed to have come to all sorts of conclusions on his own, without going to the trouble of talking at length with me, about how much it had cost me, the troubles involved, the frustrations. He seemed to envy me without even really knowing me.
So a few years passed. He would text, call, email. D and I lived in our city, lived on the same city block even, close as ever. On two occasions R announced that he would be driving through town and requested a visit. Could he stay at our house? The first time, and I might not be remembering this correctly, he stayed a few days in the guest room at my house, then a few days in a similar room at D’s. Both D and I tried to be welcoming, but we both worked and couldn’t afford to take off to show him around the city. There was the sense his marriage was entering its final stages but neither D or I felt it was a welcome thing to talk about. Maybe he had wanted us to ask. But we were only acquaintances with him, different from the people we’d been back when he’d known us. Maybe he expected us to be the same? He seemed curiously unchanged. And unhappy, softly begrudging. After he left D and I took a walk around the neighborhood and compared notes about the visit. Did D feel the same as I did, that R resented us, even maybe blamed us a bit for how things had turned out? Or maybe by contrast we’d reminded him. It was weird, didn’t seem fair. And if that were the case, then why was he so insistent to spent time with us?
After their Zoom call D was fuming. He just bitched and complained and put a bunch of passive-aggressive shit on me, D said. No sense of what all he puts on people, the entitlement. D described R’s account of his time at the party in company of the famous editor or writer, forcing his pages on her, asking her for comments. She never reached out, R told D. She never gave me comments, never even gave me my pages back, as if that were a reasonable thing to expect. D was appalled. Didn’t R have any sense that if he wanted even the smallest bit of this woman’s consideration he’d need to come by that honestly, having done the work and earned it? It was then I reminded D of the cancer, the surgeries. How those might effect impulse control and social awareness. But the neediness at the root of the gesture was a hundred percent how he’d always been. Always he’d wanted to be an artist of some sort but couldn’t ever get beyond his own inhibitions. Like many other people I’d known who were like that, there was the sense that if a practicing artist took them seriously, gave them attention, they’d become one themselves, that what’d been unobtainable by their own efforts would be instantly granted, and from there they could find the confidence to make stories or movies or paintings on their own terms, flourish without discouragement and never lose confidence again.
It took only a few minutes on our Zoom call for R to mention D. D seemed in a rush to get off the call, R said. They’d spoken for an hour, a fairly long time, but he seemed cued to how D had felt talking with him. He was ill but it was difficult for D and I to understand at first why he was so insistent on talking with us. I speculated that maybe a therapist or physician had suggested he speak with older friends or acquaintances as a way of regaining shared memories of events he’d been unable to access since his surgery. This would make sense. This would also explain the flatness of his aspect, the robotic quality of how he framed what he sought to discuss or express.
When he’d emailed that first time to request a call, he’d sent a piece of writing as an attachment. This was a move I really disliked, had been the recipient of such queries many an occasion. The request for time to maybe look at something they had written accompanied by a document of the writing in question, attached. No room to allow for a yes or no. “Here’s my story, my novel excerpt, my poem, my essay fragment, read it and give me notes.” A major breach of etiquette, in my opinion and in D’s view as well, because what someone who would send such a request is really expecting is that you would be free and bound to give them that much of our time. Usually a person waits for that kind of thing to be offered. And if it isn’t, maybe for good reason. And if they’re observant and respectful, they’ll not push the issue, having understood what had been communicated through lack of an offer.
In this case it was hard to say no. The writing he had sent along was a reflective account of he and his twin brother’s childhood, something he’d begun a while ago and worked on so he might give to his daughter, so she could have a sense of what her father and uncle and older family members had been like before she’d been born. He didn’t get to spend much time with his daughter, was estranged from her since the divorce, but if I remember here correctly she had expressed a willingness to eventually read whatever he would send her in written form.
I was busy, I’m always busy, but made time before the call to read the story he’d sent. From the way it read, it was clear he’d written it after his treatment. It’d been uncomfortable to elaborate any more beyond that. I made notes on what I could find to appreciate about it then, on the call, discussed it with him. As always, I had a strong sense he was wanting more from me, had expected to receive something from me he could have only ever earned for himself, and only after a decade or so of consistent work. Did this mean I wasn’t a good friend? Did I deny him the life he had wanted for himself, by not evolving a talent in him, living his life for him? Talking with him reminded me again of something I never lost track of but often felt strong frustration about: that nothing was guaranteed though the freedom to sit at a desk and work through fear and resistance was a privilege of sorts, one easily discarded for the enjoyment of many other, less complicated pursuits. It takes confidence to work with doubt, and therein lies the importance of craft. None of this was anything I could or would tell him. He probably already knew this anyway and avoided the topic, because at one point in his life he had the time to devote to developing just that, but for one reason or another hadn’t.
Our call lasted roughly an hour as well, maybe a half hour more than his call with D, and afterwards I was left wondering why I felt I owed him my time. Why did I feel guilty? Maybe only because he believed I was guilty of failing my end of a friendship, and in no certain terms had said so. I’d been caught up in my own troubles. I’d been focused on chasing certain opportunities. And here I was, on the other side of both, busy, married, fulfilled, even happy. Maybe there was an implication I should feel guilty for that also? A month or so after that call the email came asking for another. It was not the best time for those kinds of emails, fresh off the holiday break. A week passed then another, and every few days I’d remember the email and feel a duty to respond but resistance to do so, also. I didn’t consider how sick he might have been, because I wasn’t aware where he was with his health, given it wasn’t something he talked about. Three months passed, maybe, before I received a text from his number. It was his sister, she was writing to say she was sorry, but wanted to let me know R had died of brain cancer a week or so before. There would be a memorial service and she said R had always thought of us as close friends. They would be grateful if D and I could attend.
“Man, that’s some fucking bleak shit,” D said when I told him. That wasn’t true, we weren’t close, we hadn’t been close friends in almost thirty years. Stuck in the past, he said. Implied maybe the quality of the life he’d had since. So much had happened for D and I. Before we’d gotten back in touch with him, and really then only because of the whims of an algorithm, we’d rarely thought of him, separately or together. He was a figure of the distant past. We were caught up in lives and careers and relationships and future plans and travels so were never compelled to work backwards to who we were when we were freshly broken free from our teenage years. The whole situation made me feel like a bad person, because I couldn’t feel it. It was a misfortune that came and left in the abstract, to a distant acquaintance who existed far on the other side of a smart phone. In my text response to his sister I said I would send flowers to their mother, but then of course in the following weeks got busy and forgot. Months later I remembered and felt I’d fallen short of basic decency. Yes, I’ve read textbooks on evolutionary psychology, so have been familiarized with concepts such as inclusive fitness, what impels the human species to look after others as if they were their own. Here was another example of me failing my programming. Or unconsciously running the calculations and determining in the end I would not be held to account, would not suffer damage to my reputation among my peers and familiars for not sending flowers to R’s mother, despite the fact that was something I mentioned I would do, out of honor for the family’s loss and in tribute to his memory. I moved on quickly, maybe because I wasn’t very much bound to him. And maybe he wasn’t so bound to me either, but rather to some idea of me. The parts of me he would’ve like to have had, though really he didn’t know me anymore. What about him? Were there parts of him I would have liked, if I could have them? This wasn’t any of thought I ever had, because I’d tried those kinds of exchanges before, back when I was younger, and had found they consistently led to all sorts of disorientation, blatant errors of judgement, and general unhappiness. Better to feel those things directly, on their own terms. And on one’s own terms. And here’s one: not sending those flowers, but still holding clear awareness I didn’t and continue not to, I might be the very person R felt I was, and who he resented.
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