Absent Friends (A Vital Part of the Holiday Season)

Living a rich, full life has its rewards and, of course, its challenges. As 2009 and the first decade of the new millennium winds down, it’s good to pause during the holiday season to reflect on those we’ve known who aren’t around to celebrate a new harvest of mistletoe. Each is famous—to us—and deserves the warmth of rerun good memories. It’s these good memories we remember, the bad ones forgotten.

Today I write of four who enriched my life in different ways. Each man taught me different things. Since my parents died more than twenty years ago and biology creates parenthood, this story isn’t about them. It’s about my pals Billy B, Larson, Cleater, and MercMan.

Billy B was a redneck country boy from Apopka, Florida. He was a hunter and loved to shoot things. If it had feathers or fur, he loved putting gunsights on it and squeezing the trigger. He was a terrific shot and a very eccentric fellow; he painstaking made tiny knives using raccoon penile bones for handles.

At midlife Billy had no true north, no prideful drive for future purpose. His home life was relentlessly contentious and he was consumed by the stress and worry of every day’s angry crises. Rather than change things, he was buried beneath them and died of a stress-induced heart attack in a hospital parking lot. At the time he was a mixed up man in his mid-forties. I have always believed Billy lost his will to live.

From Billy I learned the importance of happiness. Without it, life is lived in the wrong direction. His family chiseled words from my eulogy into his headstone. I would trade that honor for one perfect day watching him truly happy.

My pal Larson was the opposite. He was effervescent and happy, a porch light of open friendship to all who fluttered around. To know Larson was to like him.

Larson was a corporate loyalist, a living legend at Xerox, as popular with his customers as he was with co-workers. Planning for retirement, he bought a waterfront fixer-upper 100 miles north of his Seattle home in Birch Bay, Washington. Larson had grown up in Birch Bay. His dream was to someday own a storybook retreat in the enclave where his happy childhood had launched a rich, full life.

As retirement drew close, Larson was diagnosed with a miserable, fatal form of cancer. Despite it he valiantly tried to fix up the Birch Bay retreat on his own, just as he’d dreamed. I suggested he accelerate the process and outsource the work to a skilled contractor. Realizing time was of the essence, he did. He lived long enough to trade a chunk of retirement money for the priceless inner peace that came from sitting on his bayfront porch, savoring the attainment of his lifelong dream.
I cried when Larson died, as did many. He taught each of us the rich, sustaining value of self-propelled kindness. He was a titan to the end.

Cleater, another Xerox pal, lived about as far diagonally from Larson as a man could: a high-rise condo in Key Biscayne. Tall, handsome, and stylish, Cleater’s passion was fine art. A tough midlife divorce took a financial toll, forcing him to keep his corporate job rather than chase his true passion of buying and selling paintings and sculptures.

Cleater also threw medical snake eyes. He was diagnosed and soon fell gravely ill, living just long enough to resell one beautiful piece at a substantial profit. The sale validated him. He cherished it the way passionate pursuits always do.

Cleater’s dream was to live the life of a fine arts dealer, but he waited too long to do it. This saddened me because he would have been fabulous—and happy. From him I learned the importance of pursuit. When you find in life something that brings you unbridled joy, do not wait. Chase it. If you don’t, time can turn from ally to enemy. You may never get the chance.

MercMan, my fourth absent friend, was my younger brother’s best friend. He lived where we grew up (Severna Park, Maryland) and drew a medical short straw at a time when the young man’s life should have been unfolding. His curse was brain cancer. He would leave behind three young children and a loving, adorable wife.

When MercMan’s destiny was sealed I took him fishing with a friend on the Chesapeake Bay. King Neptune smiled on us that day and supplied as many striped bass as we cared to catch. They were everywhere, each hungrier than the last.

Not long after that I took him to an Orioles game at Camden Yards. We sat behind the dugout, the closest he’d ever been to the field and talked of life and death. I thanked him for being a great best friend to my brother. He taught me about living.

“The only difference between me and you,” he said, “is that I know when I’m going to die and what I’m going to die from. Other than that, we’re still the same.”
Then he shelled a peanut, ate the meat, and tossed the empty hulls to the ground.
Absent friends are never life’s empty hulls tossed to the ground; they are the meat. They nourish and sustain us.

Cherish memories of your absent friends this holiday season. Celebrate their memories for what they are, eternal nutrients that enrich a good and grateful life.