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“You have a wound,” she said. “If it was a cut, you’d have put Neosporin on it, a Band-Aid. But you did nothing and so it festers. You and me and a billion others. We walk around with these deep wounds that alter how we think and what we say, the relationships we have, who we trust, the decisions we make. That keep us from really living.”
“We hold the past in our body,” she said. “It never forgets. But it can learn to let it go.”
“Now go. Also, no offense. But I’m tired of funerals,” he said. “Me, too. People talk about how fun they are but I think they’re exaggerating.” He closed his eyes, smiling. “You’re a moron. That’s what I love about you.”
Our lives each day are a series of choices. It’s one decision over another. One person over another. One job in a new city over staying at the old job. Whole worlds of what-ifs. What if Jen hadn’t had the affair? What if we’d had a baby? What if I had never met Tim? Whole parallel worlds, parallel paths that are there for the taking.
Lives are changed by seemingly unconnected, random decisions that change everything. So it is also the detour to get a few slices of pizza and two bottles of root beer so we could eat lunch. Which is why I wasn’t in the room when Tim died.
Just like Clara and her dad
You have to identify the body.
Just Like his dad
“I’m sorry, Mr. Stanley. I know this must be very … hard. It’s just a formality,” she said. “We just need you to say, ‘Yes, this is Tim Charvat.’” Where was he, I wondered in a kind of confused shock. Because this wasn’t him. This bluish-gray body devoid of life. Where was my friend?
Fuck
“Tim is dead, isn’t he.” I nodded. He stared at me. “Are you sad?” “I am.” “But you know what?” “What?” “Like, you knew him and isn’t that better than never knowing him even though he’s dead now?”
I shouldn’t have grabbed him by the throat. That was wrong. And I shouldn’t have pushed him up against the wall. Nor did I know I was going to do that. It’s remarkable what you can do when you don’t care what anyone thinks anymore.
Breakdown
Tim Charvat, longtime adviser to Sotheby’s on twentieth-century art, patron to writers, poets, filmmakers, and dreamers, bon vivant, and man about town, died suddenly at NewYork-Presbyterian Brooklyn Methodist Hospital. He was 59. Mr. Charvat, a one-time Peace Corps volunteer, was a passionate lover of the arts in all forms. He advised the New York City Board of Education and helped design an art curriculum for elementary school students. An accident at age 31 left Mr. Charvat a paraplegic. The accident, and life in a wheelchair, did not slow him down. Indeed, it seemed to drive him to do more
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Fuck
Howard said, “Get your things.” At first I thought he was talking to me. But I saw that he was looking at the bro. “Get your things, leave now. And tell your father to go fuck himself.” Which is when the assembled started applauding.
Where was he? Not this body. But him. His essence.
“There are three people in the room when I work. There’s me. There’s the deceased. And there’s God.” He shrugged, his enigmatic expression never changing. No sarcasm, no wasted words. Just the thoughts of a man who has seen behind a curtain most of us never will. “They all matter to me,” he added. “How could they not?”
I watched him, this craftsman, this last person who would ever touch Tim, touch the thousands of people who would lay in this room, watched the care with which he did it.
The thought came fast. Tie them together, he seemed to say to me. I dare you. He would have loved that. Standing, finally, in some distant place, some magical, stardust place where we go, when we go, if we go, Tim finally able to stand, to walk, the joy of it, the sudden desire, in his new sneaks, his handsome suit, ready to burst into a run, and then falling from the knot tying his two sneakers together. “That sonuvabitch,” he would have said, smiling.
He says, The greatest wonder is that every day, all around us, people die, but we act as if it couldn’t happen to us. And yet … living is hard.
“People can break you,” I said. “Through pain. But also … also … through love. The feelings so strong, the loss so great …” I faltered, never the good ad-libber. But I kept going. “I was broken two years ago. And Tim … he showed me grace and dignity and kindness when I had none, wasn’t able to see it, kind of gave up. Tim saved my life because he showed me how to live.”
What death dares us to do, is celebrate it. To celebrate the gift of life in its fleeting face.”
I’m not sure if I actually believed in Santa or wanted to believe so desperately that I convinced myself. It is a bad habit I’ve dragged into adulthood. (See: marriage, Jen.)
That I want you to have. It’s all in my will. The lawyers will take care of the paperwork. Find a good tenant though, please. Someone a bit lost. Someone with a kind heart.
Keep the salon alive. Start a new one. The lost souls are out there. And they’re always looking for free booze.
“Anyway. I’m sorry. As you are now no doubt acutely aware, I am an idiot. But I don’t care anymore. I made a mistake. I didn’t kill anyone but myself. And now, apparently, I’m alive again. I’ll tell you what I’m going to do with that. I am going to start by stealing a Coke from the kitchen as well as several notebooks and pens for my eight-year-old friend Leo.”
“Says the obituary writer. If this were a movie, it would be foreshadowing.” I wasn’t sure what to say. “The sex was boring,” I said. “I know, right?” She reached up and gently touched my face. “A year,” I said, not realizing I was going to say it out loud. “They go by faster now. Think of all the stories I’ll have.” She leaned in and hugged me, my face in her hair. She pulled back and kissed my cheek.
“If this were a buddy movie,” I said, “I would put my arm around your shoulders.” “Please don’t touch me.” We walked, the waves rolling gently over our feet. “I’m sorry,” I said after a time. “For what?” “Being an idiot. Giving you more work. Making you work with the bro.” He seemed to think about this. “There’s so much about you I don’t like,” he said, looking at the sand. “Where do I even start?”
Howard had called and asked me to meet him at Gallagher’s. I assumed he was taking pity on me. But he had an idea, he said. A new section on the extraordinary lives of ordinary people who’d died. Life Stories.
He shook his head. “Your little … speech. The eulogy. This is your idea. They like it upstairs. Think it could be something. Maybe more than words. Videos. Reminders of people’s lives.” “I think Tuan would be great for this too. The two of us, I mean.”
“Mmm … good morning. My name is Leo Hoyt and I am in third grade at PS 29 school in Brooklyn. I chose for my show-and-tell my friend Bud who is also my neighbor from five houses away but the houses are connected, so if you think about it except for the bricks it’s kind of the same house.” I looked over at Leo’s mother and father, watched them watch him. Leo looked up at his classmates and hesitated for a moment, suddenly shy, and then looked over at his teacher, who smiled and nodded. “Do you know what an obituary writer is? Well, neither did I. It is a person who writes about dead people. But
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Fuck
I see a red cardinal from time to time, out the back window, on the old ash tree, occasionally hopping onto the back deck. They are hard not to notice. Their color, their particular beauty. I did a search online and came across an interesting story. Apparently red cardinals can be spiritual messengers.
I don’t understand death. The biology of it, yes, but not what remains for the living. Pain and memory and an empty place. I think to fully get it, you have to feel it so profoundly that it upsets your sense of the world. It has to make you a little crazy. But it also has to make you love this miracle of existence to the point of bursting. If it doesn’t, well, then you don’t get it yet.
Tim said we are all obituary writers because we get to write our life every day. Write it. Please. It’s your life.
