I waited on a line early yesterday morning on a quest to get some bagels. As I neared the store entrance, I could hear the sounds of the music from inside, and the opening notes to an old Billy Joel song, “Only the Good Die Young.” And I started to cry, as I had been doing pretty much all weekend.
When I first met my husband many years ago, one of the first life stories he shared with me was that one of his close boyhood friends had died in a terrible car accident when he was in his early 20s. My husband could not listen to “Only the Good Die Young” without invoking his friend's name and memory. This early death had a profound effect on my husband, who always lived his life as fully as he could, knowing that it could be wiped out in an instant. And of course, we know the ending to that story, as my husband, too, died too young.
My 25-year-old son was a pallbearer this weekend at the funeral of one of his closest childhood friends. His friend had died suddenly, which we know today means that the pain of life caught up with him and he was unable to figure out how to outrun it. Watching the many friends, young men who I’ve known since they were little boys, bravely carry their friend to his final resting place split my heart open into a million pieces. Watching his parents grieve as they said goodbye split it a million times more.
For what is our biggest fear as parents than having harm befall our children? From the moment they are born, we swaddle them and coddle them and do everything in our power to protect them from danger. If we are doing our jobs right, we eventually come to the realization that, in fact, they are responsible for their own safety, their own decisions, and we can only sit back and watch and hope that they will figure out how to live a life, preferably one that is framed by happiness and joy, alongside the difficulties and hardships. And when they can’t, and they make the decision that they can’t go on, we find out too late.
People have said to me outright that they don’t know how they would live through what I’ve lived through. And I, as a griever, say to myself “thank goodness you don’t know but if you had to you would.” That’s what I was thinking and feeling at the cemetery this weekend. I watched the parents, people I’ve known for a long time, cope with the reality in front of them, their friends and family and neighbors bearing witness to their grief in a socially distanced formation. I watched my son’s friend’s mother keep her face hidden throughout the service and burial, and I watched his father get up and share sweet memories about his son, choking out his final words, “Precious boy. Precious man.” I watched the boyhood friends, young and strapping and beautiful, their faces mottled by tears. And I stood near other parents from the neighborhood, many of us were gulping and gasping and quietly sobbing as our friend and neighbor, an Ethical Society leader, gathered us in song and words as we all stood there, on a beautiful October morning, remembering the young man who had spent so many hours in our homes and on soccer fields and with our own sons and daughters. And we all imagined what it would be like if it were us sitting under that tarp with our boy in front of us in a casket.
There are no adequate words for a tragedy like this, that has befallen our neighborhood and this very close group of childhood friends. They will go on, remembering their friend for the rest of their lives, just as my husband remembered his friend. He will become both a sadness and an ache, as well as a cautionary tale. He has left a hole in the world, and those who loved him will mourn him in some way for the rest of their lives.
And while I don’t believe that only the good die young, in this case, it is once again too terribly true.
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