I had the distinct displeasure of attending a memorial service for a dear friend on Sunday. I mean, it was a beautiful service, there were people there I was delighted to see, and yet, who the hell wants to ever have to go to such a thing?
I've alluded in this space to my complicated feelings on the death of my friend who inexplicably shut many of us out in the last year of her life after her diagnosis with breast cancer and who, despite being a brilliant scientist and the smartest person I've ever known, pursued quack cures that did little or nothing to slow the progress of her disease.
But what really sticks with me from this weekend is how much I miss my friend.
On Saturday, my Mom and I went to see Me and Orson Welles, and it felt strangely appropriate. It's a delightful little movie that is essentially a love letter to the theater. It's also a sort of familiar coming-of-age story of a naive young man who learns about the cruelty and cynicism of the world, but it's mostly about the joy of being involved in a creative endeavor and how complicated geniuses can be. It really is totally charming and sweet without being cloying, and I think you should go see it. (Here's the trailer!)
I met my friend when we were in a play together, and though neither of us pursued careers in the theater, it had a lifelong impact on both of us. She often served as the stage manager in high school productions, and I think there was something of that role in how she lived her life: in all of her various stages and pursuits, she always seemed to me to be consciously creating a life rather than simply blundering through it. And I think that stage-manager role may account for part of how she handled her illness and death. Perhaps because we didn't fit in this particular production, many of us got cut. This feels cruel, and it was, but it's also strangely kind of admirable--to the last, she was stage-managing a production, and while the cruelty seems unlike the woman who befriended a bizarrely diverse array of people in her life, the desire to create a production that was exactly as she wanted it to be feels wholly consistent with the person I knew.
When I saw her and her family last year, she had, unbeknownst to me, already been diagnosed. I remember thinking even then that her choices were certainly not choices I would ever make (attachment parenting would have certainly led me to suicide, infanticide, or both), but she had really built a nice life that suited her very well.
My mom quoted Tennessee Williams to me this weekend. It seems to fit my friend very well, though I can't clearly explain why Here's the quote:
Then what is good? The obsessive interest in human affairs, plus a certain amount of compassion and moral conviction, that first made the experience of living something that must be translated into pigment or music or bodily movement or poetry or prose or anything that's dynamic and expressive--that's what's good for you if you're at all serious in your aims. William Saroyan wrote a great play on this theme, that purity of heart is the one success worth having. "In the time of your life--live!" That time is short and it doesn't return again. It is slipping away while I write this and while you read it, the monosyllable of the clock is Loss, loss, loss, unless you devote your heart to its opposition.
I'm still making sense of all this--well, I'm never going to make sense of it, but I'm still trying to get to a place where I'm comfortable with how little I understand.
Here's a bad 2nd-generation photo of me and my friend in a 7th grade production of "Oliver". My mouth is open because I'm singing "I'd Do Anything For You."
Goodbye.
