In Memoriam

A few years ago I spoke at a friend's memorial service.  She was a coworker, a remarkable little woman, full of dark humor and fellow-feeling, a friend.  She was a spitfire named Jennifer Kuhn, and we all loved her.  I miss her still.  She had asked me to speak at her memorial and so I did, as did many others.  (She would have been glad, I like to think, to have seen such a crowd.)

After her memorial, our boss, the CEO of the company, a young man, then in rude good health, joking or not, asked me the same thing. "You have to promise to do that for me," he said, "if I die I want you to do the eulogy."  Other people said similar things to me that day.  Having lived in San Francisco in the Eighties, I have some experience of speaking at funerals.  It isn't something about which to brag, but people are kind, and one wants to say something after, I know.  I may have said it to someone myself.

When Bryan Pearce said it to me, I'm pretty sure it was a joke, or if it was sincere, I don't expect he would have remembered saying it, or thought much of saying it after.  As I've said, our boss was still a young man, and when he died recently, after an impossibly difficult illness that lasted nearly a year to the day from his original cancer diagnosis, it was not only a blow to us all, and a shock, but also frankly difficult to accept.  Death leaves a kind of chaos in it's wake, always.

I've just been to Bryan's memorial service.  He was an important figure in our industry.  His service was well attended.  A number of people spoke; colleagues with whom he worked closely, personal friends, and most movingly his wife and daughters.

I'm glad I went.  I did not know the man as they did, obviously.  I had some sense of who he was beyond our roles as employer and employee, though that had more to do with his friendly and generous nature than with any presumption on my part.  Bryan would have everyone a friend.

It is perhaps presumptuous of me now to say anything more in his memory.  I've already written something here to mark his passing.  Still, today I remember the promise I made him years ago and joking or not, I've kept it.

It wasn't my place to say anything at his service.  So I'll just say it here, that these few words might have some small comfort to those of us who miss him.  I can't think what else to do.

A poet* said, "I remember from your life," and that's right, it seems to me, that's just how it happens.  When someone dies, but even before that happens, we can never have the whole life of another person.  When someone dies, that is what we lose.  Some of us will have had more of him than others; those that knew him best, that loved him and were loved by him, they will have the most, and that's right, that that should be so.  The people he loved best, the woman he loved, the children they made, they will remember him best, they will have memories we won't.  They will need more.  They've lost more.

Those of us who worked most closely with him, those with whom he worked every day and for years, they will remember differently, but still, they will remember too.  They will remember what he did, all he tried to do, and why, and why it matters, still.  

The rest of us will remember from his life just as much as is ours; what we learned from his example, what he gave and taught us, what we owe him, the man he was when he was with us, all too briefly.

Even in the aggregate, our memories from his life, can not be what it means to be alive, to have him still here, with us, and that is why his loss is felt so, and will be.   That is what we mourn, what we can not have again.

Another poet, a very different poet, said:

Can I see another's woe,

And not be in sorrow too?

Can I see another's grief,

And not seek for kind relief?

That is why we come here today, seeking that "kind relief."  That is what the memories we have from his life, the memories we each have, large and small, together, we offer one another now.  It is what we do.  It is all we can do for one another now, just now.  William Blake, a great poet, wrote the lines I just read.  In that same poem, called "On Another's Sorrow," he also says:

Can I see a falling tear,

And not feel my sorrow's share?

My share is small, but it is mine.  My memories: of Bryan smiling in the morning from across the bookstore's lobby, of Bryan laughing at something I said to make him laugh when perhaps he ought not to have, my memories of his many kindnesses, his enthusiasm, his integrity, his decency, his sense, his example, these are mine.  That is my loss; my kind boss, the boss who danced with me, and laughed, and did good.  That is "my sorrow's share".  

It is, as I've said, a small thing.  I offer it today to those for whom this loss is irreparable.  Not that it can mean so much to them, as it does to me, but that, with all the others gathered here today, we may remember, together, as much as we can, today, so that we may remember today -- our losses, and his gifts -- as long as we live.

He was a good man.  Remember that.  It matters.  It matters more than he knew.  What he did, the good he did, matters.  That he was good, that he was a good man, that matters more.  Remember that even I, who only worked for him, someone who never knew him as you did, someone who by all rights he should not have liked, but weirdly, miraculously, eventually he did, remember that even I knew that.  He was a good man.  There are too few.  

That is what I will remember from him.  He was a good man.  I will miss him.

*Owen Dodson, "Poems for My Brother Kenneth"

A Book Between Friends

A friend who is dying asks me to her apartment to help her dispose of her remaining books. There aren't many, but then there never were. She's worked in a bookstore for years and most of the books she's read she's either borrowed from stock, or read in advance-readers-copies -- the publishers' galleys of forthcoming books, sent out to reviewers and the trade in advance of publication, usually in plain paper covers. (I only recently learned, when major publishers, facing new economic difficulties, stopped printing so many of these, that it is actually more expensive to produce an ARC, in most cases, than to simply send fully bound copies, but timing is obviously a factor as well. Despite their comparative rarity, and what used to be a select, but loyal group of collectors of these in the used books business, now better served and undone by the Internet, most ARC books have little or no value.) My friend is not a collector. Her apartment is small, comfortable, but sparsely furnished, in part as a matter of personal preference as she has little attachment to things and less money, but also as a practical necessity. A survivor of polio, she's quite a diminutive person, and until recently when her treatment for cancer made the use of them impracticable, she wore leg-braces and walked with crutches, nicknamed, "Bert & Ernie." At home, at least when she was alone, she would sometimes navigate her day without. For some time now, she's had to use a wheelchair, so her apartment has been simplified even further, to accommodate the wheelchair. She describes this process to me as "cancer shui." Of the books still in my friend's apartment, few have any sentimental or monetary value; these she has already either given away or otherwise dealt with. I am here to collect whatever is left.

It is an unlikely pile that fits easily in a box or two. Looking through them with her, even as she insists that "there's nothing really here," my friend does what people so often do with the books they intend to just be rid of, and explains or defends the presence of each before dismissing them.

"This was actually a pretty good book."

"This one was supposed to make me rich!!! See how well that worked out?"

And then she laughs, exactly as she used to before she got sick: barking loud until she coughs, then a smoky diminuendo that resolves itself in a sly grin behind the back of her rather elegant little hand.

Most of the books are of a practical kind: dealing with financial and or situational matters from health to interpersonal relationships. "Self Help," one way and another, might best describe these. She is dismissive of the lot, though individually, as we put them into the boxes, she will admit that this or that one, "had some good sense in it."

There are also one or two rather serious philosophical works, which rather surprises me as conversationally she was never one for either systems or theory. Even more surprisingly, there are also a few books on spirituality, in which I've never known her to express the slightest interest. It is a delicate thing, handling other people's books, particularly a friend's, and even in less difficult circumstances and when finality does not hang quite so heavy in the atmosphere, one learns not to question too closely just how and why someone might have books that seem so far out of keeping with what one knows of someone else's interests or character. Books are intimate objects. To see what someone else is reading, even to glance at a stranger's book on the bus, is to get a glimpse into the privacy of another person. This is why that glance is not always welcome, whatever the book. To see, to have been invited to see even just the few books my friend had left on her living-room floor, was a matter of trust. It is best to be careful, so I am. My friend says whatever she wants about the books as she hands them to me, and I listen and agree.

Everyone who reads is occasionally embarrassed by what they read, sometimes even as we read, and some people, myself very much included in this, would rather other people not see some of the things we've read, profitably or not. My friend, though still as proudly, even fiercely independent as her present circumstances will allow, and while never apologetic as that isn't her way, nevertheless clearly does not want me to think any less of her for owning the books we've put in these boxes.

"I've read a lot of junk," she says when we're done, "that's all most of this is. But everybody does."

I agree.

"The best books I ever read, I don't have anymore."

And then we talk for awhile about some of these.

When I leave, I take her books with me, to sell at the bookstore, some of them, and the rest I sell for her elsewhere. I don't remember now giving her the money from doing this. I might have given it to another friend to give to her. She might or might not have taken it from me, so I probably passed it along. It wasn't much, as she'd said it wouldn't be. Doesn't matter.

Before I leave, she tells me, "You probably don't want any of this shit, but if there's anything you want, or anything else you think anyone else would want, just keep it." She's right about this as well; there really isn't anything I want among the books I've collected from her, nor is there anything I think anyone else would particularly like, but again, that doesn't much matter in the end.

Later, when my friend dies, and before I speak at her memorial, a dear friend of hers gives me a framed pastel drawing that our friend did years before. I'd never seen it before, so far as I remember, but it's rather wonderful: a weirdly wild-eyed face, loosely depicted in swirling colors, and a very free self portrait, I like to think. When I look at it, I can hear her laughing.

Tonight, for some reason, I picked up one of the books she said she genuinely loved. I like it too, and own my own copy. I read a little of it, just before sitting down to write this. I was going to write about the book, rather than my friend. Now I think I won't.

That's just between us.

Ineffable Creature

"Morning, Weasel."

They've painted over the burns on the sidewalk where she stubbed out her cigarettes with the tip of a crutch. Somebody else gives out the dog cookies at the cash register, calls customers to tell them their special orders have arrived, organizes the shelves of customer "holds," solves paperwork tangles. But every time I hear a metal cart half full of books bump and ring off the elevator, or look across from the Used Books Buying Desk when voices get raised at the Check Out, or I have a particularly comic encounter with some eccentric soul, I still look for The Wolverine.

It's been a year. I was reminded just the other day, by a mutual friend. It has been as long as that, longer, since we last shared a bitter laugh, growled together at the fate of the world, grinned across the floor at each other at some fresh absurdity. We went to a play once, not very well done, and coming out at the intermission, unsure if we really wanted to go back in, she pointed down the sidewalk, hacked despondently, and said "Go ahead, you bastard, run away -- just leave me here to die." Death was not something she feared terribly much. She fought it, refused it's attendant sympathies and show, laughed at it even as it came to her. She was a small woman, my friend and coworker, Jennifer Kuhn. Polio took the legs from under her when she was still a child. Cancer took her job, her hair, her mobility, even her dignity from her, but she laughed even at that. At the end, in that strangely vast looking hospital bed, she looked as small and vulnerable as a baby bird. "I don't dress for visitors anymore -- hope you don't mind," and then, drugged and still wracked with pain, she laughed. It was a harsh laugh, but then it always had been; smoky and loud. The last time I was with her, only days before she died, she said, "Dying is hard -- I wish it was over. I'm ready to go. Can't imagine why it's taking so long." And she laughed again, less loudly, not long, but still true.

"... how little alteration in good spirits the approaches of death make" as Bacon observed.

She called herself a badger, a wolverine, worse. When I asked her once why she identified so with small vicious mammals she said, "Well, I am a small vicious mammal." Her wit could be unkind, and her attitude defensive, if not occasionally offensive, but she was really all bluster and bark. Really, she was profoundly empathetic, perhaps too much so, particularly with the truly vulnerable: the crippled, the mad, the old, the young, the four-footed and the misfit. If she snapped, she snapped at the privileged, the pompous, the thoughtlessly mobile, the sententious and the overbearing. Little ass on the hard floor, her braced legs straight out before her, shelving books, she looked up at most people but always said to me, "You don't look so big from down here, Weasel."

That she invited me into her den, saw in me just a brother mammal, called me "Weasel," and friend, was and is a point of great pride. Not everyone was called to be her familiar.

We at the bookstore still miss her so. But as Montaigne says, "our feelings continue beyond this life," and as mine for her are still tender, I remind myself how she would have rolled her eyes and barked at such sentiment. Yet she did say it, more than once, near the end.

"Love you, Weasel."

Love you still, Wolverine.