Husband and I went to the funeral today of a good friend who should still be alive. AJ was a vibrant, fun, athletic man with a great sense of humor and a wife who adored him. Husband knew him almost twenty years, and his wife became one of my dearest friends. AJ loved working in his specialized field of building construction and spoke often of how electrifying it was to look out over the city at dawn from the top of a Manhattan skyscraper. He said it felt like flying. When the Towers fell on 9/11, he volunteered to work at Ground Zero among the misery and debris. He never said much about it afterward.
Of all the things AJ loved and excelled at – skiing, scuba diving, working on his tan – there was one love affair he couldn’t manage to end. It resurfaced after many dormant years following an accident at work that he refused to get proper treatment for. Ignoring his doctors’ advice, he insisted on working through it and injured himself worse. Surgeries followed and then painkillers, and when he ran out of painkillers he climbed back into the bottle he’d broken out of so many years earlier. It welcomed him with open arms.
His wife, his friends, his family, his doctors all urged him into rehab. He refused. He said he could handle it, no one knew his pain, rehab wouldn’t help, he could take care of himself, blah blah blah. He became increasingly paranoid, his marriage fell apart, his health spiraled downward. His friends discussed arranging an intervention. He said don’t you dare.
He shuffled around his bare bachelor kitchen, chugging oxycontins and pouring cornflakes in the cat’s dish when he couldn’t find the cat food. Any trace of the daredevil, class of ’69 high school heartthrob was long gone. In the words of tough guy author Raymond Chandler, drugs will do that as sure as ten dimes will buy a dollar. At the time AJ died alone in his apartment three days ago, we hadn’t seen him in a year. The four of us used to have dinner together once a week.
At his funeral, he was eulogized by his heartsick wife who was in the midst of divorcing him. She said the cause of death was stubbornness. That’s what she would put on his death certificate. Getting help for a problem makes a man no less of a man. Sometimes it’s what makes him a man. There were over twenty of us at the lovely luncheon following AJ’s funeral. Husband asked privately if we could help with the bill. My widowed friend said thank you, but no; her husband left a generous sum of money set aside for his funeral with specific instructions. AJ certainly knew how to die. He just didn’t know how to live.
Turning up the sound, Daughter’s Fotos take us to the Brooklyn Hip-Hop Festival
Nice and Smooth
Singalong with Dres
Smif & Wesson with Black Moon
Capoeira
the crowd, the bridge
silhouette