 |
| James with his Art |
Phillip Roth, the writer, died recently and by way of bidding
him farewell I was reading some interviews I found on line. In one of them he commented about how
difficult it is to accept the deaths of friends. With our parents it's painful of course, yet
we expect our parents to die at some point.
It's the natural course of events.
But friends we think of as peers who will always be with us. Unlike a parent, the death of a friend
doesn't seem right. It seems
unnatural. It's not supposed to happen.
Frieda and I have been having dinner with James and Lisa at each other’s
houses at least once a month for fifteen years.
We've been to concerts together, plays, movies, bars, parties,
restaurants. We even took a trip to NewYork City together. When we traveled
separately, we dropped off and picked up each other at the airport, cared for
each other’s' pets. They had come to be
a constant in our lives, a part of the fabric.
Lisa with her encyclopedic knowledge of pop music and movies, and James'
wacky, absurd sense of humor.
 |
| James in NYC |
The last time we had dinner together at their house was much like all the
others. James was perhaps a little
irritable, annoyed, we imagined, at the prospect of a looming trip for a family
gathering in Chicago, a memorial for his mother who had recently died. He didn't like to travel. But there was still plenty of laughter. He went off on a rant about the “hands” and
“fingers” of bananas. We had a
disagreement about the band Franz Ferdinand: I liked them better than he
did. Because of this, I may have been
very slightly annoyed with him when we left.
The very next morning, before I was even awake, Frieda rushed into the
bedroom: “James has had a stroke!” And
with that, the nightmare began. Two days
later I stood by his bedside at the Stanford Medical Center and watched him
die, watched his hands turn blue as the circulation stopped. I had to keep telling myself that I would
never see him again because it seemed so utterly impossible that he was now so
far away as to be unreachable though he was right there in front of me. He had been snatched out of our mutual time
and hurled violently into the past.
A few weeks before this the bottom had fallen out of a planter box out on our deck. James had noticed and offered to help me fix it. We spent a couple hours one Saturday morning working on it together. I held the little blocks of wood that would support the bottom while he screwed them into the plywood sides. He laughed when the block I was holding slid sideways.
Today I was watering the potted plants around the deck and came to the same planter box. I could visualize him standing there, hunched over the box, laughing. How could he not be there?
The geraniums in that planter box are hale and blooming. They don't know they have James to thank for their snug home. But we now realize what a cozy world we had with him in it.
