Friends depart but leave their mark

I'm in the season when my ranks are imperceptibly but inevitably thinning. More and more, the obituary page becomes an important source of reportage. I like it when newspapers, as this one does, let the family include a photo with the notice. Even if you don't know the person, the face often puts meaning to the name, or the other way around. You can feel: Yes, she looks like a Mildred, one of those good-egg Mildreds.

Every once in a while I'm startled by a name and a face that say something back to me: It's someone I know, someone I shared some life with. Losing friends this hard way, my contemporaries tell me, is something we have to expect and get used to. And we sort of do, at least the formal part of it. But not the bottomless finality of death. That is always a wrench.

When a friend goes, all of us who were close are shocked and saddened, no matter how much warning was given. Our first questions, if we don't know, are always "How did she die?" or "What did he have?" We always need a reason for death other than the one that so often is looking us full in the face: the time has come.

Well, it was cancer, a bad heart, an aneurysm, whatever. Dwelling on the cause -- how long she had it, how she managed it and so on -- is useful. It gives us a way to talk about death with everyday words and thoughts. If we didn't have this way of talking about it, many of us might be left wordless in a discussion of the real event: that our friend has left this vale, the door bolted fast behind; no longer here touching and touched; that voice, that smile gone for good.

We wade through the tides of ceremonial grief at the visitation, the funeral and the burial hoping, knowing that it shouldn't be entirely depressing. We summon faith in order to feel some of the promised uplifting aspects of death. After, on the quiet ride back home or back to work, we wonder how we can keep his or her memory alive. We promise ourselves that we will never forget. But at the same time we're afraid the forgetting process will begin the minute we get back to the stuff of our own lives: the picking up of a long memo to get ready for tomorrow's meeting, taking a pencil to plan supper for our Friday night guests, or yanking on the mower's starter rope to get at overdue grass cutting.

But, try as we might to resist, time begins to shift our departed friends toward the back of our minds.

For myself, soon after it happens, whenever the cloud of sorrow yields a little space, I think through how this person changed my life, or more specifically, changed my living. How he affected the way I do, or think about, certain things, how she changed or added to my views and values.

I mine our shared memories, digging for hard ore, looking deeper than just the handy traits -- "Wasn't it wonderful the way she always . . .?" I look further for what they and I can hold on to together, a definitive rock of their life that I replicated for my own. Once discovered, after I get back to the self-centered busy-busy business of my own life, I can find myself, even years later, pleasantly interrupted by realizing that I am, at the moment, doing, saying or thinking something the way he would have. And, in that moment, I can recognize an alive bloom of our friendship.

-- Freelance writer Al Sandvik lives in Treasure Island and Minneapolis, where he is a columnist for the Edina Sun-Current.

One cannot live with the dead;

either we die with them or we

make them live again.

-- Louis Martin-Chauffier

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