Grief Anniversary — Paul
January 24, 2020, was the last day that I didn’t know Paul was dying.
Someone good at observing the obvious once said that you can make new friends, but you cannot make old ones. Those friends who knew you while you were trying to figure yourself out, before you were fully formed, who watched you find your groove… those friends are like diamonds, requiring the pressure of the atmosphere and the passage of time to transform a regular person into a unique and special mineral. Old friends are rare; they are not just lying around in the places one finds friends.
Paul and I were childhood buddies. We met in junior high school, both misfit toys in different ways. We found each other. I had transferred into our suburban private school in the middle of seventh grade, when girls were at their meanest and boys were pretty much just as bad. I was a social reject. My clothes were not like theirs. I used different words to communicate. I came from a school in the city where everyone was socially conscious and cared about all the things that were going on the world. In the suburbs, it was all sex and drugs and rock and roll. I was almost two years younger than everyone else in my class, but among the tallest of the kids. You would nonetheless have been well-advised to pick me last for any team in gym class as I was slow and not at all athletic. In seventh grade basketball, I went to the locker room for a minute, and when I came back, didn’t realize that sides had changed. I made a basket for the opposing team.
In fact, I wasn’t great at anything in particular, except maybe doodling in the margins of my notebooks. I was awkward. I had buck teeth, thick glasses, and a big nose. I was dubbed the president of the Itty Bitty Titty Committee by one of my classmates. I was never privy to any of the giggle-fests in the hallways, nor was I invited to any of the bar mitzvahs that were happening that year. My mom said it was because I didn’t know anyone very well, but I knew that even if I had actually known everyone, I still wouldn’t have been invited.
Paul had it worse. Paul was gay. At that time, “gay” was defined more as a collection of mannerisms, or a gut feeling, than a sexual orientation. I was a little too young to be thinking about sex, honestly, but there was never any question that when that time came, I would be dreaming about snogging with someone like David Cassidy, and so would Paul. This was neither a secret nor was it openly discussed. In suburban New Jersey, being gay wasn’t something you talked about or acted upon in those years, except perhaps in the shadows.
Objectively, if you weren’t a suburban teenager, Paul had a lot going for him. Although not athletic, physically imposing, or the high school macho ideal, he was adorable, smart, articulate, and funny. He could draw, too, and introduced me to rapidograph pens, which made everything look beautiful and intentional. Most of all, though, his voice had not changed, and he had a beautiful countertenor singing voice. Because of it, he attracted a lot of attention. Famously, one year he got the lead in the school play — Oliver. Not wanting to be seen, I joined the stage crew. Wanting to be seen, Paul knocked his performances out of the park, while I stood, proudly, in the wings. He sang “Where is Love” so spectacularly that it is seared forever into the memories of everyone who heard it. (Some of you reading this who were there are saying to yourselves, “Oh yeah — I remember that!”) During the four months or so that Paul was Oliver, and even when we worked on other plays, Paul was a star, mostly with the ladies. We were accepted in a certain milieu. We got invited to the cast parties with the theater kids. We loved all that. It was there that Paul found his community.
The rest of the time, Paul was getting beat up after school or in the locker room. Big boys were taking his lunch money. (Some of those big boys are grown men possibly reading this. If he didn’t tell you himself, Paul wanted you to be sorry for the way you treated him, be better men, and teach your sons to be better boys. I’ll just leave that here.)
One of the amusing and also pathetic stories about our social situation pertains to the smoking lounge at school. If you were sixteen you could get your parents to sign a permission slip saying that you were allowed to be in there, and your name would go on a clipboard on the door. It was in a courtyard in the middle of one of the main school buildings, so everyone could watch you smoke. All the smokers lied to their parents and said that of course they didn’t smoke, but so many of the cool kids did; kids who didn’t have smoking permission wouldn’t be able to participate in this very important social scene. At Paul’s house and mine, this ritual was inverted. Our parents came to us and asked if we wanted smoking permission, even though neither of us smoked. “Smoking permission” was the rare form of social currency that they viewed as being accessible to us.
We were those kids who never quite fit in, so we made social lives for ourselves by cobbling together a fluid klatch of other kids like us. As we got older, we were rarely involved in the social plans of anyone who could be considered genuinely popular, but we made our own way. The boys stopped beating Paul up, and started ignoring him. He made some friends, almost entirely female, and seemed comfortable with who he was. Paul taught me to pretend not to care what other people thought. I taught Paul about upping his doodling game in the margins of his notebooks. I had a little group of girl friends with whom I hung out for a few years. There was some overlap among our friends. Then I had a couple of boy friends who actually were fun and cool, and had their own group. I sometimes was able to hang out with them. I acquired a boyfriend. I saw Paul a lot less. We both made it through high school.
That was only the beginning of our friendship. There is a whole middle that I may write about at a different time. Now, though, I’m going to jump straight to the end. January 24, 2020, was the very last day of my life that I didn’t know that Paul was dying.
On January 22, 2020, a couch was being delivered to our new country house in Connecticut. I took a few hours off in the afternoon to go meet the truck. Paul came with me to keep me company. We talked nonstop all the way up in the car about Kendall, Paul’s fiancée, who I had initially thought sounded too good to be true. (Paul was nothing if not… enthusiastic.) Kendall had turned out to be every bit as extraordinary as Paul claimed he was, and Paul was excited about some plans they were making for Paul’s lake house. We talked about them coming to visit us for a weekend in Connecticut once we were all set up. We had fairly recently been to a really fun high school reunion, and we talked about what everyone was doing now. I told him about how when one of the prettiest and most interesting girls in our high school class friended me on Facebook I was so thrilled that I ran out into my living room like a dope and announced it to my own confident, self-assured fifteen year old (who looked at me with an expression that said, “Who are you?”). We talked about how Paul had forgiven everyone who was unkind to him in high school who later came to him for friendship, but could not forgive a classmate who never had the chance to mend fences because he had died, rumored, ironically, to have been gay-bashed on a train platform.
By this time Paul literally had thousands of friends. Most people who claim thousands of people as friends are actually claiming acquaintances. Not Paul. Almost everyone he thought of as a friend was someone with whom he kept in touch. It was his superpower — the way he brought people together, and connected people. He always knew someone who knew someone who could help someone else. He always had a good idea for a fun thing to do, or a clever person to call. I recently came across a photo from a cocktail party Paul had a few years ago on Mothers’ Day for a group of a dozen friends of his who had lost their mothers. Even that gathering was fun. Everyone wanted to be around Paul. We talked in the car about how strange it was for both of us to be “popular” with our high school peers now. We said that if we had known in back then that this would eventually happen, it would have been of no comfort to us at all. The injury of high school cruelty never fully healed.
When we got to Connecticut, Paul gave me ideas about the house. He spoke to the delivery guys in Spanish, telling them where to move the furniture to get it just right. Then we went and had delicious vegetarian burritos at my favorite local place, and drove home talking and singing all the way. It was a long, simple, fun, great day.
Thirty-six hours later, on January 24, 2020, I was sitting in my office when my phone rang. It was Kendall. The summary is that Paul had been rushed to the hospital. They had done a CT scan and found a mass in his brain that was causing certain cognitive effects that Paul had been noticing, and had resulted in a seizure. Ultimately, the diagnosis was glioblastoma, a cancer that is incompatible with life, killing 75% of its victims within a year. Only 5% of patients live five years. Everything went black. I saw stars.
Paul was incredibly optimistic. Kendall was a bit more realistic, but the parade of visitors in Paul’s room were jolly and hopeful, so while certainly very concerning, and while we put together end-of-life documents in preparation for the impending surgery, it was nonetheless possible to think that there was a chance that everything would be okay.
Paul and Kendall were sanguine. The surgery to remove the tumor went as well as anyone could have hoped, and Paul was completely fine afterwards, telling jokes and singing harmony with friends in his hospital room. It was encouraging.
Still, having had one experience with this before, and because I had been doing some outside reading and listening to doctors, I think I was likely the first to accept that no matter how good things seemed, this particular cancer was not survivable. During one early visit, a friend of Paul’s was there at the same time as I. He asked her to sing at his wedding that summer, and they sang together in his room. It was a beautiful moment. I walked out with her. When we got to the lobby she said that she was sure that god was going to take good care of Paul, and asked me what I thought. I said that I had to leave the whole god part to her. I added that of course I hoped she was right, but that based on what I understood about the science, I was tempering my positive thoughts with realism — that I thought it was worse than it looked. We hugged. I haven’t seen her since.
I was at the hospital every day for what seems like around two weeks. Time at once meant nothing and everything. Kendall’s birthday came and went. I wanted to be with Paul and Kendall as much as I could. Once Paul went home, I went on college visits with my daughter to the UK, one of Paul’s favorite places. He had wanted me to check out some potential spots for their destination wedding while I was there. Paul and Kendall took a quick trip to Florida before Paul started radiation treatments. Then COVID. There would be no visiting. Although there was no way for me to see them, Paul and I spent a couple of hours going through the wedding location websites and talking about plans.
Everyone was positive and upbeat with Paul and Kendall, but the distant and superficial contact was deceiving. Virtually no one was seeing them in person and everyone was relying on group emails and Facebook posts for their news. I knew it was more serious than outward appearances would have led people to believe. I developed a role as the guy who (only when asked), tamped down people’s hopes during Paul’s illness. I did it because I am straightforward, but it was more that I wanted people to seize the day, say what they needed to say to make sure he knew how loved he was, and to get their fill of Paul as best they could. I was honest with anyone who asked me, and a lot of people did. I regret only one of those comments, eventually made to Kendall during a phone conversation in which he was contemplating planning life with his love well into the future. I wish I could take nine words back: “Oh, Kendall, this is not a twenty year cancer.” I was already in mourning, but Kendall didn’t need to hear that.
The next five months did not take five months. They took five minutes, or maybe five years. Due to the quarantine and Paul’s suppressed immune system and fragile health, I would only see Paul one more time. In late July, we had been quarantining in Connecticut, and Paul was at his lake house in New Jersey. We drove over, and visited for a few hours, out on his deck, until he was too tired for us to stay any longer. He was Paul-ish, but already largely gone. He was participating and talking, and asking Rebecca whether she would like to help him with an upcoming project. He was talking about new research and writing, and planning additional contributions to his legacy of creative works. Rebecca knew he was dying, but instinctively played along. It was clear that we were watching the essence of Paul dissipate into the ether.
Several more days of decreasing energy and less and less consciousness followed. On August 11th, Paul died in Kendall’s arms.
I have dealt with a decent amount of death in my life. Another great friend also died in August. I miss him, but I accept that he is gone. My mom died five years ago, and I miss her terribly. I am incredibly sad about losing her, but I accept that it happened. The loss of Paul was somehow different, and I’m not sure why. He was pretty young — 58 — but that’s not it. The cancer took him quickly — six months from start to finish — but that’s not it either. There is something about Paul being gone that feels unbelievable to me. Literally. It is as if I have to remind myself that he is really gone. Paul, more full of life than anyone I knew — a walker, an organic-everything buyer, a vegetarian, and a human ball of vital energy — was going to live a good long life. He and Kendall were going to get married at a country estate in the UK. They were going to travel all around the world together, taking photographs, meeting new people, creating art, spending time with old friends, and doing wonderful things.
Bad things happen to good people. That I know. Even as I sit typing this up, though, I feel as if he is still here somewhere, and that I have been remiss in not speaking to him recently. I have felt Paul’s presence, not in a woo woo way, but in the way that the people we love are with us always. Is that why Paul’s death is hard for me to accept as real? Is it the thing that Paul and I always said, which is that when you die, your soul lives on in the people you loved, and who loved you, whose lives you touched and made better?
Is it because Paul is so alive in me and in others that his passing seems so implausible? If that were the case, I think I would feel the same way about my mom, the only difference being that I watched her die, whereas the pandemic forcibly separated me from Paul for most of his illness. All I know is that I miss Paul every single day.
Losing Paul is all of our losses. It is our whole broad community’s loss. Luckily, he made sure that the very best parts of his soul were liberally shared, sprinkled around on everyone like glitter. You know how that is — once you’re exposed to it, you’re finding it FOREVER. Maybe his sparkle, his intellect, his work, his energy, and his soul survived the demise of the container in which they were kept for fifty-eight years, and that’s why I am so acutely aware of his presence.
January 24 is the day that I found out that Paul’s body was done taking care of him. He is not with us to offer strong opinions, or to recall old events from his encyclopaedic memory that the rest of us have long forgotten, but we can talk about him often, remember him always, and keep at least part of him alive that way. You can’t make new old friends. It’s true. You can, though, carry the ones you had, and have, with you for the rest of your life.
