On the Death of a Friend

Just up the road from my little cottage on San Juan Island is an old, old graveyard. It dates back to the 1860s, when the first white settlers arrived on the island, and when the nearby church was built. The church is no longer used, except for funerals, but it’s a small white box with Gothic arches for windows, half covered by the limbs of beeches so old three people could barely reach their arms around the trunks, with a steeple that tolls out the hour every hour, followed by the melodies of hymns that drift across the valley out into the hills and the mist and the distance. When we lived at the cottage full-time, I used to pause every hour to listen to the church bells, whether I was writing or working in my garden. I would stop and allow the music and the acknowledgment of time’s endless progression to move like a ghost across the path of an otherwise industrious day. When we first bought the place, on the first night we spent in our new home—the first home we owned—Paul led me out into backyard, in the snow and the deep blue dusk, and we wrapped our arms around one another and breathed in the smoky smell of winter and the only sound anywhere, across the whole island, was the tolling of the bells in the graveyard.

There’s a graveyard near me now, in the city, just as old and just as beautiful, though it lacks the church and the bells. I spend time there every day, walking or sitting on a bench or on the stone walls of graves, or lying in the grass below the pines. I’ve said many times on social media and in interviews that I spend most of my free time hanging out in old graveyards, and I think people believe I’m joking, at least a little bit, whenever I say it. I think they believe I’m putting on some kind of goth façade to enhance my mystique (not that I’ve got much mystique to enhance), but it’s true; I prefer spending my time in graveyards to anywhere else.

I’ve really never understood the irrational phobia we often have of burial places and monuments to the dead—our cultural distaste for memento moris, our fear of death’s fact and our always futile attempts to convince ourselves that even if death might be a fact, we ourselves will never die. Certain religions exist solely to propagate the comforting myth that death isn’t really real—at least, not for the chosen ones, the followers of a resurrected god who conquered death by dying and whose symbol is an instrument of death by torture. Denial of death’s reality strikes me in the same way that blasphemy or sacrilege strike the more conventionally religious, because life only exists because of death. All that lives also dies, and death creates the conditions for more life. It’s as impossible, as senseless, as futile to revere and rejoice in life without holding a similar reverence and even a gratitude for death, even though it can be painful, even though it is the doorway to the only mystery we will truly never have the least hope of solving.

I wrote a book about this—a novel, and I’m gratified to say it’s my most widely read novel to date. One for the Blackbird, One for the Crow is a paean to death, my attempt to restore this precondition for life to its proper place in our cultural understanding: a place of grateful acceptance, even reverence. I’ve done many reading events and book club appearances, talked to many readers about Blackbird, and every time I admit that Blackbird is about death, someone invariably argues with me. “No, no! How can you say this book is about death? It’s about life! The abundance and resilience of life, life’s sacred nature…” and every time, I answer: Yes. You get it. Any true celebration of life, any examination of its fullness, must necessarily make space for a celebration and examination of death. It is death that gives us life, that makes our lives and all lives real.

I do not see graveyards as frightening or sad places. To me, there is nothing more beautiful or serene than the places where we memorialize our dead, for in those places we also memorialize our love. On the faces of graves, you will find countless reflections of love that endures through ages, that lasts beyond the lifespans of the people who bore it and goes on speaking into the decades and centuries that follow. I like to read the inscriptions on old headstones and wonder about the people who are buried there—what their lives were like, who they were in all their flaws and their graces, what blessings and brightness they brought into this world to have earned the words their loved ones carved into stone, the messages that made them permanent beyond the usual span of a human life. Sacred to the memory. Beloved friend. Gone but not forgotten.

I love to see the flowers that were planted by these loved ones, too. In the cemetery on the island, there’s one grave that was planted with violets more than a hundred years ago, and in the spring it’s a carpet of sweet-smelling blue. There are graves full of snowdrops and daffodils and irises and shooting stars, and red poppies on the graves of those who fell during the first World War, and the flowers spread outward from where they were planted, all this life migrating across the memories of the dead. That’s why I love graveyards so much, because the people are gone, but not the life that still remembers the dead.

I met Nate my sophomore year of high school, 1995. He was one year ahead of me, a junior, and we were enrolled together in Arts Based School, an experimental “school within a school” created by a small group of fairly radical teachers at our public high school in a suburb of Seattle—Bruce Mindt, who taught drama and language arts; Jim Kovach, the band director; Kathy Ludgate, who taught history, and Al Zugel, who taught visual art.

These four educators had noticed that a certain percentage of kids were bright and capable, but had a difficult time engaging with curriculum when it was presented in a traditional “schoolish” manner, and thus were becoming part of the negative statistics that often plague public education. These students were more likely to drop out and were less likely to continue their education if they did graduate, despite their intelligence, which was sometimes obviously greater than that of their peers. These four teachers realized that this type of student tended to have more negative outcomes because the standard model of instruction didn’t meet them where they were. They developed a core of classes that could offer an alternative approach to education for these students and, hopefully, improve graduation rates and overall GPAs. The new curriculum would involve the arts in every aspect of learning. Students would still receive a thorough education in history, language, social studies, and all the rest of the core curriculum required by state standards. But rather than sitting in classrooms listening to lectures and taking tests, students would explore each lesson by creating group art projects that delved into the curriculum itself. Each individual student’s knowledge of the subject must be demonstrated clearly by their contribution to the finished product (which was often a performance of some kind, but not always.) The four leaders of Arts Based School petitioned the district and received blessing and funding to test-drive the experiment for a few years. Over the objection of my high school’s very stodgy, traditional principal (the living embodiment of an antagonistic authority figure from a 1980s teen movie), Arts Based School charged ahead.

Back in the mid- to late 90s, no one was really using words like “neurodivergent”—but of course, that’s exactly the kind of person Arts Based School was made for. The program was a magnet for outcasts—the beautiful, vibrant freaks and weirdos and queer kids who didn’t fit into the mainstream, socially or academically. We found real friendship with one another. From the start, we were all thick as thieves; though we undoubtedly had our quarrels and factions, overall, I don’t think you’ll find another group of teenagers who cooperated and supported one another so enthusiastically. We knew we were all going to sink or swim together, and if we wanted Arts Based School to continue into the future, we had better make sure that everybody swam.

From the start, Nate was instrumental in maintaining the peace and cohesion of this group. Probably the most neurotypical of all of us, blessed with a height and presence that made him impossible to ignore, he set an example of genuine friendship and loving acceptance of every student in the class. That was just his natural way; it was who he was as a person, tirelessly imbued with a certain welcoming radiance that made room for everyone, that acknowledged everyone where they were, whoever they were, the same way our teachers had come to meet us in our own territory.

My happiest memories of my childhood all involve Arts Based School, and the happiest memories from school all involve Nate. I was naturally gifted as an actor, and so was he; we were often cast together in opposite leading roles. Memory is so strange. Mind is so strange—all my life, since I first met Nate and acted with him, I’ve been able to recall with perfect clarity his voice delivering certain lines from the many shows we did together. His inflection, his cadence, the words—they’ve all remained with me, as sharp and clear as if I were hearing them in the present, not thirty years in the past. And I can still feel what it was like to stand beside him on the stage, to draft off his confidence and his presence the way birds in their arrowhead flocks draft off of one another’s wings. The lights hot and blinding, our marks indicated with white Xes on the black, black stage. Nate in a spotlight, isolated against the dark, delivering a monologue to a rapt and unseen audience that he’d captured and held as easily as he always did.

It’s all still so vivid to me and so pure in my recollection. The experience has concresced itself, has made itself permanent in the matter of my very self. It makes me wonder, like I always wonder: what is memory, what is mind? Where does it begin and end, and where does it reside? In our brains, conventional wisdom would have us believe. But a 2008 entomological study proved that although the caterpillar in its chrysalis undergoes a complete deconstruction—its entire body is taken apart, nervous system and all, the proteins used as building blocks to create a whole new entity—its memory remains intact. Memory and mind are not inside us, not solely reliant on the physical substance of a mortal body. They exist somewhere outside us, or around us, like the smell of violets lifting from a grave. And I wonder now if Nate—his mind, his spirit, whatever generates the electricity that animates the physical substance of self—I wonder if he’s still here, somehow, with all of us who remember him. With everyone who ever stood beside him, hearing him laugh and speak, with all of us who had the rare privilege of feeling his generous and unfailing love.

Years ago, when I was still early in my writing career and Paul and I were living at the cottage full-time, we rented part of our home on Airbnb to help make ends meet. On an afternoon in late May, I’d finished my writing and had just begun to work outside. I’m still on a quest to turn the entire acre from grass to a four-season cottage garden; this will probably take the rest of my life to accomplish, since I do everything by hand, from digging new beds to watering my plants. I looked up from my task (weaving the pieces of grapevine I’d cut into a wattle edging) and found the guest who’d been staying in our side apartment approaching me with a tentative, apologetic expression. I took the earbuds out of my ears and smiled at her.

“I was just wondering,” she said, “if you’d go for a walk with me.”

It was such an unusual request. I didn’t particularly want to go for a walk that afternoon. I’d seen every inch of our small island a hundred times over and the garden is always my most pressing project. But I have cultivated a lifelong habit of saying yes to unusual requests. They nearly always lead to interesting experiences that metamorphose, in turn, into great stories, and because stories are my stock in trade, I feel I can’t pass up any opportunity to glean new insights and narratives.

So I agreed, and my guest said—more timidly than before—“I’d really like to go down to that graveyard I saw. If that’s okay with you.”

I don’t remember what we talked about on the walk to the graveyard. Small, inconsequential things, which are often the most beautiful things in a life. She told me her name was Shannon, and she talked for a while about her son, who was about my age, she said, and who’d paid for her to come and stay here because she had always wanted to see the San Juan Islands.

When we arrived at the graveyard, I held the gate open for her, and as she passed inside, she told me lightly, “I’ve got stage four cancer. I’m probably going to die soon. I saw you out in your garden and something just told me you’re the kind of person I can talk to about things like this.”

I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t marvel a little, in that moment, at the funny way the universe has of bringing the right people together at the right time. The book I’d been working on for weeks was Blackbird, my offering to a damaged world, my small but earnest attempt to help heal this hysterical fear and denial of death that pervades western culture. I didn’t tell her about my book; I didn’t want to make the moment about me. Instead, I saw it as an opportunity to test-drive some of the ideas I’d put into the novel. We walked among the old graves, beautified by moss and poppies and columbines. We sat on a stone wall beneath the big maple tree, and looked out across the valley, where the evening’s mist had already begun to creep in from False Bay and gather in the low, blue places.

I told Shannon that I don’t have very conventional ideas about death and self and what happens to a self after the body stops working. I told her that I do believe in an existence of sorts that carries on after death, but my ideas and assumptions about what happens to the spirit, the essence of a person, don’t bear much resemblance to the standard notions of an afterlife.

“I want to know what you think about it, anyway,” she said.

“I don’t believe in Heaven,” I told her. “I don’t think the self we know during mortal life carries on in one piece after death—I mean, I don’t think that I will still be floating around out there somewhere after I die. But I do believe that We go on. I think death is like waking up and remember who you really are. Like shaking off a dream and taking up where your life left off before you went to sleep. I think when we die, we become aware again of who We really are: the One Mind; a single, many-faceted consciousness; the source of all mind, which some people might call God, but it doesn’t bear much resemblance, either, to the ideas about God you’ll find in any religion.”

She sat in silence for a while. Down in the valley where the mist was moving, the cattle called, distant and small.

“I like that,” she finally said. “I think there’s some beauty in that idea. I like the idea of waking up and becoming what you were before. But who can really know?”

“Who can really know?” I agreed. “That’s what makes death so beautiful. It’s the answer to a question we wonder about all our lives. We finally find out the answer, in the Big Moment, and it’s an answer just for us; we can’t come back and tell anyone else about it. It’s something only we get to know.”

We got up and walked again, through the graves that had been there, marking the memories of the dead, since long before Shannon or I had existed. I showed her all the flowers, how they cast their seeds from the places where they’d been planted to all the other graves, and all the spaces between. I showed her how much love there was to be found in an old cemetery, how love is the quietly immortal thing, the seed that puts out its roots to flourish, and to cast out more seeds in turn, so it moves from here down into the valley to the places where the cattle are calling.

She made me a gift before she checked out of the Airbnb: moss bound by thread to a piece of driftwood. I put it in my garden, and the moss is still growing, all these years later.

As I was packing my suitcase to leave Victoria and come to Nate’s funeral, I got a text from my friend Devin.

“Oh, god,” I said to Paul. “Devin’s brother died.”

Paul looked up from whatever he’d been doing. His face, which still looked to me—will always look—as young as he was at twenty-eight, when we started dating, was stricken and drawn and aged by the force of a revelation.

“Is this just where we’re at now?” he said. “Is this the way it’s going to be from now on—people we know dying?”

“Yeah,” I said.

What else could I say? This is the age. Time doesn’t stop moving. Life doesn’t stop moving. Only memory stands still.

I found out about Nate’s death because I chanced to log into Facebook, which I almost never do. I don’t remember now what reason I had for logging in—probably trying to verify the date of some long-past event. The news that my friend had died when he was only forty-five years old made me angry at first—furious—not angry at what had happened or at death itself but just mad. I was cranky and unbearable for days after. My fuse was way too short; the smallest things would provoke me into fits of temper, and though I knew I was being a real pain in the ass to Paul and everyone else, I couldn’t seem to rein myself in. Nate and I had just reconnected weeks before. We’d been joyfully planning a reunion for our Arts Based School classmates, to take place in the fall. And now, suddenly, rudely, without my consent, I was living in a different world. A world without my friend in it.

I didn’t cry, though—not really. The tears didn’t come until a few days before the funeral. I visited the cottage first for some much-needed private time, just me and my garden and house itself. As I always do when I visit the cottage, I walked down to the graveyard to cast my thoughts out into the silence.

It wasn’t until I was walking among the dead that it finally struck me: now Nate was there, too, in that plane—wherever it is, wherever the dead go. He had crossed the threshold of the great, private mystery. He’d taken all the things that Nate had experienced and learned and created, all the laughter and the welcome, all the love and friendship, and all the suffering and hardship, too, that come to any life. He’d brought them all back to the Source, the Great One which seeks to know All by being All. His work was done, so he closed his eyes and he woke up, like everyone else in the graveyard had done. And all that he’d been here, among the living, was spreading outward now, from the places where he’d been, from the hearts and hands and the perfect memories of all those who’d known him. I was overwhelmed, in that moment, by the most profound gratitude I’ve ever known. How lucky am I, that I got to be one of those people, that out of all friends I could have had in this world, and all the funny combinations of time and space and chance that conspire together to make relationships between human souls, I was one of those who got to know and love that sweet, talented boy—that good-hearted, loving man, whose heart was such a perfect reflection of the Christ he had revered. I could still hear his laugh—his loud, wild laugh—and even the lines he’d delivered on stage. I could feel him at my side as if neither of us had left those years we’d spent together. And all the tears I hadn’t shed before came, and they were sweet, and comforting, because they were tears of gratitude, not of loss.

At the edge of the graveyard there’s a labyrinth mown into the grass, and as I walked its course, I replayed every memory I could conjure up of Nate and all the things we’d done together. The path carried me around and around its central point, closer to the middle and away again, from one edge of the circle to another, through every part of the circle’s interior before I finally reached the great white stone at its center. And just as I arrived at the center of the labyrinth, the church bells began to ring. I sat on the stone and watched the sun set, and I marked the passing of time in the tolling of the hours, and though many ghosts crossed my path, I looked on all of them with love—the ones I knew and the ones I didn’t, the ones whose bodies had long since returned to the earth to be taken up into the trees whose new summer leaves were moving in the wind, moving to the sound of the bells.

Nate’s funeral was as full of joy and laughter (and Ghostbusters) as his life had been. Many of my old friends from Arts Based School were there, and after we’d all taken our turns at the podium, sharing our happiest memories of Nate and sharing the love that endures, we stood in the parking lot of the church, in the gathering dusk, laughing over how old we were all getting now, commiserating over all the ways our health was failing.

“Is it a privilege to get old,” Scott asked, “or did Nate outsmart us by checking out early?”

I felt such tenderness for all of us—for the lines around our eyes and our graying hair, for the same personalities I could still see so clearly under our aging exteriors—the youthful energy, these minds that were the same minds I’d known as a child. There’s a beauty in shared grief that doesn’t occur elsewhere in a lifetime of experience. Only a common loss can bring the widely separated so closely together, and bind us so tightly, even if only for a single night before we go our separate ways again, back to the lives we’ve built without one another.

After the funeral, I returned home feeling so much love and compassion for these people who’ve been beside me on life’s road for so long. All of my old classmates have, of course, had as many triumphs and heartbreaks and struggles and moments of transcendent happiness as I have had. And we’re at the age now, all of us, when these things begin to happen. Someone in every group of friends has to be the first to die, the first to leave the communal and familiar path to strike out across the threshold of the one true mystery. You don’t realize you’ve been wondering for years who will be the first to go until someone actually goes. And then you look at your friends, who are still vibrant and beautiful children in your eyes, and you wonder who will be next. Maybe you; no one can say. No one knows what sudden forks and branchings the road will take, and we all must walk the path we find below our feet.

But someday, we will all be gone. That is a given. If we’ve lived our lives well, there will be violets or snowdrops planted on our graves, and memories that persist in other hearts and other minds—memories that replay as vividly as if our moments never ended. And each spring, the trees in the graveyard will flower. Their roots will drink deep of the dead.