The passing of a friend

Drew Cotten left our world behind on Thursday April 24, 2007.  He died from a sudden heart attack while getting ready for work.  He was a generous, loving, and wonderful man.  His life is a reminder of the beauty life offers us and his passing is a reminder of its fragility.

The last time I saw Drew was two days before his death.  It was a Tuesday night and my friends and I gathered at the Lavaca Street Bar for the weekly shuffleboard tournament, a ritual I have been participating in for three years.  My former roommate Adam and I had begun the tradition in our early post-college years, daring to take on the veterans (or "old guys") that had ruled the table for years.  Drew was one of the finer players in their league, and one of the most welcoming.  I remember week after week of losing to him and his partner Calvin and how they never remembered our names until we beat them one fateful Tuesday.  From then on we were members of the club and our team's moniker was simply "the youngbloods."  Every week Drew was at Lavaca, even after many of the other senior players began to attend less often due to marriage, work, or just being tired.  The game was a kind of religion for Drew, the tournament his weekly mass.  His appreciation for a well-played game with a close score (regardless of which end of it he ended up at) was touching, even inspirational.  At the end of his life, Drew was the finest player at the bar.  He had made an art of curving the puck into the impossible edges of the right side, and he could knock your hanger off the end no matter how many blockers you had. 

But I'm not writing to memorialize Drew as a shuffleboard player.

On that final Tuesday, Brett and I had beaten Drew and Calvin in the tournament's final.  They accepted defeat well and we shook hands and it was not a particularly well-played game but we were glad to have won.  It was another week of shuffleboard and there would be others.  We would most likely lose to them next week, and if not that week then the week after.  The last time I saw Drew he was paying his bill at the end of the bar and we smiled and very casually said our good-byes and that we see each other next week.  I'm not sure if we even said that we would see each other again because it was so well understood.  We parted not with dismissiveness but with the ease that accompanies all of our daily lives.  We look at one another and we look into each others eyes and we see very little outside of the immediacy of the moment.  We take comfort in the presence of friends but we do not understand the depth of that comfort, at least not until it has been stripped away without warning.

It's difficult to put into words the impact that learning of Drew's death had on me.  Perhaps because it's difficult to understand at all.  Drew was a friend whose friendship I never thought through or took the time to understand.  We respected each other and shared many laughs and many good moments and a few angry ones.  But there was always the presupposition that there were many more moments ahead and if either of us knew the other one planned to depart then surely the final meeting would have been a special one.  In many ways Drew is a close friend that I never realized I had.  But I miss him like hell now that he's gone.  For almost three years I did not know his last name.  Our conversations at the bar were usually impersonal and about sports, or something small about our jobs, or about a good looking woman.  It was not that our friendship did not permit a more personal conversation, but it was simply never needed.  Lavaca was a kind of escape that, whether you were drinking alcohol that night or not, took you away from such things.  I remember when Drew's engagement was broken off and how hard it was on him and I remember the excitement he showed when starting a new business only weeks before he passed.

Drew's death presented itself to me as a sudden and poignant example of life's absurdity and the impermanence of beauty.  It betrayed my constructed understanding of the everyday.  I could not make sense of it.  I am left remembering the words of the fallen Japanese soldier in THE THIN RED LINE:

Are you righteous, kind?  Does your confidence lie in this?  Are you loved by all?  Know that I was, too.  Do you imagine your sufferings will be less because you loved goodness, truth?

Death may take us all.  But Drew's life and its tragically premature end should not leave us searching for answers or yearning for a reason behind it all.  We must remember the unquestioning love Drew had for life and the friendships it granted him.  We must remember that the absurdity of life and death does not diminish the beauty of it.  We should not question our sadness at Drew's passing nor should we allow it to cloud our memory of him.  It is easy for us to slip through life and allow its realities to render us coarse and hardened in an attempt to shield ourselves.  Emerson wrote:

The Indian who was laid under a curse, that the wind should not blow on him, nor water flow to him, nor fire burn him, is a type of us all.  The dearest events are summer-rain, and we the Para coats that shed every drop.

Drew would not want us to clutch our jackets tight and protect ourselves from life's splendor or its pains.  "Grief too will make us idealists."  His death is a call to remember the majesty of each moment and to not let them slip away the way I let the final time I saw him become so casual and inconsequential.  The universe offers itself to us at every turn; it is not ours to make but ours to experience.  Drew knew this in his heart whether he spoke it or not.  He loved us all in the same silent way and we loved him.

You were the best, Drew.

*** 

That night Brett and I stayed out late and drank heavily and played shuffleboard to honor Drew.  The light from the neon and candles was a special glow that once was endearingly obscene but now was beautiful.  I was imperfect with my throws but played well enough to win and make things interesting.  Brett had become very good at the game.  It may be because he played against Drew almost every week.  I walked through the torrential April rain and my jeans dragged on the ground.  The lightning was harsh and the thunder was loud.  Brett's car was not in the same garage as mine.  We parted and I yelled that I loved him, man.  I said it jokingly but was mostly serious and he knew I meant it.  He walked underneath the street lights with his dancing gait and in his silly jacket and his floppy hat.  He disappeared into the night and I took shelter underneath an awning on the side of a building.  The rain kept coming and coming and even under the awning I got soaked.  I watched the rain for a few moments that stretched into a long unending daze and held my breath and exhaled and the storm was strange and beautiful and too miraculous to be so powerful on the same night that a friend was laid to rest.  I ran and I ran through the streets and puddles and running water and I ran my way into the garage and it was stone and silent but for the distant sound of the rain on the walls and the rumble of thunder and I drove home through it all, curling myself into bed next to Alli and her warmth and crying myself to sleep but somewhere inside I was still running.