When you’re young, the last thing you expect of your friends is that they’ll die.
It happens – auto accidents, childhood cancer, that sort of thing – but when it does, it’s nearly always a shock.
When we lose friends as kids, it’s nearly always because they move away. I lost two best friends at age 10 and 15 when their fathers were transferred by their companies.
I never had any contact with either of them after that.
But I was very fortunate to make friendships in my teens and early 20s that have lasted until the present.
That’s a long time. My oldest friendship from that period goes back 57 years, the youngest 47 years. Two have been fairly continuous and two have had long gaps. At least now, I am in contact with all four on Facebook.
I had a fifth friend from that time, but he died unexpectedly four years ago.
Unexpectedly is a good word for it. About two months before his 65th birthday, just a few months after retiring, my friend Tom died after complications from a brain aneurysm.
He had been living in Denver, where he spent a quarter of a century working as a sportswriter for the Denver Post. I had actually helped him get his job there, putting him in touch with the sports editor.
It had been a long time since I had seen him, but he covered the NCAA men’s basketball Final Four in Atlanta in April 2013 and we met for lunch the day after the championship game.
There was a great irony. Both of us had aged enough that we didn’t really recognize each other at first. Tom looked a lot like his late father, who had been an Air Force test pilot. God only knows who I looked like.
We had lunch together. I don’t really remember what we talked about, and I don’t remember if we ever talked on the phone after that.
But three years later, I got a call from my friend Mick. He had been Tom’s next-door neighbor growing up in Virginia and they were also friends. He told me Tom had an aneurysm and was in the hospital.
It took him more than a week to die, and there had been once or twice during that time when there was reason for optimism.
I flew to Denver for his funeral and met his wife Pam for the first time. Love had come late to my friend, and he had been very happy in his later years. I hadn’t seen Mick – my closest friend for half a century – since leaving California six years before.
Coming to Denver had been difficult. My wife Nicole had been ill, so being away for a few days wasn’t really an option. I had caught a flight out of Atlanta at 7 a.m. and my return flight from Denver got me back by 6 a.m. the next day.
Shortest long trip of my life.
It took me a long time to get over Tom’s death. Heck, I still miss him.
It’s odd. We don’t really make good friends in middle age or later. We don’t have the time to build friendships, but I had made another friendship through my college fraternity and Facebook.
Brandt was a member of my chapter of Sigma Phi Epsilon years after I was there. He was a great guy, a beloved friend to many other members of our chapter and I grew to like him through contact on Facebook.
We met in October 2017 at our fraternity’s annual golf outing. I was in Virginia for the 50th reunion of my high school graduating class, and the two things were happening the same weekend.
He was 13 years younger than me, but we had a lot in common. We became closer friends after actually meeting. Then, completely out of the blue, on March 1 of this year, I got the news that Brandt had died.
Complications from heart trouble and diabetes.
He was 56 years old.
I lost another friend a couple of months later when my brother in law Marty died after an 18-month battle with cancer. Truly heartbreaking for my sister and her two young sons.
The three deaths — Tom, Brandt and Marty – all had one thing in common. All were younger than me, two of them more than 10 years younger.
Those are the deaths you don’t expect. It didn’t surprise me when my dad died in 2008 after a long illness at 82, or when my friend Walter died that same year at 87.
I’m 70 now, and there aren’t that many people in my life older. My friend Gary – my longest friendship – is a year older than I am, and my mother is 93. My aunt, my dad’s sister is in her late 80s, and I have two sisters-in-law and one brother-in law in France who are all older than I am.
One of my favorite movies is “Bang the Drum Slowly,” a baseball movie about one player doing what he can to protect a slowly dying teammate. When the rest of the team learns the situation, they become nicer to the victim.
His response is, “Everybody would be nice to you if they knew you were dying.”
The other player’s response: “Everybody knows everybody is dying; that’s why people are as good as they are.”
But maybe the best exchange of all comes from the movie “Tombstone,” where a dying Doc Holliday gets out of his sickbed to help Wyatt Earp in a gunfight Earp can’t win.
Jack Johnson says to him, “Doc, you oughta be in bed. What the hell are you goin’ this for?”
Holliday replies, “Wyatt Earp is my friend.”
“Hell,” Johnson says. “I got lots of friends.”
Holliday replies, “I don’t.”
That pretty much says it all.