Who By Fire

I went to my 25^thcollege reunion last weekend – I reluctantly signed up for one event, leery of the pompous middle-aged people my Harvard classmates had undoubtedly become and convinced I remembered no one and nothing of my undergraduate experience. 

But I stayed past midnight Thursday, and stopped in Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Twenty-five years out, life has bruised us all in some way, and we are more secure in who we are. It makes for better conversations than the exchange of resumes I recall from the only other reunion I attended, 5 or 10 years out. I talked to a friend of a friend who is a psychiatrist and whose own partner developed debilitating mental illness six years into their relationship. I talked to a classmate who said his work as a rabbi calls him to help people in the best and worst moments of their lives, and most of the time he can do little but be present and open. I learned another friend had grown up in a magic-show cult.  

I learned that 22 of our classmates had died. That’s only about 1 percent of our class – but each is a world entire to their beloveds. “Who did you come for?” a friend asked me following a Sunday morning memorial for our deceased classmates. 

I hesitated. I had come, in part, for Nick. He had been my housemate at the Dudley Co-op. The co-op was comprised of two wooden houses off campus that sheltered 33 of us who for one reason or another orbited askew of Harvard’s arc. The co-op was a place where I overheard this snippet at dinner: "All heterosexuals must be closed-minded, I mean, there's no other explanation." A homeless recovering alcoholic from Australia named Johnnie Walker lived on a cot in the basement and ate his meals with us. Because of course. Alaskans might understand it this way: the co-op is to Harvard as Alaska is to the United States. Apparently I like weird people.   

Nick was quiet and mousy, and I remember the wild-eyed look he gave me after we escaped our burning three-story wooden house at 2am one January morning my senior year after someone fell asleep with lit candles in her bookshelf. The next day, the university found us housing in a freshman dorm and gave us 15 minutes to enter the partially charred and stinking carcass of our home to collect our personal effects for an expected month. “Do you think they looked in our rooms?” Nick asked me, panicked. While I grabbed what I’d need to get through exam period, Nick was hastily deconstructing the marijuana grow operation I hadn’t known existed in his second-floor bedroom.

I attended the memorial for Nick. I also went because I’d heard my old friend Marc would be playing music with members of his college band, The Press. Once a groupie, always a groupie. Marc wrote and directed a totally wacky rock opera our senior year, “The Prophet and the Janitor,” and he overlooked my utter lack of talent and let me join the cast. We danced and sang in Fred-Flintstone-like outfits while fake-digging with blue plastic shovels. The music was beautiful, the "plot" inane, and the giggles endless.   

But mostly I was drawn to the memorial not for any one person but for death, for the ties between life and death, for my fascination with those ties and my reverence for ritual and remembrance. I wanted to honor the lives of those whose footprints have faded. I wanted to retrace those footprints, to listen for the echoes of the dead. Perhaps it is projection. We will all die. We all hope someone will care. 

My tears began to flow before the service began as the faces of my former classmates flashed on a screen in the entryway of Memorial Church with the dates that bracketed their lives. One died in his sleep our freshman year. How could I not remember that? Was I too busy navigating Chem 10 and roommate dynamics?  

Three others died before we graduated, including the first to die by suicide. My co-op housemate Nick died in 2016 of a fentanyl overdose. Nick was so gentle, he wanted to move softly on the earth, collected restaurant grease in New York City to convert to biofuel, installed solar panels in the Southwest. I can’t know what happened, but I imagine Nick felt the assaults against earth personally, viscerally. Or perhaps he tripped and fell into an addiction so powerful it needs no reason.  

One classmate was killed by a stray bullet walking home from a cultural festival.[1]He was a community leader, gifted and giving. One died in a collision during a mountain bike race – another co-oper whose death in 2010 I had missed. One died in a plane accident, one in a car accident. One was murdered.  

I learned about Robin Mitchell through a loving tribute by Maggie Martin. The two were the only women in our class to graduate with ROTC scholarships. Robin was a track star from a working-class community, a consummate supporter of her weaker and slower friend, a brilliant student who went on to medical school and served as chief neurosurgery resident at the time of her death. Maggie ended her remembrance saying, You’re not supposed to talk about how people died but the world needs to know Robin was murdered by her husband. I’m still so angry, Maggie said. We have to talk about domestic violence, she said. I could hardly breathe. 

We are a microcosm, my class. We die by domestic violence, by addiction, by gunshot, by accident, by cancer, by heart failure, by self-harm, by killers unknown. We are none of us immune. Leonard Cohen’s voice echoes in my head: 

And who by fire, who by water

Who in the sunshine, who in the nighttime

Who by high ordeal, who by common trial … 

And who shall I say is calling?[2]

And yet. The living. We closed the service singing U2’s “40” - I will sing, sing a new song– and walked out into the sunshine, blinking and disoriented in that nether space between death and life. I walked out of Mem Church, out of Harvard Yard, through the cringeworthy opulence of the law school to my car. I drove home, took Alder to his soccer team party, watched 11-year-old boys scream and splash in a pool, felt the very alive-ness of being. I tasted water, sun, food, drink, laughter. 

I shook off the pall of death. 

I will sing, sing a new song

I will sing, sing a new song 

How long, to sing this song…

We are always singing a new song. There is always only the present moment, each moment a new song. This is how we live with the imprint of the dead on the inside of our eyelids. This is how we honor Robin and Nick, and how I honor John and Ali. We retrace their fading footsteps and listen for their echoes while stepping into new worlds, singing new songs. This is how we find joy in the inevitable shadow of heartache.

---

[1]See Cuomo Agency Lawyer Dies a Week After Being Shot, New York Times, Sept. 16, 2015. 

[2]Who By Fire, by Leonard Cohen 

And who by fire, who by water
Who in the sunshine, who in the night time
Who by high ordeal, who by common trial
Who in your merry merry month of May
Who by very slow decay
And who shall I say is calling?

And who in her lonely slip, who by barbiturate
Who in these realms of love, who by something blunt
Who by avalanche, who by powder
Who for his greed, who for his hunger
And who shall I say is calling?

And who by brave ascent, who by accident
Who in solitude, who in this mirror
Who by his lady's command, who by his own hand
Who in mortal chains, who in power
And who shall I say is calling?

Some recent snapshots of our lives:

Rosie equally happy in a prom dress (in distinctly Juneau-like weather in Arlington)...

...and in the White Mountains.

Alder no-hand biking while I fumble-with-phone biking. Questionable, all. 

Making mosaics

Contemplating the power of the ocean, or discussing a trick-shot video on YouTube?

Some fine co-opers there, pre-reunion 

I developed a palatable gluten-free nondairy smoked salmon pasta! Nobel, please!