Dave would have enjoyed his funeral

There’s a defibrillator just outside the door to the funeral home chapel and I'm thinking, “If Dave was here, he’d point at it and say, ‘Too late.’” Dave’s the guest of honor, though, and our opportunity to sit in the back row and crack each other up is gone for good.

So, I had no one to share with after a mourner thanked me for coming and I said, “I wouldn’t miss it for the world,” like it was my kid’s wedding or something. I couldn’t nudge someone and tell them to make a note when there was a part of the eulogy they could also use for me. After overpaying to pre-plan my own going-away party, I couldn’t berate Dave for choosing the simplest of pine boxes and making me look like a show-off. I don’t know how this sounds online, but we’d have been laughing hard enough to get thrown out of the service if it had been Dave and I in the back row.

Actually, I should call him David, since that’s what everyone else was calling him in their eulogies. I don’t think I ever called him anything but Dave over the 30+ years we were friends, but I didn’t know him as well as I thought. That’s a constant, though. No matter how long you’ve known someone, you find out a million things about them at their funeral that make you wonder whether you’re in the wrong room.

He liked one of my favorite books, Confederacy of Dunces, apparently, but that never came up in a conversation. Apparently, we also skipped the details of his early years or some of his major challenges in life. Maybe that’s because they weren’t funny, and Dave was big on funny.

Or, maybe it’s because we all live in multiple worlds that only collide at our funerals and that wasn’t the part of Dave’s world that I inhabited. The two of us lived in the world of shtick, one-upping each other on old stories where he always had a crazier tale to tell. We even wrote and produced a play, which was such a smash hit that three people have heard of it. Yes, two are spouses, but that third guy is really influential.

Dave is the latest in a long line of people I knew well and didn’t. Alan and I were friends for 60 years, transitioning from grade school through high school and college, marriage, children and careers. After all that time, all those years, people I met after he died introduced me to a dozen facets I’d never seen. Jeff and I shared way too many drinks on the deck, traded old jokes, commiserated about life and took turns being the biggest loser at our monthly poker games, but I had to wait until his funeral to learn new details about my friend and neighbor. And on it goes.

Each of us inhabits separate worlds for family, for work, for hobbies, for people we knew in grade school or high school or college, and down the line until we’re all interplanetary travelers with multiple lives that we cannot share in total. Still, there is a world that we did share and, when a longtime friend passes on, a piece of that world disappears. Old friends are witnesses to our lives, testifying to the reality of our existence. Without their confirmation, we’re just a bunch of old guys in the park, rambling about stuff that might or might not be real.

I guess I could try to learn more about people I’ll meet in the future, but it’s already too late for me to start up any 30-year relationships. Maybe I should pay more attention to the ones I have already, before somebody is staring at the defibrillator outside the chapel and thinking, “Too late.” Again.

Next week, we'll focus on a different guest of honor as we share a few lessons from my dad's life on his 100th birthday. We'll all learn something, but only if we subscribe.

---