"Ever has it been that love knows not its own depth
until the hour of separation."
- Khalil Gibran
I heard yesterday, when a dear friend and high school Brother-From-Another-Mother FaceBooked me with the news. And then another of my set called to confirm what I had hoped against hope wasn't true: the first of us had passed on....
Carlyle Vincent Smith has shuffled off this mortal coil, to borrow the phrase from the Bard ... and those of us who loved him are lost in grief, struggling to wrap our heads around the extinguishment of a bright but lately distant light in our lives....
I've known Carlyle since I was eleven, when he and I were part of what turned out to be a very successful experiment indeed. The University of Detroit High School - now know as U of D Jesuit High School - had invited sixty boys to become members of the its first Jesuit Academy class. In part to part to provide spiritual, moral and academic guidance to eager and ambitious young men and in part to stave off its declining enrollment as the realities of post-riot Detroit in the mid-1970s hit it hard, very hard, ninety-eight years into its existence, U of D founded what was in effect a junior high school. And Carlyle - or C-Lyle, as he was known to us and everybody - was in its inaugural class of seventh graders. We would graduate from U of D together six years later at the dawn of a new decade and in the process grow from boys to young men and from friends to brothers for life.
In fact, Carlyle and I were not only members of U of D's class of 1980, but, together, we were one-quarter of an octet that named itself the Maniacs, an appropriately juvenile sobriquet that these many years later is actually oddly inappropriate for eight inner-city Detroit kids who all graduated from college and have a half-dozen graduate degrees and various other illustrious achievements among them. Back in the day, we liked to suggest that we were crazy and perhaps a tad dangerous, reflecting as it did at the time the need to posture protectively during that teenage crucible period in our lives, but, actually, we were a pretty straightforward, clean-cut bunch: one of our number was our class valedictorian, another won our school's Leadership Award and half of us captained one or more of U of D's athletic teams (while three of us finished second, third and fourth for the school's scholar-athlete award because, in effect, we split our classmates' votes), etc. In sum, in six critical, wonderful years together, we grew from boys to young men in whom our parents (and friends) took great pride and from hangin' buddies into life-long friends and brothers....
But I saw Carlyle only occasionally in my adult life: the vagaries of fate being what they are, we stayed in touch but only got together a handful of times independent of our sojourn back to U of D every five years for class reunions. In a phase, we were cool but not close ... and yet when we got together - as happens with all great friends of longstanding - it was as if time had not passed a moment. Whether it was just a few of us or all of us, when we were in each other's company again we were home, transported back in time to the innocence of our youth when the possibilities of the world shone brightly and lay just ahead of us for the taking.
And despite our success, we each struggled. A few years ago, at one of the lowest points in my life (working and wobbling my way through a protracted and enervating divorce, a simultaneous career transition, etc.), Carlyle came to New York City to celebrate his birthday and I agreed to meet him for a drink. Though I was really rather depressed and reclusive at the time, I couldn't pass up an opportunity to be in my dear friend's company again, a rare and treasured prospect. So I drove into the City through rush-hour traffic to experience the type of homecoming that nourishes the soul, sharing three glorious hours with my dear friend as we commiserated about the vagaries of life and celebrated our appreciable but seemingly ephemeral triumphs. And then he left to hook up with a lady friend for the evening ... and I never saw him again....
It was another glorious moment among the string of such restorative and elevating reunions over the years. In fact, just a year or two before, we had celebrated our 30th high school reunion and managed to get seven of the eight of us back together, having only managed to get all eight of us together on three occasions during those intervening three decades. (I'll own the fact that I was usually the one missing on the half-dozen or so occasions when we only managed to get seven Maniacs in a room during this time.) We were - and are - still like brothers, though life has taken us down separate and quite distinct paths.
Which is what made my quite reasonable and calm reaction to the news of Carlyle's passing a real puzzle to me yesterday. Sadly, he was the twelfth friend of mine to die this year - a mystifying, unwelcome and unprecedented experience in my life, to be sure - but, logically, one could posit that I'd developed a sort of unconscious self-protective fortitude based on my recent experience. Yet I was troubled that I wasn't more upset: yes, I was sad, but not as sad as I thought that I should be when a lifelong friend passes on....
And then it hit me: awakened involuntarily in the middle of the night - a night, ironically, before a family road trip that necessitates sufficient rest - I realize that I'm mourning my friend deeply and that the delayed reaction was just my body and mind collaborating to protect my soul. But now that it's loosed, the wound is gaping indeed. I miss my friend terribly. I regret that I was not closer to him during what I suspect neither of us realized were his last months and days. I ache for his family, as now his parents must bury their eldest child. And I grieve for what will never again be: no more Maniac reunions (like the anticipated one for our upcoming U of D reunion next year), no more deep but just a touch distant conversations with my friend who always seemed to be close but not quite fully accessible in the last decade of his life. (To put a finer point on it, in recent years, I always felt like there was more to the story that C-Lyle wasn't sharing about his life and his circumstances, a veil that no amount of loving attempts at comfort and support could pierce, which is an experience that other friends have noted as well.)
Whatever happened to my friend, I want him to know that I love him still and that his spirit will always live on through me. I will always try to be just a little bit cooler than I naturally am because of his example, a preternatural sense of self-assurance and nonchalance that made him magnetic to friends and acquaintances alike. I will always think of that laugh and of that inevitable response of "Walt, maannn, you just don't understand..." when he was trying to set me straight about something or other. And I will always wonder if there was anything else that I could have done to make his earthly life happier, as the reserve and distance in our relationship in recent years intuitively suggests to me an opportunity lost.
May God bless and keep you, C-Lyle, as you're returned to Him from whom you came. I will treasure the more than four decades of friendship and the myriad hilarious and happy memories with which you gifted me (and everyone who was privileged to know you) in your earthly life and try not to ponder what could have been. You were always the coolest ... and now the world seems just a little more stark and cold without you. So the work begins, of keeping your memory alive and aflame in our hearts to steel us for the journey ahead and help us be just that much cooler, like you, as we travel our path....
"You can love someone so much. But you can never love people as much as you can miss them."
- John Green
No comments:
Post a Comment