Surprises

He died last night.

The husband and I take a walk around the neighborhood every evening. It's our post-dinner constitutional. As we were walking back into the Cake Eater Alleyway from our walk, we ran into our ex-hippie neighbor, of whom we're very fond, and we chatted about the wild thunderstorm that passed through this afternoon. In the background, I saw that our other neighbor---Eric, the landlord's roommate---was fiddling around with his car, which hasn't been around the house for the past couple of days. Or at least I thought it was him. There was a fair amount of hair on him, and that didn't ring quite right, because the last time I'd seen him, he was completely bald. But, I thought, it had to be him. It was the same color hair, and if you can lose your hair that quickly, well you can get it back at the same rate, right? It seemed logical at the time. We said goodbye to one neighbor and walked up to the house, greeting another neighbor, readying ourselves for yet another neighborly conversation. After all, this is what you do on summer nights when you live in Minnesota. The weather will turn to shit soon enough, and you won't see your neighbors for six months because no one wants to spend any time outside then. We all hibernate here during the winter, so you work on your relationships when the weather's warm.

Well, it wasn't him. And it wasn't the conversation we expected to have.

It was his brother, who looks an awful lot like him. He introduced himself and then and he had the unfortunate task of letting us know that Eric had passed away last night. He'd been in the hospital for the past few days, dealing with complications due to the round of chemo that he was on for the testicular cancer. He'd been doing fine with the chemo, which he started at the beginning of last month. The husband chatted with him last week and while Eric had said he'd had twenty treatments in the last two weeks, he was hanging in there. He was doing all right, that he was going to beat this. He was even going to work every now and again. He worked at a bank and his co-workers had decorated his car with get well messages soaped across the windows, like people do when someone gets married.

The get well messages were still on the car this evening as his brother and his brother's fiancee packed up some of his belongings. Eric's originally from Ohio. I assume that's where they're from as well. It never came up in the course of conversation.

I didn't know him well enough to be upset over his death, but I'm still very sorry that he's gone. He was a nice guy and he didn't deserve to die. I respected him for his upbeat attitude. He wasn't shy about letting anyone know what was going on. The first conversation I ever had with him was a few days before he went in for surgery. We hadn't met yet. At that point, he was just "the roommate," and was, for me---as a person who's lived in this house for more than five years and has seen people come and go---someone I had yet to meet. It was dark outside and I was walking back into the house, and he walked in right after me, startling me because I hadn't seen him. He introduced himself and then he apologized over and over for scaring me. He was so sweet in his earnestness. We found a few days later about his surgery and thereafter every conversation was flavored with information about his cancer. He wanted to let us know how he was doing, in case we were afraid to ask. He wasn't ashamed that he had cancer---and testicular cancer at that, which is not something I wouldn't think you'd want to advertise if you were a man. He was always talking about how he was going to beat it, and while it was apparent he wasn't pleased about some of the treatments he was going to have to endure, he was going to endure them nonetheless. Because, of course, he wanted to live.

It's just so bloody sad that he's died. If anyone had the right attitude, it was him.

The memorial service is on Friday and, of course, we'll go. It's something of a milestone: this will be the first memorial service I will have attended for someone I know in the Twin Cities since I moved here nine years ago. I said when I lived in Des Moines and I attended the funeral of a co-worker's husband that, ahem, it was time to move: someone we knew had died. It was an odd sort of a fringe benefit when you move somewhere new: when you're new in town, funerals aren't a part of your regular schedule of activities. It does take time to meet and make friends with people when you're new to town. If I still lived in Omaha, I'd probably be going to funerals and wakes on a regular basis simply because that's just the way things work in your hometown. You know people all your life, and then they die. You go to either their wake or their funeral, depending upon your closeness, and pay your respects. You look at the obituary section of the paper every day. I can't tell you when the last time I looked at the obits was.

It's a common thing, death. As common as birth. As common as all the happy things that can happen to you in a lifetime. I think we all forget that sometimes.I know I have. It never occurred to me tonight that Eric's brother was going to tell us that he'd died.

I just hope Eric is somewhere happy and that he's free of pain and cancer.

Posted by Kathy at August 9, 2005 10:30 PM | TrackBack