Death of a Friend
Cats: Personal, Friends|A childhood friend, the son of close friends of the family, died on Monday. He is only 2 years older than me–just 32. I didn’t spend half as much time with him as I should have, but any time he saw me he was the nicest guy in the world to me. He used to hang out with the kind of people that no doubt made fun of me when I wasn’t around, but he was the kind of guy who would have defended me to them, for no reason other than he was a good kid.
He was a good kid. It’s the worst possible torture to be required to speak about someone in the past tense. It means he’s really gone. In a more trivial sense, I think about that when I talk to people at my job who’ve just totaled their car, and I’m probably the first person to ask them questions like “How many miles did you have on it?” or “What color was it?” and using past tense carries such finality. That, for a linguist (and son of a funeral director), is what makes death real to me…when I talk about someone in the past tense. It means they are no longer in the present, and they will never, ever again, have a future.
