Tom Mandel 1946-1995

I can never remember exactly when it was that Tom died. Sometime around this time in April, sometime in the mid-1990s.

Tom and I were Best Friends during a very difficult two year period of my life that culminated with meeting and running off with Ben.

At the beginning of my friendship with Tom, there was some speculation as to whether I was going to run off with him. I nipped that one in the bud though it wasn’t for lack of attraction: Tom was really fucked up where women were concerned; he could only sustain romantic attraction in a woman who was actively rejecting him. (Mere indifference didn’t count.) I knew that if I started going out with him, if I slept with him, he would dump me just like that. By remaining merely friends with him – Best Friends, true, but ever constrained by that definition – we could have endless conversations about philosophy and politics – Tom was a conservative in the William F. Buckley mode and back then, I was a knee-jerk radical. Plus I could sustain the romantic frisson between us and blow on it whenever things started to get boring.

April Grey held a baby shower for me when I was pregnant with Robin. Tom told me he would not be able to attend – he was going to France instead.

“Well, I suppose that’s a valid excuse,” I told him.

So I was quite surprised when he walked through April’s door. “I came because – well I knew you’d be here. Had to tell you in person. Hate to spoil your fun, but I’ve had some rather bad news. I’ve just been diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer.”

Six months later he was dead.

He was the first person I’d ever known intimately who died. What surprised me most about his death was how little I felt. I wasn’t numb – I honestly didn’t feel any grief. And this was tremendously shocking because I deeply loved Tom but also because I have all those abandonment issues.

During those last six months I’d acted as his medical liaison – drving down to Palo Alto two or three days a week so I could go with him to his chemotherapy sessions and his doctors’ appointments, carefully taking notes so that I could translate them for Tom: you may have thought you heard this, but you really heard this. His prognosis was very, very poor and the chemotherapy made him very, very sick. If it were me, I thought, I’d accept the fact that I was going to die. But, of course, it was not me and who the hell knows how they’ll behave if Death is the bill collector knocking at their door?



He married Nana on his deathbed. She was not the most fickle and cruel of the women who’d rejected him; she genuinely loved him, it was only after he behaved like an asshole that she turned fickle and cruel. Nana and I together watched over his bedside the night he died. The only sound was his laborious breathing and the beeping sound his morphine drip made when the intravenous saline bag needed to be changed. But I told the people at Time Magazine that he died listening to Beethoven’s 9th Symphony – he would have liked that.

For years after he died I… felt him. A beneficent presence at my side or hovering just above me, I dunno. When my mother died a few years later, I never felt her at all. We had as little real connection in death as we’d had in life. Her last words were, “I am not a bad girl!” His last words were, “I’ve taken care of you –“ as indeed he had: I owed that job at People Magazine totally to Tom.

I often look around at this not so very brave new world, Facebook and cybermalls and behavioral malls, wishing Tom were around so I could talk with him about it. And once a year on whatever day in early April I’ve dubbed the anniversary of his death, I go out to a bar, order a shot of Laguvulin – single malt o’ the gods! – and raise the glass to him.