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Mike died around one in the morning. I was thinking he'd hold off till 3:40am, but in the end, literary closure wasn't as important to him as the family of friends that circled around him.
There are the usual postings on FB -- I woke up at 1am and I knew instantly that something had happened.
I didn't.
I've noticed before how eager people seem to have personal stake in every tragedy on the periphery of their lives. I know the sister-in-law of a guy who was marrried to a woman in the Twin Towers... But maybe I'm just being cynical. Maybe they all did wake up at 1am.
When Rena told me on the phone a week or so ago, "Mike considered you a good friend," I was a little shocked. I never figured Mike considered me one way or another, truth be told. And that's okay. There are some friendships in which reciprocity plays a role and others in which it doesn't. Some where you think, Okay! I've called the bitch three times in a row! Now, it's time for her to call me. And others where you shrug the scoreboard off because you get what you are gettting.
Mike was monstrously self-absorbed. We share that trait in common, though as a mother, I had to lose it, teach myself how to notice the people around me. Tracking for Dummies -- I could write the book.
We were both only children, raised in squalor by highly dysfunctional parents. We were both entertainment industry veterans, set adrift by the parent ship through circumstances not of our own making. At some point, Mike was considered not physically attractive enough for his anchorman post, and I was simply neither detached nor ruthless enough to be a good agent.
I once speculated to Mike that the source of his deep depression was the crash and burn of his show biz career. One can be as ambivalent as one chooses about such things -- Their values are so phoney! That world is so superficial! -- but the fact remains that working in that sphere fills one's coffers with social capital, instantly redeemable at outlets everywhere. (Is it time for me to tell you again how plain Julia Roberts is in everyday life? How impressed will you be, huh?)
He ignored my comment.
In 2010, Mike wrote:
I wonder from time to time how I will die. Car wreck? Stroke? Slow, wasting disease? With my history of high blood pressure, stroke is a likely candidate.
Being alive isn't a bad thing. But, as I've written before, it's an exercise in pointlessness. We pop into this world, stir up some shit that doesn't last, maybe do some good that doesn't last, and if we're really important, leave behind a monument that perhaps becomes a tourist attraction, but ultimately doesn't last. The whole history of mankind is nothing but the blink of an eye.
Enjoy it while you can, I guess, but it's no big deal. As I've said before, I feel like I'm stuck in an airline terminal, wandering around between flights. Yawn.
Yo, Mike! The suspense is OVER!
(He would actually find this tasteless joke very funny)
Death was Mike's teacher in a very profound way. From the moment he got sick, he was surrounded by the love of his community. That changed him. That connected him. I was so hoping that having pulled out the heavy artillary to teach him that Important Life Lesson, the universe would ease up on him, let him live another tranquil 10 years or so with his fetching hippie artist sweetie and her mischievous-eyed daughter. But no, the Universe wasn't just content to give Mike detention. It rapped Mike on the knuckles and suspended him.
I must make a pilgrimmage to the Red Cup one day.
Musee des Beaux Arts
W. H. Auden
About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
This is the poem that got me through Tom's death 18 and a half year ago. It's still the only poem that gets the true nature of suffering right in my never humble literary estimation.
