A eulogy, of sorts

My dad called me Friday morning to tell me that one of my high school classmates had passed away. So I took off work early and drove home to Alabama so I could go to the funeral Saturday morning. I hadn’t seen Ben in several years, and I had probably only seen him once or twice since I graduated high school. I’d known him since we were about four, I think. His parents live a couple of blocks away from my parents, so we grew up in the same neighborhood. When I started preschool, he was in kindergarten at Donoho, so he was in my class when I was moved up over Christmas break. Or maybe he started in first grade. He stayed at Donoho for several years, but I think I remember his parents sending him to a different school for a few years, probably Sacred Heart. He came back in middle school, though, and stayed at Donoho until our senior year, when he dropped out a month or so before graduation to get his GED. He went to Alabama on a Blount scholarship (kind of like an honors scholarship) for a year or two, I think.

I didn’t hear much about him during that period, but at the beginning of my senior year in college, he landed in the ICU because his pancreas failed. He was living in Anniston, and he had to be airlifted from Regional Medical Center in Anniston to the UAB medical complex in Birmingham so he could get the best care. He had already been in and out of rehab a few times, and after he got better, he went straight back in. If I’m remembering this right, I was told at the time by a mutual friend that if he went back to drinking or using drugs, he could pretty much kill himself instantly. It’s always sounded a little like an urban myth to me. I don’t know if that’s what happened; I don’t know what happened at all, just that he’s gone.

I’m sad about it, but not terribly upset. It was a shock to hear, but after a moment, not that surprising. I feel terrible for his family. His parents are kinda crazy but nice people, and his sister was a friend of mine at one point. Going to the funeral was odd; in a way, it felt like I was posing a little bit. Few of my classmates showed up, and I was never close to Ben. Most of the people there were friends of his parents, not friends of his. I saw a few people I knew from high school, some friends, some not. It’s hard to talk about, not because I’m upset, but because whatever memories I have of him are so far in the past, I can’t trust them at all. The more I search, the harder it becomes to know if I’m remembering him correctly. I can’t tell you about the person he was. My high school experience was so strange in that way; it’s amazing how much I knew about my classmates and how little at the same time. There were about 45 of us that graduated together, and half that number had been at Donoho since kindergarten. I knew parents, brothers, sisters, what kind of grades people made, what clubs they were in, who they were friends with in first, third, sixth, eighth, twelfth grade, what sports they played, whether their parents were divorced, where they lived, where they were from, and how much money their parents made (well, a vague estimate). But I probably never actually exchanged words with half of my class during our entire high school experience. I certainly never had any idea of what their internal lives might have been like. Even to claim that Ben was a friend of mine seems like a lie. Any explanation I give of the circumstances that led to his death, and any description of my relationship with him, seems false.

I remember bits and pieces from high school. Ben was always smart, but he put forth little effort in class. He could ace standardized tests but never turned in his homework. He played several different instruments and started a band with several of our classmates. I remember seeing them play at a fund raiser for his church, Grace Episcopal, the same one at which his funeral was held. I could tell you about the day Ben got fed up with school our junior year and just walked off campus in the middle of the day. As our school property had been blasted into the side of a hill, and there was no way off the property but a very narrow road that was dangerous to drive on, much less walk, this was a little more radical than it might seem to someone unfamiliar with the property. He got about two miles towards downtown Anniston when some of our classmates saw him walking along while they were off campus for lunch. They picked him up and brought him back, and he got suspended for a couple of days. Is this an adequate depiction of the person Ben was? How can one instance stand in for a whole life? And why this one, and why should I be the one telling it? Does this not say more about me, that I remember a moment when Ben “got fed up with school?” Was that really what happened? Or did he have a fight with his parents, or with his girlfriend? Was it something else all together?

In my head, Ben was a person who had almost no tolerance for any kind of institutional hypocrisy, and the good lord knows our high school was full of it. I remember him as having contempt for our teachers when they asked us to do assignments he considered stupid. Or am I just remembering what I thought, and attributing that to him? I secretly admired him for being willing to talk back, even when it got him in trouble. I saw him as being able to do and say things that I thought, but never would have uttered. Is that really what he was like, or has time and my own inability to see past the end of my own nose during that time (and arguably now) simply turned him into a symbol of my own frustrations?

Or have I just read Absalom, Absalom! one too many times?