Think About The Way XIII

By Doctor Gonzo 

27 August 2000

Minneapolis -- "Sam Keaveny is fucking dead."

Words uttered while traveling along country road 134, near the Fingerhut Warehouse. Words incredible to hear, words that I hoped I would never hear uttered aloud with any serious. However, those words came out of the mouth of my friend Ross as we went down that road. It was an early morning in June, perhaps early Friday morning. To think back and put a precise date is somewhat difficult, because the emotions were too intense and they mess with memory. But I can still see those words and the look on Ross's face when he said them, a look hard to describe.

It was true, and it was devastating. Although I didn't know it at the time, when my pager went off around 8 PM on the night of June 6, 2000, my life was about to take a turn in a direction I could not have expected in a million years. Because I was working, it was some time before I was able to return the pages, when they became more frequent, more urgent, and from a multitude of people. Then the phone call, the shock, the numbness. Too early at the age of 22.

I am reminded of Julius Caesar as I write this: I come not to praise Sam, but to bury him. Not that he needed the latter, nor was there ever a time when he got too much of the former. In fact, dozens of phrases from novels run through my head, all of them related to the subject of death; none seem to fit. When a very close friend dies, nothing you have felt or read in the past can fully capture the new emotions. Nothing prepares you for the pain every day afterward, for the knowledge that you will never see him again. Sometimes it all seems unreal. Perhaps it is. Metaphysics, however, is lacking for a moment like this.

Sam was not an angel. Sam's epitaph will not be written in the history books. He did not find a cure for any diseases, did not lead a country, did not invent a better mousetrap. Based on what some of the people said at his wake and funeral, you almost thought that he did do all these things. I understand that people need to paint a picture for themselves that allows them to deal with death, but to canonize him so quickly is confusing. It's as if only his faults died when his heart mysteriously stopped. But that's not true. Everything else died as well.

I was glad to hear some of the stories I heard at the services, but it was unfulfilling. Almost everybody focused only on his strengths. According to most people, he had life and the world figured out. They talked about his excellent scholarship, his leadership abilities, his extroverted self. It was clear to me, a person who had known him almost ten years, that some of these people didn't know him at all. Yes, some of them were acquainted with him. Some saw him a couple hours a week in class, or worked with him at a camping store. A few knew him through their own children, a testament to how tightly knit our community is. Nobody can say that the outpouring of grief in our community was false; there were hundreds, if not thousands of people standing in line to see him. Far more than I will draw, probably. Everybody who was there was grieving. But not everybody was grieving the same man.

Sam did not get the nickname "Waffle" for having everything figured out. He was responsible for statues of saints disappearing for juggernauts from our school. He broke nine of the Ten Commandments at some point in his life. It is hard to argue that he had a good impact on people in all of his adventures. The bottom line is that he was human, and his faults are at least as important as all of his positive attributes. The stories that make us laugh or groan deserve just as much time as those stories which demonstrate his sterling character.

The square world may miss his knowledge, his work ethic, his leadership. But what I am going to miss are his faults, because that is what friendship is all about. Who wants to hang around somebody that is already perfect, somebody that has no room to grow? To do that would be no different than hanging around an inanimate statue. Sam had potential, and I hung around because I wanted to see where he was going. It might not always be wholesome, it might not always be smart, but it was worth it. That's what our needling was about. It's not much fun to fool around with somebody who had it all figured out. There would be no change, nothing to look forward to.

Those people who thought Sam was the most upstanding member of the community since Abraham Lincoln saw one part of him, the part he projected in order to make it in this world. But his close friends saw a different part of him, one that was hidden away from casual acquaintances. That was the real Sam. He wasn't a textbook example of how to be standing on God's shoulders. He was somebody trying to find the right path and getting sidetracked from time to time. And I wanted to be there on that path with him; that's why I was his friend.

Not many people look for that kind of aggressive humanity. It is obvious especially in the ritual of the funeral. I find few things right with the Catholic Church, but the beliefs of the priest as expounded during the funeral were especially onerous. "Sam died because God wanted Sam to be with Him in Heaven." To me, that makes God sound like a selfish prick, which He probably isn't. But believing that does give people comfort, especially the same people who only saw the good side of Sam and thus thought he was a shoe-in for the Kingdom of God.

Somebody who knew Sam better, however, probably can't buy this nonsense. Not because we are judging his life and his worthiness to go to Heaven, but because Sam didn't really believe in that, and neither do we. If there is any reason for his death beyond the fact that his heart just stopped during a routine medical procedure, it is probably that he found a place with lower rent. Or he could have died just to get a kick out of the pageantry that came out of it. Any rational metaphysics would not include some omnipotent being deciding out of the blue on June 6th that it would be nice to kill somebody. But in a world where people wish to believe that something exists to explain arbitrary acts, that theory might be comforting.

Sam's death floored me. Many things that we talked about will not happen. We will not create a cinema café in St. Cloud, we will not visit a great walled city full of the best and the brightest of our day. I will not go and see him teaching English at a high school in Okinawa. We will not walk among flower gardens talking about our crazy friends, and Loso's Midway Pub will seem strange if I am not searching for him when I go there. There is a lot that I was planning on doing, and now nothing.

However, I don't know if his death had any large impact on the way I live my life. It would be expected of me to say that his death was a wake-up call for me, that now I realize how precious life is. But that's not the way I feel. I think about life every day, and at the same time I know that such questions are pointless anyway. It is human to die and to lose, so I wonder when people say that a death makes them think more about their own life. Why weren't they thinking of their life before? And if they weren't thinking about it before, what will stop them from reverting to that state? A death, like every other event in this world, simply reminds us that we are human. Only that point need be taken away.