Gerald C. Matics -- Author

I warn you now, this will be a long one. Yesterday was a tough day for me, and I have to share the reason: my best friend from childhood -- and who, although we have seldom spoken in our adult lives, I still consider the best friend I ever had -- was laid to rest after taking his own life. This is my eulogy for him.

Dave Gardner and I met in kindergarten at Coeburn Elementary School in Brookhaven, and in the way of all newly met children, we got along well. My memories of that time are fuzzy after (Jesus God, can it be?) 34 years, but I seem to recall us playing with each other more than with other kids; I do have a clear memory of being upset at my birthday party either that year or the following year -- I would have been turning six or seven -- because Dave came down with a cold that day and couldn't come, even though there were plenty of other kids and presents there.

We weren't each other's only friends, of course, but we kept gravitating toward each other over the years. By the time we were in about sixth grade, we were pretty much inseparable. We often hung out with Ed Paffett and Craig Oberg, and I considered them good friends as well, but Dave and I had a different bond. I think one reason might have been that Dave was for a long time the only other kid I knew besides me and my siblings who was adopted. Fortunately both of us lucked out in the adoptive parent lottery since we each got a wonderful set, but back then I didn't tell many people I was adopted out of self-consciousness because the ones I did tell invariably were for some reason taken aback, and it made me feel like I'd just confessed to being a cross-dresser. (And yes, I know that sounds silly, but I also know with absolute certainty that I would never have had to explain that feeling to Dave.)

I can't begin to tell you all of the things we did, experiences we shared, things that brought us close during those wonder years of preadolescence, but let us simply say that many of them involved being in places we should not have been. We weren't bad kids by any means (although there are a couple of incidents I'm not at liberty to discuss since I'm not totally sure the, ah, parental statute of limitations has expired), but we did tend to trespass a lot. A favorite place was the cliffs behind Brookhaven Swim Club, which we reached through a hole in the fence, and we'd spend hours crisscrossing the cliff face (yes, shockingly, I wasn't acrophobic back then) and talking about all manner of inconsequential yet profoundly weighty matters, like who were the hottest girls in our class, in our school, on TV, and so forth.

Puberty, it need not be pointed out, was bearing down on us like a runaway train.

Speaking of trains, another thing we did a lot was walk the abandoned tracks that ran from Aston to Lenni and points beyond. We sometimes did that with Ed and Craig as well, and friends, let me tell you, when I later saw the movie Stand By Me and read the Stephen King novella it was based on, it was as if King had been riding shotgun with us during those times because so much of his story and our experiences synced, right down to the way you had to almost crawl across the trestle bridges because the apparent motion of the ties going one way and the water beneath going the other made you dizzy. (By the way, I trace my intense fear of heights to an incident in which the four of us crossed Chester Creek by shimmying along the I-beams underneath the bridge, 50 feet or so over the water, and when I was halfway Dave clapped his hands and startled about a hundred pigeons who were roosting under there so the whole freakin' lot of them flew past my face, and don't think he didn't know that was going to happen, either -- but perhaps I've said too much.) All of us, characters and real kids alike, were in search of an adventure, not realizing we were finding it along the way, that the most formative -- and in a sense some of the most important -- segments of our lives were being lived right there, right then. The opening and closing lines of the novella were, going from memory, virtually identical, and for my money they fit us -- particularly Dave and me -- perfectly: "I never had any friends later on in life like the ones I had when I was twelve.  Jesus, does anyone?"

Dave -- and, indirectly, Ed and Craig -- actually was the catalyst for my writing career, such as it is. The first writing I ever attempted was a screenplay Dave and I collaborated on called Adventure In Rutter''s Run, and it featured, in a surprising twist, four pre-teen boys who had a penchant for trespassing. The basic plot had something to do with us exploring land that belonged to Old Man Rutter, stumbling on his son in the midst of assaulting a girl our age, and coming to her rescue. We wrote it all out in a few weeks in one of those black-and-white-marbled copybooks that were omnipresent in our lives back then, and I kept it for the longest time.

I realize it's no Academy Award winner, but I'd give anything to know where that copybook is now.

Anyway, we continued more or less as best friends until high school, when perhaps inevitably we started to drift apart. Our world had suddenly become much larger, and we each saw different corners of it that we wanted to explore. We still did some things together after we started at St. James -- met up for lunch, went to the library, joined cross-country and track, talked about who were the hottest girls at our sister school, O'Hara, and points beyond -- but we also started hanging out with different crowds, and our time outside of school was spent differently.

Four years, it turns out, can vanish in an eyeblink, and we were graduating before we knew it. I remember Dave being floored at how long we'd been friends -- at that age, it seemed like a lot longer time -- and in my yearbook he simply wrote, "Good luck after 13 years together." Then he went into the Army, something we'd both talked about doing for years -- we were going to join the Special Forces together --  but I chickened out and went to college. (I did feel a bit justified, however, when Dave later told me it only took him one jump out of a perfectly good airplane to realize Special Forces wasn't his thing.) And except for seeing him once or twice after he got out, and later talking with him on the phone sometime after my son Jack was born (Rachel, his daughter, would have been about three), we lost touch completely for a long time. We started exchanging phone calls and e-mails earlier this year, but we could never get together. The last I talked with him was in early summer; every time since then when I thought about getting in touch, something would come up, and I'd excuse myself by thinking: I can call him later, he's not going anywhere. 

In the end, I guess we ran out of later.

This blog is turning out to be as long as one of my stories, but I have a few more things to say. First and most obviously, Dave could not have been in his right mind to leave behind his wife and children, who by all accounts he loved very much.  Depression, though, is a slippery, insidious, secretive thing, and no one should ever blame themselves for not having foreseen what would happen. He is unfortunately not the only friend I have known who took his own life, and in no case did those closest to the person have any clue what was to come.

Second, the funeral service was a poignant farewell, especially near the end when one of Dave's close friends, Russ, gave the most moving eulogy I have ever heard. At Dave's mom's request, Russ also read a few lines from a poem called "The Golden Heart," author unknown, that were more than fitting.

Although we loved you dearly,

We could not make you stay. 

A golden heart stopped beating, 

A special one was put to rest. 

God broke our hearts to prove to us

He only takes the best.

And finally, while that is a beautiful poem, a different one came to my mind there in the church. Anyone who saw the movie Four Weddings And A Funeral might recognize it as the poem one of the characters recites when his partner is laid to rest, and it affects me every time I read it.

So, Dave, if you will kindly ignore the blatant romantic overtones, I would like to offer this as my final expression of sadness, and my last goodbye to you.

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He is Dead.
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

 

Funeral Blues

W.H. Auden