Last week an old friend from my Uni days in Scarborough passed away.
It's affected me more than I thought it would, and today I'm going to spend a bit of time thinking about why that might be.
His name was Bill. About a week before he died, he put up a note explaining he had terminal liver cancer and didn't have long to go. He said he didn't want any messages, he was at peace with it and in some ways excited to experience what was a totally natural part of life. As I read his note I'd just got back home from having a tooth extracted from the dentist so was in some discomfort myself, and I think that contributed to my having a little sob. I'm not exactly the model of the emotionally repressed male, and I'm comfortable with crying when I feel the need. Despite that, I'm also au fait with repressing uncomfortable emotions, so there are things that should make me cry but don't. The big things. Life frustrations, setbacks. I've not cried at the news of friends dying in the past. I think many people would relate to this. Isn't there something daft about losing it at the end of Forrest Gump, which we know isn't real or even based on real events, yet stoically ignoring the real sadnesses in life, whatever they are for you? An example would be my parents going through a "rocky patch" from about 2007-2010. There was a lot of sadness at that time. And yet, I didn't really cry about it because it was such a huge event that it just became the backdrop of my day-to-day existence. And I continued to not cry about it until they'd got back together. Suddenly I could see the entire event in perspective and how it had effected me, and one random night, when everything seemed to be safely resolved, the sadness of the whole time period hit me. I cried about it then.
So when I read that an old friend i'd not actually seen in person in 11 years was going to die and got weepy about it, it took me aback a little.
I felt like a fraud, in fact. And that's a feeling that's stuck with me through the news of his death and the week that's followed. Getting sad for the sake of getting sad. Surely I'd got over an old uni mate by now? There are lots of people I've spent more time with in my life the news of who's death I'd probably meet with a sad shake of the head and lifting of the eyebrows before storing the news away as essentially irrelevant to me.
But somehow, Bill's death feels more relevant to me than I'd imagined it would.
A big part of it is that I think Bill represented something special. There was a lot to admire about him; his outlook on life - his attitude to the trials and tribulations of having to exist - was second to none. He thought about stuff - really considered his beliefs, opinions, perspectives on things in a way very few other people do. And this considered approach led to something I'd not seen in 2003 as an 18 year old fresher; a man in his late '40s who was OK with letting you know when he either hadn't worked something out yet, or just didn't have a view about something. A man who was still exploring the world afresh. This came as a shock to me. Adults, up 'til then, were set in stone, complete and finished people. I went to them for answers, not questions. I didn't probe how they'd arrived at their answers. In fact, the idea I'd question the answers and perspectives an adult gave me wouldn't even have occurred to me! Because to me, the answers they provided defined who they were, and were lessons I should just accept and take on board. Because they were finished people, and I was still under construction.
Bill was still under construction, and that was his finished state. It was who he was. So I related to him, and I think my other friends of my age did as well. He was one of us, but better, because he had decades more experience of being one of us. We could look up to him as an equal.
We were on a music technology course together and that gave us shared experiences. We were in a band together - Bill primarily played the MIDI Clarinet, an instrument that was in equal parts amazing, baffling and very funny. I was on Drums, and my other mates Jim, David and other David were on Guitar, Bass and Keyboards respectively. (Or Guitar, Keyboards and Bass - that works too, respectively).
We spent many many hours jamming in the various uni studios, and sometimes we recorded stuff. I've still got some of those recordings, and listening back to the noise we made I don't think you'd believe me if I told you there were no drugs involved. It was really out there, free-form stuff encompassing every musical style you could think of. At the end of the year we were marked on a live performance, which I really enjoyed but I remember Bill being quite uncomfortable with being on stage. He got nervous and that, combined with not really being able to hear himself, meant he couldn't gauge how hard he was blowing into the mouthpiece of his strange electronic woodwind contraption. This was a problem, because the strength you blew into it was sensed and used to pitch bend the notes.
He was hopelessly out of tune, and we all had a good laugh (including Bill) when we got a recording of the incident the following year.
As young adults, we lapped up the stories and anecdotes he told us. He'd worked as a teacher in the Middle East. He'd traveled overland from Glasgow to India as a penniless man in his early 20s. He'd grown up a tenement house in Glasgow, and in that I felt an extra kinship as that's where my Dad grew up. I sometimes fancied that they might have known each other, unlikely though that'd have been. He told us about his thoughts on spirituality - his time in retreats, his meditations, his feelings on the soul, the mind, universal consciousness. But don't think he was some airy-fairy hippy. He really wasn't. He questioned those views, met what I guess you'd call eastern mysticism with a sceptical, clear and level head.
One of the ideas he taught us that really appealed to me was the idea of who we actually are. When we strip away the physical things - the bodies we walk around in, our sensory experiences, the memories, the emotions that are little more than flashes of endorphins and other hormones in our meat brains, what are we? We wrap all those things around us and use them to define who we are as entities, but what's at the heart of it all? What actually experiences all those things? And when you strip all that stuff away, what's left? Well, we're all the same thing. Yet we spend our lives convincing ourselves that we *are* our bodies, our names, our memories, our feelings and our experiences - all these things we've had no say in or choice over! He called his image in photographs and mirrors "TOG" (For "That Other Guy".) TOG's name was Bill, and the world would try to trick him into thinking that he was Bill. But he was onto them, and remembered that it was just a clever trick, a game even, that the world plays on us all.
Now, there's a certain kind of person who will read that and think it sounds insane. That's fine, we all have our own views. But I also suspect there are people who will deliberately NEVER think about this stuff or form any opinions about what is essentially the unknowable. And again, that's fine too. But I think it's far more insane to never think about it!
We went to Bill's flat on occasion to hang out and he led a few meditation sessions with us. They were fun. The conversations were always interesting, and I enjoyed my views being challenged afresh. He told us about the way he looked at time. We in the West think of ourselves as moving forward through time. The past is behind us, the future spreads out in front of our eyes. If you believe in the capitalist, individualist narrative you might even feel like you're rushing forward, reaching out to achieve your dreams. But if you give it some thought, that doesn't make much sense.
We don't go anywhere. We're not striding boldly forward through time. Time flows past us as we sit, forever, in the moment that we call "now". We can't see into the future. We can only look into the past. We're imagining ourselves facing the wrong way! Bill told us time is like a river. We're standing in the shallows, looking downstream. We can see what's already gone past us but we've got no idea what's coming from upriver.
On the last day of the final semester there were gigs, events, drinking etc going on all day on campus and Bill came in. We spoke briefly, he asked when I was leaving to go back home, I told him and said I was sure we'd see each other soon. He gave his trademark grin and said he wouldn't be so sure - in his experience people made these promises to each other but they didn't always come true in practice - people move on with their lives pretty quickly, so it might be better to say bye. We said bye. But I didn't believe him. We'd surely meet up soon, we had all the time in the world!
Well, I believe him now. I saw him a few months later at the graduation ceremony, admittedly. He didn't actually attend the posh bit, but afterwards he wandered down to the venue to see us and say hello. I have to admit, I don't remember much about that day and I don't remember saying bye again.
That said, when I look back on 2006 from today the penultimate goodbye was the one that mattered. He was comfortable that our time together was ending in a way that I don't think many others could have been - he was living in the moment, and the moment was moving on for us both whether I realised it or not.
In some ways, Bill moved on from the Bill I knew. In the days after he died I went back and re-read his blog. It's a very satisfying read, made complete now by the fact Bill's life has come to an end.
I remember one time, probably early 2006, we went round to his flat and he was finishing up a webchat with a lady from the Philippines he called Dolly. We waved hello before he said bye and ended the chat to begin entertaining us.
His blog begins in late 2008, when he's making plans to fly to the other side of the world to meet her. It continues through his months out there. His decision to marry her. His return the the UK the following year. The trials and tribulations of the UK's immigration system, resulting in his return to the Philippines late in 2009 to marry her. And then in 2010 the last of these regular entries is shortly before she arrives in the UK.
The blog is fantastic. At times, I had to stop reading to re-compose myself. It's a snapshot of Bill and very well encapsulates who he was as a person far more than the photos of TOG. It's part introspection, part travel-blog, part ruminations on the meaning of love, life, the roles we're expected to play by the wider world. Bill takes you by the hand and lets you into his heart, to get across what it was like to travel the path he walked.
And, most poignantly of all, it all but stops once Dolly arrives in the UK. I think he must have been truly content to move on into his new married life. and I'm glad that he had those subsequent happy years with her.
Through this time I was aware of things going on with him of course, mostly through the dubious miracle of Facebook. More and more, I feel like Facebook gives the illusion of connection. But that's a story for another post! The point is, he was always there in the periphery of my awareness and I assumed there he would remain until some future time when we could re-connect properly.
The events of the last few weeks therefore came out of the blue, and rekindled memories I thought I'd neatly sorted through and packaged away.
The news of his death has taken me back to that time I spent in Scarborough, and it's the shock of experiencing something I thought had been left behind that has led me to feel the emotions I think you can probably sense if you've read all of the above. Nostalgia, regret that I didn't go back and maintain real, human, physical contact with him, and probably at a more deep level an awareness that Bill represents a time in my life when there were many paths open to me and the world was an amazing, exciting and scary place. I was incomplete, impressionable, and Bill influenced my outlook on life at some pretty deep level. However, I also feel blessed to have known him, and appreciate him all the more. Even his death is part of a lesson he had for me, and a hard one. It's one we should all know. It's one I'd have claimed to know, but knowing isn't the same as understanding:
Time passes us by, things come to an end. People's lives end. And when that happens, there's nothing you can do about it. You just stand there and watch them drifting away from you down the river. They're still there, and they always will be. It's just that from where you stand, they recede into the distance, the water carries them round the next bend and they drift out of sight, on their way to some distant ocean beyond our understanding where all things go in the fullness of time.
