It’s Time to Up Our Game

Last Saturday morning I was in the apartment of one of my best friends from Yale, hanging out with him and his father-in-law. We’ve been friends for thirty years. At one point I pointed to him and said to his father-in-law, “This man here is the best thing that happened to me at Yale.” I heard it come out of my mouth and realized I had never said that before. I’m not sure I had ever let myself think it.

When people ask me whether I enjoyed Yale, I usually give them a tour. I talk about the classes and the professors and the old buildings. I think about whether they would like it, or whether their kid would, and I try to say something useful. I normally answer for the person asking. This time I gave myself permission to answer for me. Yes, I enjoyed Yale. There were plenty of wonderful things there, but my friends are the best thing I got out of Yale.

That afternoon I went to the memorial service for my friend Kate (not her real name), who was in my residential college, Saybrook. She was a physically small person with an enormous personality, and the thing I remember most about her is her infectious smile. Every picture of her at the memorial had that same smile. It wasn’t just too big for her face. It was too big for her body.

At the service I learned how much of an adventurer she was. She and her husband once took off and traveled around the world for ten months. Over the years she broke a lot of bones in a long run of unlucky and ill-advised adventures, and she kept going anyway. Her mother said there were many times she thought Kate was going to die in one of her crazy adventures. Kate just wanted to have fun, and sometimes the fun got there before the planning did. Her cousin told the story of her first memory of Kate. Kate was very young and had come over to her house, and they took her bike riding on a trail. Kate didn’t know how to use foot brakes. Who would think you’d need to explain that? So when she started down the hill, she had no idea how to stop. I thought this might have been one of the times she broke her arm, but there were so many stories about Kate breaking her arm that I couldn’t tell.

When a wonderful person dies, everyone has to figure out how to deal with it. One of the mourners talked about the providence of God. She said that when people like Kate are taken from us, she feels it’s because someone needed them more. I understand why people say that, and I don’t like it very much. Rabbi Harold Kushner didn’t like it either. His son Aaron died at fourteen of progeria, a disease that makes children age rapidly, and a few years later Kushner wrote When Bad Things Happen to Good People. He went back to the book of Job, the story of a good man who loses everything, and decided that if he had to choose between a God who is all-powerful and a God who is good, he would keep the good one. “I cannot believe that God ‘sends’ illness to a specific person for a specific reason,” he wrote.

For comfort, I go to Richard Feynman. Near the end of Feynman’s life, his friend Danny Hillis told him, “I’m sad because I realize you’re about to die.” Feynman said, “Yeah, that bugs me sometimes too. But not as bad as you think. By the time you get to be my age a lot of what is good about you has rubbed off on the people and so although I will be dead, I won’t be completely gone.”

When Kate’s husband spoke, after he talked about how wonderful Kate was, he talked about John Green. Green did an episode of his podcast The Anthropocene Reviewed about Auld Lang Syne, and it’s really a eulogy for his friend Amy Krouse Rosenthal. Kate’s husband talked about how clearly Amy accepted death. Green says one of the last lines she wrote was, “Death may be knocking on my door, but I’m not getting out of this glorious bath to answer it.” Amy used to get whole rooms to sing a song with her, to the tune of “Auld Lang Syne.” The song is one line, over and over. We’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here. On paper it’s a bleak song, but Green says that singing it with Amy, “I could always see the hope in it. It became a statement that we are here—meaning that we are together, and not alone. And it’s also a statement that we are, that we exist, and it’s a statement that we are here, that a series of astonishing unlikelihoods has made us possible and here possible. We might never know why we are here, but we can still proclaim in hope that we are here.”

I have a new way of thinking about death that I learned at the memorial. The idea that someone needed Kate more asks me to hand her death over to God. Feynman and Amy ask me to accept it, and to look for Kate in the people she rubbed off on. I’d rather take it as a challenge. I started telling people, “Kate was one of the really good ones. She made the world a significantly better place. We’ve lost one of the best members of our team, and now we’ve all got to do better.”

Further Reading

Green’s episode ends with a short recording of Amy and friends singing the song, and it’s worth hearing her lead the room. I hear a couple more things in the song than Green does. Here is now, the only place any of us actually lives. Here is also just what is, accepted without needing a reason. And “Auld Lang Syne” itself is what people have always done at the turn of a year, raising a glass to old friends.

If you want more of Amy Krouse Rosenthal, start with “You May Want to Marry My Husband,” the Modern Love essay she wrote about her husband, Jason, while she was dying. Then read his answer in Modern Love and his book, My Wife Said You May Want to Marry Me, and watch his TED talk on grief. After that, go to her memoirs, Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life and Textbook Amy Krouse Rosenthal, and watch the films from The Beckoning of Lovely, the project where she invited strangers to meet her at the Bean in Chicago and make something together.