Dave's Last Beer

This year, my family is planning a trip to the beach and this is a thing I wrote the last time we were there.   It's adapted from a journal entry from back when I worked in human services.  For six years, I worked with a guy named David Martin, whose birthday was on July 4th.  

I was moving through a philosophical shift, so the tone is a little dark.   

And the number 11722 in the heading denotes how many days I'd been alive.  I used to have this... thing.  A numbers thing.

I'm fine.

*         *        *

Entry 630
July 4, 2001
11722

A couple weeks after Dave died this past December, his belongings went up for grabs. His family had taken all the photographs and Martin family artifacts and relics, leaving Dave’s extensive collection of broken typewriters, leg bag straps and coffee-stained shirts.  I wandered into his room days later and saw a couple of CD’s sitting on his dresser, Perry Como and Gershwin.  The CD’s were too badly damaged to work, but I took them anyway.   I once drove Dave to see the Como statue in Canonsburg and he listened to Rhapsody in Blue often when I helped him get ready for bed.  Here's a tip:  Rhapsody in Blue is a piece of music that lends elegance and dignity to anything that you are doing while listening to it.  If you're pressed into unsavory tasks or require them of other people to get through your daily routine, you could do worse.

A week or so later, I saw that Dave’s half-empty 24 pack of Bud Lite was still in there.  And obviously, the place has enough disciplinary problems without tempting our underpaid overnight staff with an unguarded case of beer.  And I’m guessing -- just hypothesizing wildly, that Dave had spent so much time trying to listen to the faintest wisp of WJAS while hip-hop was blaring in the living room that he probably wouldn't have wished to contribute to the deterioration of the staff’s ability to complete their appointed tasks.  So in the interest of all living and dead parties, I took the beer.

Three weeks ago, I was making some barbecue chicken and that’s just about the only thing that will move me to drink a beer at the dinner table.  So I went to the lettuce crisper, pulled one out and noticed that it was the second to last. “Aw,” I thought, “That’s sad.  I’m down to Dave’s last beer.”

I decided to save the last one until his birthday and have it then.  It would be a nice little moment, and it would be the third day of my vacation in Ocean City. “I’ll watch the fireworks and have Dave’s last beer.”  And that's what I'm doing now.  But it feels more complicated.

Dave’s death was fascinating to me. I've never experienced first hand the slow death of anyone.  I've always had a buffer between me and the nasty business -- the surgical dressings, the swollen abdomen, the gruesome hints of what was going on inside.  It was the first time for all of that and I could look on it with absolute objectivity because it wasn't happening to someone I loved.

I know how that sounds.  But it’s true.  I liked Dave.  A lot.  I may have liked him better than anyone I ever assisted, although it’s easy to feel that way about dead people.  But I’m not kidding myself into thinking that this is about the process of mourning.   I think the mourning thing just falls where it falls.  I’m not doubting the grief of the other staff people, no one in particular anyway, but Dave and I existed in a professional paradigm, even if it wasn't obvious from the way I dress.  We didn't have an emotional involvement.  And what I'm thinking now is that might not be professionalism on my end as much as it is emotional laziness.

But, the people around me, less emotionally guarded, don't seem better off.  A lot of them were baffled as to why a guy like David, who just never caught a break in his adult life, would have to die the way he did.   If you allow yourself to consider, just for the moment, that the universe is near-random, indifferent and filled with arbitrary suffering and loss, these mysteries sometimes clear up quickly.

Some of the people who supported Dave wanted exclusive rights to the grief.  They felt that Dave’s family was hugely absent, and that the displays of emotion were a) for show or b) a manifestation of their own self-loathing for having ignored him for most of his life.

I can imagine losing plenty of people that I hardly see and I can imagine my grief as being immense and genuine.   You carry people in your heart, you know?  Dave was someone’s little brother.  Someone’s uncle.  There was a photo in an album that summed up the way they must remember him -- as a little kid, steadied in his father’s arms and smiling that broad smile of youth and potential.

There was also the very real and shameful fact that Dave's passing was going to signal the end of a very difficult stretch of work.  I'd been out of my depth for some time with pain-management and specialized adaptations to his care.  And I really wasn't even in the center of it.  But out on the periphery, there were still plenty of reminders that I wasn't nearly as effective or helpful as I should be,  David's communication, which was tricky when he was healthy, just about dried up because he was now in bed all of the time and too weak to point at a letterboard.  All of the following conversations became yes or no questions with answers that fell somewhere in the middle.  The very last exchange Dave and I had was me asking him repeatedly if he was comfortable as I made this and that adjustment to his position, and he wasn't really answering me.  I asked him if he could move his head from side to side, and he did -- as if he was was shaking his head "no".  We shared a confusing moment, and then he chuckled.  It was small and improbable, the first laugh I'd seen since his diagnosis.  That was the last time I saw him.

Dave's support gear was moved to an extra bedroom of another apartment.  Weeks went by, and on a snowy weekday, I killed an hour of waiting for my bus by sitting in his powered wheelchair and kind of meditating on his place in the world, and mine... and everyone's.  Society has created these insulated little pockets for people who won't fit anywhere else and it's equally tragic and beautiful that someone can be accepted and compartmentalized at the same time and by the same people and that's really just a symptom of a civilization which has developed in an organic and imperfect way just like, let's say, an embryo that experiences an oxygen deficiency at some crucial juncture.

I pressed the power button on the chair that belonged to the man who'd been in his grave for a month and a half, and his battery was still half-charged.  And I don't know why, but that made me, for the first time, legitimately sad.

But today is his sixtieth birthday.  His family is thinking about him.   And so are some of the people who supported him.   And one guy sitting on the east coast, whose life got a little easier when he died, is drinking Dave’s last beer.