I don’t done generally think this is a good thing to do, yet I am interested in finding out more about a high-school classmate and short-term college roommate who died last year. I would like to know what happened.
This was a former good friend of mine who I had drifted away from. We roomed for a year in college until I went somewhere else for school, yet we continued to hang out and went to many concerts together and many parties and played tennis and played on softball teams together. Then I got married and had kids and he didn’t, and we drifted apart, and at some point I wanted to avoid him because the friendship felt difficult to support.
He was a very heavy drinker. I remember we went to a George Thorogood concert and we hit the john right before it started. There was a line and we heard the band come out and start playing, and my friend, reluctant to wait in the line once the music started, was so drunk he walked up to a sink and unzipped and peed into it. That kind of drunk.
Still, a good friend back in the day and I remember him in left field making a magnificent outstretcheched diving catch to save a softball game in the last inning in a meaningless adult softball league, a catch as good as I’ve seen on ESPN. We all cheered and rushed the field to congratulate.
So we drifted apart and recently my GF mentioned something about him, asked his name since she didn’t remember, and when I told her she googled him and after a pause said, “I think he may have died.” So I then googled and saw that yes, he was gone.
So here’s the thing about him. His older brother, who he revered and who was a world-class blues harmonica player who had played with one of the old-time blues legends (Jimmy Rogers) in a European tour, had died young a few years before him. Both his parents were dead. He was married very briefly with no children. He could be a melancholy sort. I worry that he felt very alone and I hope that didn’t contribute to his death at the age of 58.
Googling him returns next to nothing other than a brief funeral notation mentioning it was a private burial. He has an elderly uncle still alive, and the uncle has a Facebook account with all of three followers. I messaged the uncle with my condolences but got no reply.
Anyone know a way to find out a bit more about what happened to him? I’ve been thinking about him off and on since I realized he was gone. That’s probably a product of the mystery about it, my fear that his lonliness may have contributed, and my own advancing age and thoughts of mortality.