Cue Jim Carroll’s “People Who Died.”

It began on my way to the bus, with a phone call from my oldest, dearest friend, Meghan, who, through static interference and intermittent service, told me that our friend Q had died. For some reason I continually misunderstood her – I kept asking “who?” – for some reason I couldn’t understand, or perhaps comprehend – what she was telling me.

At Q’s wake, friend after friend stood up and held forth about his eccentricities, his infallible sense of humor, his amazing ability to build and fix anything, and a few even crowed their triumphs at getting back at him with their own practical jokes. A true fool, there will never be another like Q. It didn’t hit me that he was really gone until I saw the bag of his ashes, pulled from the special plastic box in which they had been shipped, and tied with a round metal dogtag embossed with his full name. A few of his friends had the wherewithal to assemble small packets of wildflower seeds, with instructions to spread the seeds in the shape of a “Q” in honor of his love of the outdoors – “agrarian graffiti” they called it. I took my seed packet and lined up to receive the communion of Q’s bones, and I sobbed as Billy opened the bag and poured his ashes into my cupped hand, the reality of his gone-ness hitting me “full tilt boogie,” as Q himself would say.

Thus began a summer of endless lame mortal surprises. Next came my cousin Bruce, whose death from cancer was inevitable, came surprisingly quickly, and despite the fact that I was aware that he was ill and had been talking to the people who lived near him (my brother, his wife Judy) I curiously didn’t find out about his death until a week after his passing. His memorial service was a celebration of his life told through slides, stories, and a train ride at the Western Railway Museum in Solano County, California.

I knew that he loved trains, and that he had a miniature working trainset in his house that he spent years building, but I really didn’t understand to what extent until his memorial. I learned that he knew more about trains and the impact of rail travel on California history than pretty much anyone. His wife Judy, my cousin, put together a lovely afternoon of a slideshow, speeches, and lunch, and the memorial ended with a ride on Bruce’s favorite, an electric train, restored with all the original accoutrements, that originally took commuters over the Bay Bridge in the middle of the 20th century. Judy is unflinchingly stoic and optimistic, despite having watched her husband succumb to the ravages of cancer, and I don’t think she’s lying. If I could be even half as strong as her in my daily life I’d be a powerhouse. It’s strange and enlightening what you can find out about people you thought you knew after they pass into not-ness – their effect on others continues on even after their own activity has been halted.

True to the perfect essay, this story has a third character, a friend and former co-worker, Marc, who died unexpectedly despite a long, heroic battle with lung cancer – one that we all thought he was winning. Marc was kind, generous, brilliant, and unnervingly zen. At Marc’s funeral I cried for the huge emptiness he left behind, but I was crying more for his family, really – his father and brother, and his new wife of less than a year.

When we all lined up at the gravesite to take turns shoveling dirt onto his casket, I eschewed the shovel for my bare hands. The dirt felt good – cool on a blazingly hot day – and it seemed a fitting tribute to get down in it, my hands dirty, the loamy smell of the soil drifting up through the shimmering heat. Though I had never met him before, I longed to say something to Marc’s father, anything I could to help shepherd him through this awful time. I bravely approached him, gave him a hug and somehow tried to impart some comfort. As I walked away my sobs boiled up from a place that was becoming achingly familiar.

Also like in a perfect essay, each one of these people was vibrant and full of life – a cliché heard at funerals and in movies, but really true in all cases. Although Q had spent the last few years of his life drinking himself into oblivion, he was still the funniest, most eccentric, creative person that I’ve yet to meet. Bruce was one of those geniuses that mastered anything he put his mind to, had a wry sense of humor and didn’t suffer fools. And Marc, the youngest at 37, still had so much to do in this world. [Cue Billy Joel’s “Only The Good Die Young”.] It’s impossible to grasp the “not-ness” of someone who was once so present.

Throughout the summer I never felt like this succession of sad coincidences was about me. My sadness during all the funerals and memorial services has been for those truly close to the deceased – not that I wasn’t – but true to form, I’ve always felt like an outsider, and this was no exception. I mean, I had my moments of closeness with each of these people, but had never managed a sustained intimacy that I feel allowed me the type of gut-wrenching grief that those much closer to them must have felt. Of course I’m sad that they’re gone, but I also am getting through my daily life without feeling lead weight of grief around my shoulders. Despite the shitty summer, I feel fine. I regret not feeling as if I really got to know each person well enough that their passing would have been a shattering occurrence.

But I admit that I’ve also wondered if there isn’t something going on here. Is the universe trying to tell me something, or is there something to be learned from having three people pass on in close succession? The atheist in me says “no,” that it’s just a coincidence. It is what it is. But part of me has begun wondering if some higher power (ick) is trying to tell me something, that I’m being nudged awake with a sharp spiritual stick. I’m just not sure what I’m supposed to awaken to. I mean, there’s gotta be a message here somewhere, right? Or is it simply the way the dice rolled this time around?

On the other hand, there has always been a part of me that feels a strange surge of optimism each time someone close to me dies, because a part of me really believes that I’ll see that person again, that their absence in my life is only temporary. Perhaps it’s just the guileless optimist in me that fools myself into thinking that there is some spiritual thread that runs through the universe. Or perhaps I’m able to tuck away the person in a special corner and visit them whenever I need to.

Some say that people live on in the memory of others, but somehow that seems too simple and somehow disappointing. Of course we all want to make our impact on human history, but I like to think that we actually make an impact that goes deeper than memory. Like the law of thermodynamics that states that there is only a finite amount of energy in the universe, perhaps when someone dies, the energy that once was a discrete form gets released back into the universe and recycled into other beings.

I think that I have spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about death – a morbid thought wanders into my head, seeps through the cracks and settles in like a chill. I fight it off like swatting at a fly that I can never seem to catch and, well, kill. Often they’re fears that someone close to me will die, or that I’ll die before I’ve had a chance to do everything I want to do in this lifetime. These thoughts don’t drag me down – on the contrary, I feel like a pretty happy person – but rather it’s an awareness of other possibilities that papers the walls like an ugly pattern I’ve learned to ignore.

I’ve noticed that through all the turmoil I’ve found a zen of my own. With each funeral or memorial service, some of those sharp edges of fear have been ground down to a smooth sheen upon which I’ve floated through the summer, able to live through and with the reality that yet another person is gone.

Late in the summer during a backpacking trip Tim and I took to celebrate our 1st wedding anniversary, I spread Q’s ashes & wildflower seeds in the shape of a Q in a redwood forest. Someday, perhaps next summer, I’ll return to the same spot to see if the flowers took hold. I wondered as we hiked through the forest looking for the perfect spot, “Is he here with us now? Does he know that we all really miss him?” My guileless optimist muse said yes, and put images in my head of his ghost following us down the trail, laughing at some practical joke that only he knows, and that we’ll come to understand much, much later.