Be careful opening a Pandora's box - you never know what will come out, and it's almost impossible to shut it once it's been opened.
This week I learned a lot of things - good and bad - about my childhood friends. Some have passed on, some are thriving, and some are somewhere in between. I learned that Robert B, easily my best friend from the Fourth Grade until at least my sophomore year of High School, passed away after a long career as a well-published professor and genetic researcher. However, his obit didn't disclose the cause of death.
Of my group of four friends, Robert was clearly the smartest of us all. He got perfect, straight-A grades through school, and he encouraged and coached me to try and keep up as best I could. When he said something, or suggested a solution to some puzzle we were facing, he was almost always right. You didn't have to question it - it would have been foolish to not accept what he had to say.
Robert was the smartest, and Doug turned out to have been the most successful. Stephen was the heart and soul of our group and I was, well, we never really know who we are or how we're viewed by others, do we? The other three all lived close to one another but my home was a good 15-minute walk away, a formidable trek for a schoolboy, so I didn't get to hang out with the gang as much as they did with one another. So I guess I may have been the "outsider," the frequent absentee of the group.
Yesterday, I learned through Doug, with whom I've just this week re-established contact after a 40-year hiatus, what the obit didn't state. Robert always had a hidden side to his personality - no matter how well I knew him, it always seemed there were dark corners of his psyche that he didn't share with anyone, even his childhood best friend. He would become withdrawn and distant at times, appearing to be aloof and unfriendly, and then suddenly "get over it" and be his same old affable self again. But it was always up to us, his friends, to seek him out and bring him back into the fold following one of his introverted phases.
Robert was clearly a genius but sadly we’ll never know why he was so tortured. The last time I knew him he was in college working toward his first degree and I was laboring in a series of dead-end, blue-collar jobs. He was particularly withdrawn and unreachable then, even by his usual standards. I had heard a rumor, which I never substantiated, that he even had tried to kill himself once around this time, and while it may or may not have been true, it was certainly believable. To be honest, when I saw his obit, "suicide" was the first thing that crossed my mind. But he did eventually go on after that and married his high-school sweetheart, and together they raised one son and one daughter. Robert joined the faculty of the University of Massachusetts in 1987 and settled his family in Amherst.
But that dark side was still present and eventually resulted in his becoming a serious alcoholic. I learned from Doug, who had endeavored to stay in touch with him, that it got so bad that his wife eventually told him he had to leave. He apparently moved in with his mother for a while down on the North Carolina coast, near Myrtle Beach where we had once camped and stalked sea turtles together as teenagers. From time to time, he would go back north to Amherst to visit his kids.
It was on one of those trips back home that he died alone in an Amherst hotel room. Apparently, his liver simply stopped working and he just collapsed. March 30, 2010. RIP.
It’s truly heartbreaking. A wife and two children couldn't save him from himself and a successful career in science and academia couldn't save him. His friend Doug couldn't save him, and I hadn't known him at that point for some 35 years (if I ever really knew him at all).
Impermanence truly is swift. What was here yesterday is now gone today. As our dew-like life so easily disappears, we should try to do good for others as long as we are still alive.
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