The only alternative to burying your friends is they have to bury you.

—Raymond Carver

Here is a story about my best friend, Gary, that is both funny and cruel.

Six years before he died, he went through a nightmare depressive episode. This is how he described it in an essay:

I had spent the previous two years dropping the ingredients of my life into a stew pot, seasoning the mix with self-pity and a burgeoning sense of worthlessness, and leaving it over a low heat to simmer. This is never a good idea, but in my case, I don’t really even cook—I’m generally useless in the kitchen unless you need a pickle jar opened or want to have mildly adventuresome sex—so there was no way this could possibly end well.

Toward the end of that two-year period I decided one day to bring him to Supercuts.

Bear with me here.

As an accomplished depressive myself, I have found that the long process of extricating yourself from your own ass begins with tending to the most basic human business. I got this idea from the British colonel in Slaughterhouse-Five, who, even as a prisoner of war, takes immaculate care with his appearance, as a matter of survival rather than vanity; he’s seen that men who stop bathing and shaving very shortly thereafter stop breathing. Getting out of bed is a good start, but it must be followed by other, harder, things—brushing your teeth, eating something, showering, and, when one is ready to graduate to such complexities, getting your hair cut.

At the time in question Gary was doing some of these things, but sporadically and sideways. He’d get out of bed and shower most days, sure, but he drank more beer than water, did more crosswords than writing, and subsisted mostly on candy and potato chips. He’d given up on all but the most basic personal hygiene, and so had come to resemble a Neanderthal, if a Neanderthal had somehow come into possession of a pair of frayed khakis and a rumpled old Oxford.

And when I’d had enough of watching Gary spiral, in desperation and frustration, with the British colonel in mind, I took him to Supercuts.

The part that was both funny and cruel was the agreement I’d forced him into: I would pay to have the nice stylists at Supercuts clean him up (which he had no interest in, understand), but in return, when they asked for his name at the reception desk, he was to respond simply, “Greystoke.” He was to say no other words, regardless of whatever else was said to him. He was to behave in every way how he looked, which was like Tarzan before he was rescued and returned to civilization as Viscount Greystoke.

And Gary, never one to pass on a good gag despite how desperately unhappy he was, played along. We went in, and I told the receptionist that the bundle of fur next to me wanted his hair cut and beard trimmed. She turned to him and asked, “And what’s your name?”

“Greystoke,” he said, keeping his voice low, drawing the two syllables out into a growl.

Obviously this was a lot weirder than anything the poor receptionist had expected to encounter that day. First off, I was doing most of the talking for someone who appeared, hirsuteness aside, to be a capable adult. Second, when he did speak, it seemed as though he knew just the one word, and that it was perhaps a word he’d been taught within the last hour.

The woman put pen to paper, then hesitated. “I’m sorry, can you repeat that?” she asked.

“Greystoke,” he said again—same intonation, same refusal to make eye contact.

The receptionist paused a beat longer. “Ohh-kay then,” she said, scribbling in her ledger. “Have a seat, and I’ll call you when it’s your turn.”

While Gary sat with his elbows on his knees, staring down through his bangs at the floor, I flipped through celebrity-gossip rags. People came in, people went to the back to get their hair cut, people paid their bills and departed. Finally a stylist looked around the reception area—clearly aware she was being played for laughs but, hey, she had a job to do—and said, mangling the name, “Greystroke?”

And even Gary had to chuckle as he rose from his seat and followed her in a plod like he’d just joined the Bataan Death March. Less than an hour later he came out looking like my friend again, looking like a million bucks, looking, in fact, not just ready but Super Ready.

I have just gotten the call that Gary has died. It is April 2018—or, at least, it was until that call came through. Time has suddenly shattered and scattered, and very little seems certain anymore. I live in Maine, that much I know, as does (Did? I think, reeling) Gary. We grew up maybe twelve miles apart. It is one of the reasons why we understand one another so intuitively, why we seem sometimes to share the same mind, the same heart.

I am in Seattle, not Maine, when the call comes. One moment Gary was standing there and the next moment he was down, the caller reports. My best friend has died, my best friend is dead, my best friend, Gary—whom I loved with all possible desperation, whom I still love, present tense, future as well—once was alive but is no longer, and I am three thousand miles away, and if I suspected in the past that time is pliable or circular or sometimes runs backwards, then I now (whatever now means anymore) know for certain it is and does all those things.

And here’s proof: In the next instant it’s six days later, and I am on a train to Boston writing Gary’s obituary. I’m trying to make it funny, as it should be to properly celebrate him, so I start with “Gary David Socquet died in remarkably inconsiderate fashion on April tenth,” which is a joke I know he would appreciate because it’s both funny and not actually a joke at all—it was, in fact, rude, dying like that, without notice or explanation. Further along I write, “Gary understood time was illusory,” even though I know now that time is not, in fact, illusory. Time will prove itself to be very real as the days pass, and then the weeks and months, and Gary remains dead, and I never speak to or laugh with him again.

The proof of this statement comes in the way the train disintegrates around me, and now it’s six years later, and I’m writing this essay. Though I have tried to communicate with Gary many times—in dreams, in my head, and, yes, even out loud—he has not responded, and I have not seen him, not even once, in the two-thousand-plus days since he died.

And now, even as I write this very line, time whipsaws backward, and it’s suddenly two years earlier, and I am reading an essay by Peter Schjeldahl titled “The Art of Dying,” and I am struck dumb by this passage: “Life doesn’t go on. It goes nowhere except away. Death goes on. Going on is what death does for a living. The secret to surviving in the universe is to be dead.”

What is grief? I’ve wondered that a lot over the last five years. In fact, I’ve wondered that for much of my life. I wondered it fervently after my father died in 2007. And then, in 2018 and 2019, when Gary and my friend Lea and my friend Brock all died, boom, boom, boom—Lea in her sleep, Brock discovered upright and stiff in his easy chair—I began frantically interrogating grief, desperate to know something, anything, about it, as though knowledge of grief’s essence could somehow subdue it.

To explain what I mean by “frantically interrogating”: imagine I’m being beaten by a large and uncannily emotionless man, not unlike Frankenstein’s monster in overall presentation, and as the blows fall and I turtle up in a useless effort to protect myself, I’m screaming, “Who are you? Why are you doing this?”

We prefer to treat grief like a liminal space, a thing we pass through on our way back to normal life. We hire therapists to help us “process” grief, as though it were a pile of paperwork. We apply the same upwardly mobile, can-do American attitude that we bring to bear on parenting or running marathons: something to be done well but above all to be done, navigated like an obstacle course, as though we expect someone to give us a medal at the end.

But for me, at least, grief feels like nothing so much as an abiding, inescapable protest against the pigheaded ceaselessness of death. It is, in other words, just as permanent as its object. After all, death and grief wouldn’t be so bad if we were all like Jesus and only spent a weekend in hell before popping back up out of the grave. Sorry about that, we might say to those who’d mourned us. What’d I miss? But that’s not how it works. You’re dead, and you’re dead, and you’re dead, and then, when you’re finished being dead, you go on being dead some more. Why should we expect the natural, inescapable response to death to be any less intractable? Why fool ourselves into believing we can make it so?

My first experience with grief came at the death of a hamster. Funny, right? It would have otherwise been the death of my grandfather, but I have no recollection of his passing. He treated his body so poorly, and was unlucky enough besides, that he died at forty-nine, when I was only four. At that age I certainly had no understanding of death and its never-will-you-see-this-person-again permanence.

So: the hamster. By then I was eight or so and understood death just fine, knew what it meant when I found the little guy stiff and cold on his blanket of sawdust. He was albino. His stark white fur was soft, his eyes closed. The day before, he’d been conducting his hamster business as usual, running around his cage, enjoying the network of clear plastic tubes I’d assembled for him. Now he was gone. Just like that, as they say. I felt his goneness unmistakably, holding him in my hands. I felt, and was, alone—the hamster departed, the room empty of anyone but me. We dug a little grave in the dirt floor of the basement, and I was inconsolable. Even then, the force of my grief seemed to overwhelm people. I had a distinct sense that the adults in my world were frightened of it, or at least made uncomfortable by it.

Since then, grief has been the same experience every time: seeing the stitches that held my great-grandmother’s lips together as she lay in her casket; viewing a high-school buddy so slathered in undertaker’s makeup that he looked like a mime; kissing my father, over and over, while his forehead cooled under my lips. There’s the childlike shock at the moment of death—which seems to stop your own heart—then the slow blossoming of a sorrow so black and bottomless that you’re sure nothing about you can survive it.

But, then, we do survive, right? Mostly? And I am often amazed that we manage to trudge ahead in the face of grief. It seems to me a massive, heroic thing, to go on, but we do it all the time, every day. And maybe that’s what I’m really after here: I’m trying to understand how we throw these losses on our backs and keep walking, all the while aware that someday the thing that grieves us so will reach its rigid hands out for us, too.

It’s probably worth mentioning that Gary, Lea, and Brock all died at ages most would consider quite young. Brock had just passed fifty, and Gary and Lea hadn’t yet made it to the half-century mark.

There’s a broad, buzzy term in current use that could accurately describe each of their demises: deaths of despair. Part of the complexity of grieving them—particularly Gary—is that although the coroner would not file any of their deaths as a suicide, it’s impossible to feel as though they didn’t, in one way or another, kill themselves.

Brock’s heart gave out after three decades of steady, brutal alcohol abuse.

Lea ingested pills—for nerves, for sorrow, for something, by God—and though by all accounts she did not intentionally overdose, she also never woke up again.

Gary smoked and drank and did nothing to take care of himself, and then his aorta ripped open, and he bled out in the time it takes to sing “Happy Birthday to You.”

They all grew up in some degree of privation. They were all bright and sensitive and could have succeeded wildly in ways society esteems. Instead they lived quiet and mostly unfulfilled lives, grappled with money and substance abuse and their own minds, and died young.

It’s not the greatest tragedy, on its surface. But the reason I find it so sad is because I know from experience that children suffer quietly and in isolation, their pain hermetically sealed inside their hearts, rarely if ever given utterance. A smart, sensitive kid, even a young one, knows he cannot speak of the shame and sorrow of poverty to his parents. Bad enough to not be able to give your children everything they need; worse still to hear about it from them and have your heart broken anew. So poor children learn early on to keep their mouths shut and keep up appearances.

Gary escaped into daydreams, as many of us did: the pleasant ones, of Daddy Warbucks–type benefactors; and the dark ones, of some ugly fate befalling his parents and necessitating a dramatic change of venue. Neither came to pass. Instead, on the strength of raw smarts, he went on to a fancy high school and a fancier college. Yet somehow, after the depressive episode and the consequent foreclosure on his house, he was living in a windowless office space and sleeping on a mattress on the floor, his few remaining possessions in black garbage bags, as penniless at forty as his parents had been when he was five.

I see these two facts as not at all coincidental. I know too well how the sense of who you are and what you deserve, forged early, can guide you as an adult straight back to everything you longed to flee as a child.

I’ve taken to telling young people that it takes ten years to get from age twenty to age twenty-five, five years to get from twenty-five to thirty, and three years, tops, to get from thirty to forty. So far, forty to fifty doesn’t seem like it’ll amount to much more than a long weekend. The people my age and older laugh knowingly, and the youngsters nod like Sure, sure, whatever you say, Gramps, and I am left, every time, wondering why the only thing we know to do with the stuff that terrifies us is to make jokes about it that aren’t really jokes at all.

I have another early memory: of our family cat dying terribly. He came home and crawled behind the bathroom door to be alone. Some kind of poison appeared to be making his insides liquefy and pour out everywhere. He was, as you’d imagine, in a lot of pain. I recall watching as he lay there, listening to him make terrible noises and feeling a brand of helplessness I certainly hadn’t felt before, and don’t think I’ve felt since.

After he died, I screamed, “Why?” repeatedly until my mother, likely very upset herself by the whole ordeal and having no ready answer, screamed back, “I don’t know!” And that shut me up.

I was asking: Why did the cat have to suffer so awfully? Why did any of us? Somebody get God on the phone, I was saying, with a ten-year-old’s righteousness. I’d like a fucking word with Him.

But the answer to the more literal version of my question—Why did the cat die?—likely had to do with a guy 

who lived down the street. Dominic was the neighborhood loon, his old house swaybacked and crammed with junk inside and out. He didn’t like cats on his property and had said so, going so far as threatening to poison them.

Dominic had a reputation, among us kids, for being deeply scary and possibly evil. But I imagine that if I encountered him now, I would recognize he was just damaged and helpless, if not entirely harmless.

In any event, it was through Dominic and the poisoned cat that I first learned life is action and reaction, push and pull, offense and vengeance. The adults in our world did nothing about the cat’s death, so we kids vowed to settle accounts ourselves. We plotted idly to burn Dominic’s dump of a house down. And then one day, somebody appeared to make good on the threat indirectly, by torching the telephone pole that attached Dominic’s house to the power grid. All that remained was a charred stump at the edge of Dominic’s corner lot. It sat there for years.

Later we heard that Dominic, in the grip of whatever madness made him hoard garbage and poison cats, had set the pole on fire himself.

One time I was on a book tour and doing an event in San Francisco, where Lea lived. I hadn’t seen her in a couple of years. As luck would have it, I spotted her a few strides ahead of me in the Ferry Building, both of us heading toward Book Passage, where I was giving a reading that night. I sidled up beside her and put my arm around her waist without saying a word, and her initial terror blossomed into joy at the sight of my face, and that is a moment I will take with me everywhere I go forever.

Is it possible that grief is the one essential human experience? That it is grief, and not language, nor an ability to conceive of the future, nor a capacity for a moral framework, that actually defines what it is to be human? If the secret to surviving in the universe is to be dead, then maybe the secret to being alive is to grieve, ceaselessly, until such time as we pass into eternity by joining the dead ourselves.

Sixteen years after the fact, my mother clings to grief over my father’s death as though it were essential to her own continued existence. As though her grief were just behind food and water in terms of what’s necessary to keep her alive. After all this time, I am beyond frustrated with her stubborn refusal to do much more than wait around for the reunion she believes is coming between her and my father. At the same time, I understand the only real difference between us, with regard to grief, is that, by writing about it, I’ve figured out a way to monetize mine.

My pal Brock and I were like brothers, but he had a deep, bubbling well of anger that made me hate him sometimes. He’d inherited this anger from his old man, an embittered drunk who drove a vintage T-top Camaro. Like a lot of embittered drunks I’ve known—like his son, in fact—Brock’s father’s biggest problem was he didn’t seem to know why he was here on Earth in the first place.

Once, Brock spent a week trying to drink himself to death, but instead he just fell and smashed his head and wound up in a coma. When he came to and got out of the hospital, he was homeless for a while, and sober. Then he got a job again at the restaurant where we’d worked back in the nineties, and he started drinking again, but no hard stuff.

One night he called me out of the blue. He’d do that sometimes, being one of those rare people who are actually good at keeping in touch. He was sitting in his apartment back home in Maine, and I was walking to a hotel in New York City after speaking at the library on 42nd Street. Brock was a little drunk, and so was I. He said he was proud of me, which made me feel like shit, picturing him brain-damaged and hammered in his shitty apartment, with the same shitty job we’d both had twenty-five years before.

That’s the thing about where we’re from: nothing changes, and the only way to gauge the passage of time is to look carefully to see just how used up people are.

I told Brock I loved him, and that was the last time we talked.

A month later he came home from work, sat down in his easy chair in front of the TV, and quietly died.

They found him the next afternoon still sitting up, the same way I’d found him a thousand times back in the day: shithoused, asleep in his clothes. Back then I sometimes thought, as I tried to rouse him to get ready for work, that if any of us was going to drink ourselves to death, it was probably him.

I feel Gary slipping away from me as I write this, as I claw at him with these words. I did the same thing with my father—before he was even dead, in fact—inserting a version of him into my second book and, to a lesser extent, my third. It didn’t work. I could neither save nor memorialize my father; he died, and now I barely remember his face. Gary’s dead, and I can’t hear his voice in my head anymore, and all the things we did together, all the ridiculous times we had are fading, blinking out (and when we’ve all had our fun / deflate the stars and put away the sun), leaving me with vague emotional impressions I can neither trust nor convey.

Has this happened to you maybe? Is there someone you can no longer hear, or picture in your mind’s eye, or even grasp in dreams? And do you feel as though perhaps it’s somehow your fault that they can no longer be conjured?

Because as the memories leave me, I become more and more convinced that I was not good enough to Gary. That I did not take sufficient care of him. That my inability to convince him to leave the ruined town we grew up in and start over was a moral failing, the consequence his to pay. That I left him there to rot. That I’d been mistaken when I’d assumed the man who came out of the depressive episode was the same man I’d known before, when in fact he was a doppelgänger who looked and sounded like Gary, was just as funny and furious and loving and principled, but with one crucial difference: he’d given up on the world and on himself, and he no longer expected much from either. That, in fact, I turned away from him at the times he needed me most, and that my punishment for this infidelity is the slow, inexorable loss of memory, which is itself a kind of madness.

Once, I told Gary that grief is not linear but cyclical: an unending feedback loop of gnawing pain and warm, stinging memories, of regret and love and bafflement. He had never really lost anyone close to him, so I was by default more of an authority on grief than he was.

Then his mother died, and a couple of weeks later, while we shared a drink, he looked at me and said, seemingly apropos of nothing, “Grief really is cyclical, isn’t it?”

Neither of us knew it, of course, but he was only a couple of weeks from his own death.

“You have no idea,” I told him.

And, come to find out, neither did I.