Three funerals and school(mate) reunion

All things must pass. Even people the same age as you

Photo by Vasily Koloda on Unsplash

I've been a puppet, a pauper, a pirate, a poet
A pawn and a king
I've been up and down and over and out
And I know one thing
Each time I find myself layin'
Flat on my face
I just pick myself up and get
Back in the race
That's life (that's life)
That's life and I can't deny it
Many times I thought of cutting out, but my heart won't buy it
But if there's nothing shaking, come this here July
I'm gonna roll myself up
In a big ball and die
‘That’s Life’, written Kelly L. Gordon and Dean Kay, performed Frank Sinatra

Last Sunday evening, I caught up with an old school chum who I hadn’t talked to for 34 years. I arrived at this miniature school reunion curious but also a little anxious. What if it turned out they’d had a better – or even just a more conventionally successful – life than me?

Actually, let’s deal with the elephant in the room immediately.

Who’s won at Life?  
Hard as you may find it to imagine, dear reader, I wasn’t one of the cool kids at school. Of course, most people aren’t, and even those who are often have their own immediate or future tragedies to deal with. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

I don’t think my erstwhile classmate, Danielle, will mind me revealing that, while she was well-liked, she wasn’t positioned anywhere near the zenith of the high-school status hierarchy either.

So, is this like one of those Hollywood movies where the teenage nerd transmogrifies themselves, through pure force of will, into a hugely successful alpha male/female? Well, not so much in the case of Danielle or me. But that did happen with one of our mutual acquaintances, as I’ll get to shortly.

Upon arrival, the first thing I noticed was that Danielle was no longer Danielle but had morphed into “Dan” or “Danie”. (She brought her lovely husband along to the catch-up and he kept referring her to that way.)

An aside: Isn’t it interesting how people’s names subtly shift as they age? I can remember when James Packer was known as Jamie and was working at his magazine company when the message came down from on high that his current wife was to be henceforth called ‘Jodhi’ rather than ‘Jodi’.

Danie had a surprising backstory and interesting, um, front story. (Is that a term? It is now.) She revealed her father had humble origins and left school before his 15^th birthday, as was common at the time. He subsequently became a successful inventor and businessman.

Possibly due to her own father’s example, Dan didn’t go to university, instead opting to spend a year acquiring practical skills at secretarial school. After working in office-admin roles, she headed to London to live in fun-filled poverty, met her (fellow Aussie expat) CFO husband there and ricocheted back and forth between the UK and Australia in her thirties and forties. At some point, she had two kids and purchased a house close to one of the “world’s coolest neighbourhoods”. Like me and her father, Dan eventually went the self-employment route. She now has a contractor day job with a tech company, as well as one or two side hustles.  

Look, anyone who’s a regular reader of my not-entirely-Panglossian blog posts can see where this competition is heading, so… let’s just declare it a draw! As it turns out, you become much less obsessed with ‘winning’ once you’re on the wrong side of 50 anyway. Especially once you find out just how badly some of your peers have lost.

The first tragic death
During the Covid lockdowns, one of our former schoolmates took his own life. As a disturbingly large number of men do.

I had a somewhat complicated relationship with the individual in question. We were never close friends, but we were friendly during the first years of high school. Much to the incredulity and/or resentment of those he left behind, this individual somehow engineered a dizzying ascent up the popularity greasy pole and became one of the ‘cool kids’ in Years 11 and 12.

He didn’t then abuse his newfound cachet and he wasn’t a bully. But as is the way of these things, it was clear to his erstwhile companions – or this one at least – that he was now moving in rather different circles and that one shouldn’t be overly familiar.

I ran into him a couple of years after finishing high school. I don’t want to weight this encounter with too much import – we only chatted briefly and superficially. But it was pleasing we could, more or less, drop all the cliquey, high-school bullshit, come full circle, and banter with each other for a few minutes in a relaxed and jovial manner. As we sometimes did between the ages of 13-16. I’m grateful that’s the last memory I have of him.   

The second tragic death
A lot of people believed they had a deep friendship with Chris Murray. He was an antipodean Ferris Bueller. I’ve spent time around celebrities, CEOs, entrepreneurs, politicians, salespeople and religious leaders. Still, I don’t think I’ve ever encountered anyone more adept at reading people and – if he wanted to – forming a warm, near-instantaneous connection with them. And not just everyday people either; this was a guy who was on friendly terms with everybody from Jerry Lewis to Quentin Tarantino.

(Journalists sometimes flatter themselves that the people they are interviewing will be so charmed by them that they will want to keep in touch. This never happens. Except with Chris. With Chris, it did happen.)

I can’t make any special ownership claim on Chris. However, with one possible exception, I knew him longer than anyone else – we met at the local primary school back in 1978 – and spent a lot of time with him, especially in the Nineties.

We had a periodically close but often complicated relationship. (You may be noticing a pattern here.) In retrospect, I can see I wasted an unhealthy amount of time obsessing over why he seemed to have the Midas touch – romantically, socially, occupationally – and I didn’t.

After he couldn’t find the time to turn up to my 40^th birthday celebrations, I decided I shouldn’t keep making him a priority when it appeared, frustratingly, that I would only ever be an option for him. (The downside of being mates with Ferris Bueller types is that they always have plenty of other friends – old and new – vying for their time and attention.)

Around this time of year back in 2017, I saw a Facebook post that’s now etched in my memory. I’d heard bits and pieces from mutual acquaintances that Chris’s once-charmed existence had become rather less charmed as he entered his forties. But I had no idea just how dire things were. The social media post, written by one of Chris’s friends, informed his vast social network he’d contracted aggressive bladder cancer, was no longer conscious much, and would soon die. Not too long afterwards, while I was still agonising over whether it would be appropriate for me to try to visit him in hospital, he did. A few months shy of his 46th birthday.

I’d always assumed we’d eventually drift back into each other’s lives, as we had several times before. But circumstances intervened.        

The third tragic death
I was aware that several of my schoolmates had died over the past three and a half decades, as I guess was statistically inevitable.

But I didn’t know about Chris Deere until Dan filled me in. When I knew him (and I only knew him in passing), Chris was a nerd in the literal sense – he was passionate about computers. Back in the 1980s, when that was much less common than it is now.

From what I can ascertain, Chris got one or more Information Science degrees, became a big wheel in Newcastle’s tech scene, and sold at least two start-ups for vast sums of money.

I have no way of knowing, but I’d imagine that, after several decades of hard graft, Chris was looking forward to leading the somewhat more leisurely life of a venture capitalist in his fifties and sixties.

Except he died two months ago from heart issues.     

The moral of the story
When I was young, I was conscious of life’s finitude. But only in a theoretical, abstract way. Of course, I knew people could die. But I always assumed it was not something anyone my age needed to worry about.

Of the many punches in the face life inevitably delivers, few are as terrifyingly disorienting as noticing a growing collection of your former schoolmates and childhood friends have already run their race and you’ll never see them again. Not in this world, at least.  

So, if you get the opportunity to catch up with a childhood or school friend you’ve lost touch with, I’d suggest you take it. You may find reacquainting yourself with someone who knew the unformed version of you – and who you, in turn, knew the unformed version of – unexpectedly delightful. (That was certainly my experience with Danie a few days ago.) And you might just be spared the regret of not resolving things with someone while that was still an option.