Requiem
An ordinary loss, an ordinary life, but I will honour him as I loved him.
A close friend I’d known for 25 years committed suicide three years ago. He did it painlessly, neatly and carefully, in keeping with his meticulous nature. He did it on his 45th birthday. He was always a sucker for symbolism.
I am often driven to write by strong emotions - particularly grief and loss - and so I wrote a poem that I shared with his sister and our group of friends. I read it at his funeral, though I was so overwhelmed with tears that most of the attendees made sense of perhaps half of it.
I’ve agonised about publishing this. It’s profoundly private and I know I am indulging my ego by doing so. It’s also a poem, the form of writing most calculated to produce either cringing second-hand embarrassment or eye-rolling scorn. But it’s also one of the best things I’ve ever written, one of the most deeply felt and emotionally honest. So, here it is.
Dungeon Master
You did it properly, I hear,
painless, peaceful, a perfectionist to the last
You did things properly, I know,
You cared about the way things fit,
about the way things were,
about the way the world should be
Your were so smart, my friend
So full of lore, of arcane wonders,
of magical knowledge, and what it could unlock,
a master key to the final chest
You weren’t so very easy, I fear
Spiky, thin-skinned, stubborn as a stump
You took the world so personally
You held your ground, you said your piece,
You lived your principles and damn their eyes
You were so hella fun, my dude
Playing verbal tennis while in lane,
quoting rap lyrics and movie lines,
hitting ults and taking names,
connected, present, in our zone
You were a man apart, Herr J***
Quite unlike anyone I have ever known
You were yourself and fuck the noise
You occupied a space shaped just like you
A space in all our lives
You were so very loved, our Pretch
You were so very good at heart
You made our world a better place
You were the DM to our band of dorks
Now who will roll the dice?
Since his death I have struggled with all the usual regrets and longings of the bereaved. We were close, and I loved him unreservedly, but did I show him that enough? The last interaction I had with him was two days before he did it. I ignored a direct message in Discord, too wrapped up in whatever I was playing at the time. Too buried in my own petty shit and my own preference for avoidance over connection. That was my last chance, and I blew it.
The psychology here is painfully obvious. I’m mourning my own first contact with mortality as much as the loss of my friend. Since his death, though not entirely because of it, the Discord server that a half of dozen of our closest friends used to connect while playing co-op games has fallen mostly silent.
And so a place I had in the world, a place of comfort and connection, where I could be truly myself without the necessary masks and modes of adulthood, that place is largely gone. That place had endured for nearly a decade of my life, through some of my hardest times.
In the midst of a bad first marriage I neglected and eventually lost connection with my closest friends - the same half a dozen guys who peopled that server. After of nearly a decade of neglect, I was able to rejoin that group and was reminded of how incredibly lucky I have been in meeting all of them so early in life.
For me, who moved to Cape Town and who has been remiss in making new friends, Discord was a daily refuge and a constant comfort. A crutch, but also a place of love and fellowship and intimacy. It connected me to my favourite people in the world, the people who know all the best and worst things about me, and still love me without question.
And so, the love of my lost friend and the deepest bonds of brotherhood are tied up inextricably in that virtual space. Now those empty channels gape like rooms in an abandoned house, slowly filling with the sands of the Namib.
And yet, contrary to my sentimental wallowing, some of us have begun to meet intermittently on Sunday to play a cute little co-op and enjoy each other’s company. One of those guys, my very best friend in the world, was toying with an AI-powered music generator and did me the honour of using my words in his first attempt.
I find the result quite beautiful, although I am not exactly impartial. It was this song that made me decide, at last, to publish all of this. (Love you, Ga, you are truly the brother I never had)
In a recent interview Toni Morison advised writers “Don’t write about your little life”. She was talking specifically about fiction, but her advice holds for memoirs by the unremarkable. But now I feel I no longer have a choice. I need to start somewhere, and it seems like confessional is working for now.
At least it’s getting me to write rather than crouching in my burrow, watching the years tick by and wondering if I ever could, or ever would. I have a habit of looking up the age of writers I admire at the time they published their first work. Is it too late? Probably. Am I no good in any case? Or at least not good enough to rise above the hundred million other writers striving to be read? Perhaps, most likely, yes.
And yet, and yet, here I am. If the loss of my brother-in-arms stirs me, at long last, to simply write, and to write for once about what is real and solid, then perhaps it will be one good thing. And if, out there, on the pitiless stretches of the internet, even one stranger finds this screed and feels the touch of love and loss, then I have succeeded in a way that I have never done before. I think he would be proud of me. I hope, I hope, I hope.
*I decided to keep his last name confidential, out of respect for his family.