In my first two years in California, i made one true friend.
A friend you know will be there. You'll always be connected.
I loved you, michael.
And in many ways, hardly knew you.
This is truer of more friendships than we realize. With michael especially, for in the year that i knew him, we spent more time in the living moment than in anecdotal sharing. Fleeting references to the past only...
It can be singularly bittersweet to learn the details of a friend's life, only after they've died. I was enabled in this by his memoir, "The Possible Happiness of Life". The last time we were together, he eagerly gave me the book. He was so happy to have finished it, after years of procrastination.
At a glance, we might have seemed unlikely companions. Me, a roaring rational empiricist. He, a new age spiritualist.
But the areas where we converged were ever more expansive than our divergences. Saving the world, finding the best in humynity, embracing the moment, sensualist exuberance...michael was one of the most huggable people you'd find.
After he died, of natural causes in a friend's chair, his unread book stared at me for months, partly because the spiritual aspects filled me with trepidation, and also because grief has its own agenda. But what a delight it turned out to be, with minimal spiritual ramblings. He approached that part of his life with joy, but perhaps understood that there are some aspects of spirituality that don't lend themselves to words, so one ought not even try (if only all spiritualists could locate such modesty). He never preached, and never stopped being genuinely curious.
The book unfolds in tales of a life...and what a life! A child of ultra-progressive parents, he attended Stanford, the Free University of Berlin, and then Harvard, before dropping out to volunteer for eugene mccarthy. After that, it was environmental activism in northern California and around the globe, an extensive retreat in Kathmandu, and sojourns on the greek island Hydra, where he renovated a 400 year-old ruin. He lived in Berlin before the Wall was completed, in a spiritual nature commune in Sonoma, and in San Francisco as a gay man during the AIDS holocaust.
Throughout, he continually manifested the ethos LIVE - CELEBRATE!
We met as housemates, in a little home in San Pablo, my first California residence. Our flatmates were a rwandan diplomatic student, and an affable fellow plagued by obsessive/compulsive bipolar disorder. At its best, it was a haven for camaraderie and curiosity. At its worst, hellish. Not a bad metaphor for life, i suppose. I became liberated before michael, and returned to help him move out (i helped him move twice his last year). After that, we got together every couple months, for companionship, cuisine, and maybe an episode of Star Trek.
Such a supportive, loving man...who had a romantic/sexual life more active than mine, even in his late seventies. Perhaps like me, he never found the great love of his life...and perhaps like me, he knew that was a silly metric by which to define a life. Yet i don't doubt that, again like me, he might have wished otherwise. At the end of his life, he was beloved by many, yet always as a presence who floated in and out of people's lives. Is he more of a possible mirror for me than i realized?
But life is what it is. All you can do is try to greet each day with integrity and hope.
Some questions, i'll now never be able to ask. Given his compassion for all life, his "zero population growth" advocacy and awareness of the environmental disaster we're visiting upon ourselves by trying to keep billions of humans eating other animals, i'm bufuddled over why he never became vegan.
I was enriched by knowing him, and diminished by his death. He lived a long life almost exactly as he wished, and at the end was as sharp and independent as ever. He died believing death was not the end.
A pretty happy life...and that's nothing at which to sneeze.
Thank you, sweet michael.
I'll always miss you.
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