I wrote this 2/2 because I needed to and, I guess it was the first time I felt "the call of the blog". I'll be funny another time.

MY FRIEND TOM

Last Saturday,my friend Tom died suddenly. Between the time I received the news and now, millions of people have lost someone they loved. But somehow, among the many feelings I have swirling around me is one I had when my daughters were born,

I remember looking at them in a way I still do and wondering, “How has anyone ever experienced this before?” Something so powerful, strange and completely singular? I knew children were born everyday, but to create a life! And those two particular lives! Wow.

And now, my friend Tom is dead. And it is equally hard for me to imagine anyone sharing, understanding or even conceiving the sense of loss and pain that I feel.

Some of it is due to my inexperience with this kind of loss. My father died about three years ago, but I had very little contact with him for a long time. When he passed, and I saw him in the end, it was with a profound sadness I looked at the man with tubes running out of him, laying on a hospital bed. I felt the same way when we moved him into a nursing home, once illness debilitated him beyond the point where my mother could handle him. I cried when I realized his life now fit into the cardboard box we slid under his bed the day we checked him in. But when he passed we knew it was time. Did I miss him on a day-to-day basis? It pains me to realize that I didn’t and I don’t.

When I was a child, I lost both sets of grandparents. I was never close to them. I remember each event as hushed conversations in the kitchen while we kids played upstairs, Again, the sense of loss was minimal.

Sometimes I wonder if the fault is mine. Was I somehow wired incorrectly? Do I compartmentalize so completely so as to be able to stuff these events into a box and shove them into a dark and dusty corner of my brain and lock them away? Me, who cries at the drop of a hat at any movie, TV show or piece of music for reasons I can barely articulate? How can I have so little connection with the passing of my blood?

Then my friend Tom died. I met him through my church choir, though I learned we both wrote for television, and had a deep love for musical theater, sports, cigars and scotch. He was a passionate, tirelessly witty guy, who told stories like no I ever knew, had a big heart, a wonderful wife and a terrific 13-year-old son. Our families had the good fortune to become intertwined. And even as he drew away from the church we attended, we remained friends.

Each Christmas, he and his wife threw a huge soup party where he gave out as gifts Christmas music CD’s he burned that were as eclectic, nourishing and fun as time with him always was.

It is impossible to do justice to the impact he made on everyone. My last contact with him was a comic email that he sent to several of us the night he died, a song parody called “Rough Cut Lady”.With all that is wrong about this event, it only seems fitting that our last communication involved music and comedy, as immense as his gifts were in both areas.

I am part of a large community of people affected by his loss. He had many friends. I was just privileged to be one of them.

Now, my friend Tom is dead. And I will miss him in a way I have never in forty six years of life have missed anyone. And while I know that my feelings are common for anyone affected by the
passing of a friend, they are new to me and I don’t know what to do with them.

I ask friends questions, and then plumb my grief for what? A lesson? Some cliché that will make the grief slide down easier?

This makes me feel vaguely dirty. Why should I gain insight from a loss that hurt so many people? I don’t want to benefit from his being taken away so suddenly and cruelly. I don’t want to feel better about this, ever.

The first thing I heard as this news filtered through our church community was several versions of “God has a plan”. Sorry. I’m not ever going to understand a plan that involves the loss of an individual like Tom. We blessed to have known him are the better for it, but his loss is everyone’s. It is a darker world, quieter, with less laughter and less music now.

So I will hug my wife and my daughters, hoist a glass of Scotch to my friend Tom Amundsen and attempt to reconcile the fact that nothing I believed or thought I knew now makes any sense to me.

Will this get easier with time? I expect so. I will wrap reason and wisdom around me, like a cloak against a sudden, unwelcome chill, remembering the warmth of our friendship and looking forward to the coming thaw. But, I’ll still miss you, Tom. I promise.