(Image via Getty)
Last year, on May 28, I got a weird phone call from my buddy Sergio. Weird for a number of reasons, starting with the fact that it was actually an incoming call from someone my own age rather than a text message.
“You hear about Matt?” Sergio said. I had not heard about Matt. Matt was dead.
I didn’t believe him, at first. Sergio didn’t know all the details, something about Matt having trouble breathing at work so they took him to the hospital. Matt was by no means a paragon of health, but the guy was only 31, and he could skate circles around me on the ice. It didn’t feel real. I’d certainly fallen for pranks (that were not always in good taste) at the hands of my friends before, repeatedly, like for multiple decades. I wouldn’t put it past them.
But six days later, I was looking at a little box that contained all that was left of my friend. I went over and tried to tell his mother what a difference her son had made in the lives of his friends. In my life. I worried I didn’t say the right things.
Matt and I were both in the trumpet section in the high school marching band, and we both liked Green Day. Years later, we’d get together in the Twin Cities with the boys and do cookouts all summer long. Matt liked to grill. He preferred salmon, although I usually got something much less expensive for myself, like brats, having become quite a cheapskate during law school. In the fall, I’d always cook a turkey for Matt and his roommates and whoever else showed up — my first employer after law school gave away turkeys at Thanksgiving, and that started a decade-long tradition for us. I got pretty good at making gravy.
Have you ever gotten drunk with your friends and rented kayaks? Try it — really fun (put on a lifejacket first). When Snapchat came out, Matt would use it to film people who’d be just rounding a corner at the house as he blew an airhorn. The end of every video would be him giggling like a schoolgirl. He was always a solid wingman on a double date. One time, we ran into a bachelorette party at Toby Keith’s I Love This Bar and Grill, and that’s a great story I won’t tell right now, because people in his family might read this. Another time, we just went to an Applebee’s because there was nothing else to do and told dad jokes to each other for like three hours.
Q: What did Abraham Lincoln say before he went to Ford’s Theatre?
A: ‘I need to see this play like I need a hole in my head.’
*pause for effect* Too soon?
We’d watch the Vikings and him or his brother or I would blow a ringing note on the horn — literally a bull’s horn fitted with a mouthpiece — whenever there was a touchdown, and also just periodically from time to time for no reason at all. He’d get out his mandolin and strum it during the commercials. As Matt got older, he grew out his hair and beard and increasingly resembled a Viking himself. Half the time when I cruised up on my motorcycle, he’d be outside, and he always smiled when I pulled in.
That was far from the first time I’ve lost someone unexpectedly. And, unless I’m next, it won’t be the last. But this doesn’t get easier. You just carry it around with you.
As we approach 100,000 coronavirus deaths in the U.S. (we might actually hit that number on the anniversary of my friend’s death), I think of how random and cruel it was that Matt had to die. But while these deaths we’re now facing are certainly cruel, they’re not all so random. We know, generally, who’s most at risk. We are capable of tracing many of these cases back to a particular source. And while I’ve been as wont as anyone to voice frustration about all the pandemic restrictions, you know, I’ve been bearing them a little easier these days. Maybe just wearing a mask to the store could save someone like my friend. A little extra beard itch for a few months is a pretty small price to pay for that.
Jonathan Wolf is a litigation associate at a midsize, full-service Minnesota firm. He also teaches as an adjunct writing professor at Mitchell Hamline School of Law, has written for a wide variety of publications, and makes it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.