:: Barrett ::

Monday, May 02, 2005

Friday I was finally free from jury duty and decided to finish up the day working from home. Lacking the common sense to have picked up lunch, I decided to forego any further interruption and order in from the local Thai restaurant. They're one of those establishments that ties your address and name to your phone number, so all you have to give them is your own little ten-digit ID number and badly-mangled Thai dish name of choice, and your telephone conversation is over. When the food arrives all the pertinent bits of information are printed on the receipt, your name having acquired the suffix "Resident" as a tribute to their efficient desire to prepend, instead of overwrite, the default name for a new customer. Mine, reflecting the name of the first person to place an order from my apartment, still reads "Barrett Resident". So there I sat munching on some Pad See Ew, staring at this culinary invoice for a dead man, and feeling very much like I have in the weeks since I started referring to him in the past tense: highly emotionally constipated.

The dearth of posts here, really my state of reticence both on-line and off, has been largely the result of a belief that to move forward I must first eulogize and abreact. As weeks start to pass I'm beginning to realize that this belief is actually stifling my natural grieving process. This isn't an abscess that can be lanced and drained in one fell catharsis, this is a fresh wound that will take some time to heal, and even then as a scar. But still, if only to record my thoughts while they remain unfettered by composure and rawly stung, I think I should put something here, however incomplete and forced it may be. Not to get it all out, not to move on, but because failing to due so, failing to say something, anything, would trivialize the importance of a friend.

In an uncharacteristic act of initiative, it was I who sought Barrett out freshman year of college. He'd become somewhat of a class legend thanks to his facebook entry, which featured a photo of him in a huge, curly, blond wig and listed his interests (amongst row after row of everyone else's homogeneous "community service", "sports", and "greek life") as "social insurgency, butterflies". It would be a great disservice to us both, I reasoned, if we were not to meet. And so I looked up his number and gave him a call, whereupon we met and I experienced his ecstatic verbosity for the first time, parting with him after several hours.

This was to be a harbinger of our friendship over the years to come, for a couple of reasons. First, Barrett came in bursts - irrepressible, overwhelming, intense, and giddy bursts. While he shuffled around the country on one of his many extended hiatial dalliances it wasn't unusual to go months without seeing or hearing from him in the slightest. When he invariably breezed back into town it might be with a whimper or a boom, but you could be assured that if you set aside a few hours Barrett would fill them with regale-force winds and leave you almost less sure of what he'd been doing than before (he once sardonically called this in an email his "Unexpurgated Vault of Lies and Convenient If Not Patently Obvious Exaggerations"). At the very least I was acutely aware of being in the presence of someone for whom boredom was an alien sensation. Second, our friendship became, much like Barrett, highly independent. It stood apart from the mutual social circles, geography, and circumstance of which so many acquaintanceships are born. Sitting in the campus cafeteria that first night was no different than the stoop of his building several years later, or the roof of my apartment a year ago. It was just an ongoing conversation between him and I, and to hell with anything else.

Later freshman year we took a road-trip with our friend John to Chicago, using Barrett's car (a vehicle he knew quite well bestowed him with immediate respect amongst the pedestrians of the underclasspeople). As John endeavored to make romantic progress with a girl he knew from high school - our host for the night - Barrett and I retired to the car, resigning to simply sleep there as best we could. This plan was hampered somewhat as the temperature dropped, and we made intermittent shivering conversation through the cold Chicago night. Fetching our failed lothario the next morning at some ungodly hour from the heated and carpeted shelter we'd been promised, we drove to the John Hancock Tower and looked out from the observatory. In front of a novelty backdrop set up for just such an occasion, Barrett and I assumed comical poses as construction workers enjoying lunch on an I-beam. His friend Bryce was to later deem it the most disturbing photograph ever taken. I'd all but forgotten about it, until Barrett - six years later, now ending his tenure here in New York - handed me a framed copy as a departing gift. It's just large enough to hold the program from his funeral.

I think sometimes about his sense of humor, how the more awkward, tragic, or unpalatable a situation became, the more fodder for amusement it gave him - how he had such a clear perspective and sense of import that quotidian worries, from social etiquette to paying bills in a timely manner seemed put in their place. They were trivial distractions, and their failure to be recognized as such by people by and large was a constant source of bemusement and amusement for him. And the comedic self-flagellation, my god how that man would willingly hand over his ego to be feasted upon for the sake of a laugh. I'd like to think that with that insatiable self-deprecation he'd be the first to smile at the way things turned out. If not for that reason, I'm sure he'd crack a grin at having confounded expectations in a most flamboyant manner yet once again.

One of those expectations, that losing a peer is not something to be dealt with for some time, has been proven invalid in an excruciating and agonizing way. To realize that it's not just those walking before us, but those walking at our sides who are frail and vincible, at any time, without the slightest warning, is to acquire, for however transient a moment, a very clear viewpoint - one that underscores how meaningful others really are, how very little in this world is genuinely undeserving of your interest, and how confusingly simple the mere act of living can be. It is, in essence, to be given the gift of thinking as Barrett did, if only until the suffocating and petty concerns of the day-to-day relegate us back down from his level. Only a rare few occupy that realm permanently. This one in particular will be missed dearly.

Posted by morland @ 11:42 PM

:: Comments ::

Mike, I totally understand. Even in writing this, I know it's going to be too short to fully express what I want to say, but as I'm tied to school at the moment, I've got to wait until after May 20th to give attention to trying to compose something more near-complete. I've been in the process of mourning and trying to figure out what is the best way to approach this? The process of finishing my last projects and graduating from WashU, itself, makes me reflect on Barrett. For both of us graduating from here seemed like the last thing that would ever happen(maybe I'm speaking too soon).

Because everyone had such a personal relationship with Barrett, although we might be able to all understand the degree of loss, it's hard to explain to each other what it means for each of us. We've been temporarily conferred a role as those who have lost a friend, a role that all of humanity inevitably has at some point, and I don't want to ask something like how long does this role last, but what do we do now while it's still going on? What do we do at three weeks, and then a month after barrett departed?

We try to apply our ideas/philosophies/religions to the question, and take a more rigorous look at answers they've given us than we probably did the first time. I recently listened to a recording of a buddist nun who said that whenever something truly awful happened to genuinely say and think "this is the best, the best." There were reasons specific to buddhism why this was a good attitude, but the general idea to react to loss or hardship with joy is also shared by many other faiths. It was very hard for me to think positively after hearing about Barrett, and so I questioned can this be right? I'm sure barrett would have some ideas. We cultivate an appreciation that each of the lives that are begun and ended every day have great meaning, and it's hard to worry about things in daily life like grocery shopping. When we develop this kind of appreciation we realize the amount of meaning all around us and what it's worth. Barrett was interested in absolutely everything, and he was a wonderful person.

Posted by: Peter on May 4, 2005 05:09 PM

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