thirty-nine memories (6)

Memory #6: “IMPORTANT”

About forty-five minutes before my seminar on C.S. Lewis (taught by Professor Pain—I kid you not) one Thursday the summer of 2001 at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey, I walked into the library to check my e-mail. It had been several days, and there were about thirty or so mostly useless, mostly non-personal e-mails awaiting a courtesy open and delete. But I was hungry and in a hurry, so I deleted the majority without reading them, deducing from their subject headings that they didn’t apply to me. The last e-mail left to be deleted, the one at the top of the list, was entitled “IMPORTANT MESSAGE.” I was skeptical that it was, in fact, important, for I could tell it was a mass e-mailing to everyone on campus at Bethel from an address notorious for announcing trivial urgencies. But for some reason I decided to open this one before rushing off to get a sandwich before class.

The message, quoted in full, read as follows:

“Today at approximately 12:15 p.m., Oakwood Hall Resident Director Dave Slater was found dead in his apartment. A prayer meeting will be held in the Shiloh Prayer Chapel at 3:00 p.m. We will forward further details as we receive them.”

Dave was my best friend; in fact, probably my only really close friend. If he knew enough about computers and could pull it off, this was just the kind of practical joke he’d pull. He lived completely alone in a college dorm all summer. I remember him joking, “Man, if I died in my apartment when school’s out, it’d be a week before anybody found me.” It turned out, we think, to be about five days. It was no joke; there was a message on my cell phone to call home right away. My best friend was dead.

I went to C.S. Lewis class that night anyhow (I was 700 miles from home; I didn’t know what else to do!), and a man gave a presentation on Lewis’s A Grief Observed. It was the first time I’d ever been in a graduate seminar where the material of the presentation touched the presenter so deeply that he cried. The only more ironic possibility might have been if I’d been taking a course on the literature of grief—which was, believe it or not, an option that summer.[1] Nevertheless, no one should learn via e-mail in a university library that one’s best friend has been discovered dead in his apartment.

[1] Drew University, Summer 2001, “The Literature of Grief” taught by Dr. Laura Winters.