Thoughts after a funeral

I did not know the deceased. I knew his wife (#3, it turns out), who had acted in several dramatic presentations I'd put together for the Unitarian church.

Several things stuck with me.

• He died from complications following a medical error in surgery. Jesus. I have no idea if anyone is getting sued over this, but it's not all that rare. The moral is, be guarded and suspicious about your doctor. Half of them graduated in the bottom half of their class.
• Ex-wife #1 gave the most remarkable, insightful, kind and loving tribute I've heard from an ex-wife. They were both mathematicians. I like to think this explains the utter logic of her remarks. There is great kindness in logic with a heart, and we see far too little of it. Her remarks about their breakup in the 70s after she became a feminist ("he couldn't change that quickly") hit home since my own marriage ended somewhat similarly, if in more radical circumstances. A lot of marriages ended in the 70s as wives demanded more than they were getting in their relationships and men were slow to make the right angle turns demanded of them. Decades later, of course, the picture has changed once again. May you live in interesting times.
• Are large, well attended memorial services like this the exception or the rule? Not even a dozen of us gathered in the Shakespeare Garden to spread my friend Ger's ashes. Dick had no memorial service. My parents, by request, had no memorial service. If I have one, it will be my wife's doing. Many of us disappear with far less fanfare. And relatively speaking, we seem more quickly forgotten, too. Here today, gone tomorrow. The end. The loners, the folks living on the fringe, on the edge, the non-joiners, the existentialists. Who remembers them?
  

The ex-wife made a profound impression on me. What a heart! What a mind! They had met in grad school, both nerds. They apparently had a fine marriage until everything changed in the 70s -- and the question becomes, well, did they then have a fine marriage before or was it just fine to him, a nightmare to her? To a degree, my posthumous play Oregon Dream addresses this question. When is memory an echo of the past and when is it a singular hallucination? Many men, I suspect, believe the former about their past marriages, and many women the latter. If this isn't a dramatic situation ha ha, what is?

After the funeral I ran into one of my favorite directors, who did my work in the late 70s, whom I run into about once every five or ten years.