If you Google the quote, “They say you die twice. Once when you stop breathing and the second, a bit later on, when somebody mentions your name for the last time", the ever amusing Internet will supply sources of its origin as diverse as Banksy, Ernest Hemingway, and 'the ancient Egyptians'. My money is on those Egyptians because, well, they were ancient and, therefore, had a massive head start spinning off little bits of wisdom.
These words resounded this week because December 18th is the birthday of my marvelous friend, Peter Garczyinski. We met when we were seventeen in 1969 on moving-in day of our freshman year at Manhattan College, which ever oddly is in The Bronx. We remained close friends and confidants until Peter died suddenly one June morning in 2007 at the absurdly too soon age of fifty-five. That horrible happened just a few weeks prior to his scheduled retirement after thirty years of teaching high school English, a vocation in which as his obituary had it, he “guided countless students through the rigors and beauty of the English language, from the meaning of the word aphorism (look it up and realize that this piece by me is NOT aphoristic) to the imagery in Shakespeare's plays.” Peter was out for his morning jog in Saratoga Springs that sunny Friday before heading to school in Queensbury NY to proctor an English exam when ‘the widowmaker’ lived up to its terrible title and instantly made a pained and grieving widow of his brilliant, ever astonishing wife, Heather.
Peter had immediate plans to travel the world with Heather in that retirement and instead suddenly perished, which prompts me today to plant his name here in pixels and digits so that he'll live yet near what would have been his 72nd birthday. I will tell you that as a roommate he demanded that I fry ' perfect bacon', that we drove 24 hours straight to Florida twice, that he helped me move to Saratoga in 1976 and then decided whimsically to stay and lasted much longer there than I did, that he was a fervent Mets fan who didn’t really understand baseball, that he played Happy Birthday on the accordion to each of us on our birthdays each year, that he was a careful and devoted father to his children, and a steadfast friend upon whom I could rely for both honesty and sympathy. And that I miss him as all of us miss those friends who were so important to shaping us and who then were torn from pages of our lives.
We grow nearer death each day. Sorry about that reality check, but that awareness sharpens with each further step in the rocky landscape known as the 70s and I don't mean the decade of absolutely terrible clothes and too much disco, but rather the mountains beyond the biblical range of three score and ten at which friends drop away too frequently. So, we could be saying names all the time. Fine idea that.
We need not say only the names of those we know. Power rises from chanting the names of those strangers that we mourn because of the sadness and wrongness
of their deaths. (Thank you, Janelle Monae.) Of all the things we post on these platforms perhaps those that affect me the most are the tributes that I see to siblings and parents who also have 'shuffled off this mortal coil'. And in reading those often brief but always emotive tributes and mementos, I think each time that the loved one hasn’t disappeared from this earth irrevocably because as those ancient Egyptians promised someone is still mentioning their names. And so it is for Peter today; for me he still lives.