It is now 08 January 1996. Going into semester break three weeks ago, I thought I might avoid in 1995 the spectre of death which had reared its ugly head in Savoy in 1994. Alas, no. Okay, that was polite. Now in each of three years (1994, 1995, and 1996) I know someone who has died.

Warren Nygren

Died 22 December 1995 of stroke
His brother--my grandfather--died back in 1989, but while Weldon spent the last 110 days of his life in the hospital dying of lung cancer, Warren's death was unexpected. His massive stroke occured about a week before he died, but he had no indications of impending death prior. I don't remember when I last saw him--couldn't have been too many years ago, though, as he and his wife came to Illinois a few times (I went to California in 1987). He had his children gathered when he died, and his wife, and he died in peace overnight.

Thom Walls

Died 06 January 1996 of brain aneurysm
My father met Thom in the early 1980s when Thom was singing at the Hilton in Lisle where my father was working security. They hit it off well, with Dad singing with Thom on a couple occasions on stage. I remember one night being at the Walls's house in North Aurora listening to Thom and my father sing and resing "We Didn't See A Thing"--I always liked that recording; it made my father sound like a really good singer. Thom was very nice, and had a wonderful voice. He gave us audio tapes of four shows for us to listen to in the car on my family's 1984 car trip to Philadelphia. Time passed, we moved to Naperville (actually closer to North Aurora), and we drifted apart. Thom called once, must have been in about 1993, and I had to tell him that my father didn't live there anymore. Then in 1995, my father sent the Wallses a Christmas card. They sent one back, telling him that Thom was joining a new band effective the first of the year. Dad called them up, and both my parents went to go see him New Year's Eve--he was appearing in Oak Lawn. Same old Thom and Peggy, my parents said, and the stories bore them out: Thom singing wearing my father's hat, then going around later introducing my father as his brother. Sounds like 1984 to me: I can just hear Thom responding to someone asking why my father was wearing Thom's hat: "No, he's wearing his hat." (They ran the same routines 12 years earlier--I saw them a couple times.) Saturday was to have been Thom's first gig with the new band...but Sunday morning Peggy called my house with the news. No one had to tell me he was dead, either; I have only ever heard one person in hysterics half as much as Peggy was that morning, and that was 13 November 1994. He died at the keyboard, six songs into his first set with the new band, doing what he loved best.
"Life is made up of meetings and partings; that is the way of it." -- Kermit the Frog, The Muppet Christmas Carol
What is to be learned of these deaths among us (or at least among me)? I don't know. From the People-have-to-die-eventually school of thought, I compare Warren's and Weldon's respective deaths. I think I am more comfortable with Warren's; it was a shock, to be sure, but it was not an ordeal like his brother's. I watched my grandfather wither away and my grandmother get more and more depressed as his condition worsened in 1988 and 1989, and after all that, his eventual death was a great relief. As far as with Thom, there is pure shock value. I could dwell on the fact that he was two years younger than my father is now, but I don't, for much the same reasons that I don't dwell on it when I read in the news that a policeman gets killed somewhere--it could have been him, but it wasn't. What I see out of this, particularly since my parents saw Thom for the first time in at least a good three years a week before he died, is the importance of keeping relationships alive. I made one New Year's resolution this year: "To blatantly offend, alienate, and otherwise piss off fewer people than I did last year (or the year before)," as I put it in my .plan file. Getting people mad at you is one thing, though; losing them entirely is another, and is far more scary. I can list five people who I have seen for a combined total of under an hour in the last seven months; five people who I count among my friends nonetheless, and upon whose death immediately I would kick myself for a solid week. Another two of my friends, each at least as important to me as any of those five, I have not seen nor heard from for stretches of four to six weeks at a time for one reason or another. I have actually thought several times about what I would do if one of these friends died, as have I wondered how these seven individuals would handle my death. I don't mean to be morbid, but these last three deaths I have seen (the first of the three is Bob Martin, died 12 November 1993 in a plane crash) have shown me that (1) people do not un-die, and (2) people often do not die on schedule. I'm only thankful that Thom did die of a cause rather than an accident--I have had enough accidental death for a good long time. I may miss my friends, but there is a chance out there somewhere that I may meet each of them again. Losing that chance is not something I want to have to do. The moral I suppose is then that I should increase that chance wherever possible. I have learned, I think, as has my father before me, that there are too many important things in life to let something stupid get in the way. Taking that to heart, I hope that I fail to alienate anybody for something that doesn't really matter. It's hard to create friends; it's easy to lose them; it can sometimes be unexpectedly impossible to get them back.
Jason Elliot Benda -- 08 January 1996 -- 04:00 CST
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