I See You

A few years ago someone I vaguely knew from the church we went to friended me on Facebook. I have not gone to this church very much in the last few years, but for a long while we were pretty active there. Mark joined the bike club and I got involved in social events – a couple of auction committees, the 150th anniversary of the church, the going away party for a beloved priest. I met a lot of people doing those events, and I knew this friend requestor. He and his wife were musicians and were frequently asked to provide entertainment. I was never the one doing the asking and our interchanges were no more than brief “hellos”, but I don’t think they ever said no to helping out in whatever way they were needed. So in light of the brevity of our interactions and my absence from there for awhile, I was surprised he even knew me at all.

He didn’t post much but occasionally his name would pop up on my feed. The regularity of that happening seemed more in recent months and I got the impression he was sick. I thought about inquiring of mutual friends who would know but that seemed intrusive to me. Does the health of someone you barely know in person, and only incrementally more through social media, allow you to poke around in their life to ask why the sudden surge in photos of a noticeably thinner version? I didn’t think so but I wondered about it often, because even in a digital world there was a kindness to him that I had recognized years before.

What I had gathered on my own was confirmed when his wife posted on his page that he was turning inward on his journey, and though his page was still up, he was headed elsewhere. It was poignant and not a surprise. A few days later, she recounted their wedding day – not with the grief that must have been bearing down on her for months, but a touching recounting of the snowy day that started their marriage. Three days after that she wrote that her husband had died peacefully. It wasn’t until the following morning that I read the news and the shock and sadness of the death of someone I barely knew surprised me. Why I was staring at a Facebook post on my phone crying for someone on the periphery of my life? Someone I was certain wouldn’t know who I was if he saw me in the grocery store. Why did this feel like a baseball bat to my knees? The condolences that were shared would confirm what I thought I already knew about him. This was a very decent man.

In the hours that followed I would chalk up my sad reaction to his death as the stress of my own life lately, and the toxic swirl of hate that seems to be overwhelming us all. It wasn’t him that was making me sad, it was everything, and all day that everything-that-wasn’t-him sat like a rock in the pit of my stomach. I decided to pick up the rock and flip it over to see what I had missed, and underneath I found plenty of chances to know this man more. It was clear that he was deeply loved and admired so why didn’t I go further than the briefest of greetings? This rock was laden with regret.

And then I remembered something. Following my dad’s death, somebody left a handwritten letter in the mailbox saying how sorry she was when she heard the news, that she had admired my father from afar when she saw him at church, and though she never knew him she wanted to express her sympathies to his family. We were stunned when Mom passed the letter around. “Who is this,” we asked her. She had no idea.

There are a lot of reasons to admire someone who would do something like that but it wouldn’t be until this week that I would come to understand it.

Many people live in the periphery of our lives and their leaving is not a cruel teaching moment for conversations that never happened, friendships never formed, a thousand missed opportunities.

It is an affirmation that all along the way you saw them. Oh my did you ever see them, and for reasons you couldn’t begin to explain you are better for it.