Now I Lay Him Down

A eulogy for an ordinary man

I have been asked to say a few words about my friend Larry, who Father Tim says has passed on to a better life. Few people in this room have ever met Larry. He outlived his parents, which is normal, and his only sibling, which is not uncommon. He outlived both his wife and his only son, which is not so usual. So, in lieu of a relative, and as the only known surviving friend of the deceased, I have been asked to do this.

If you knew Larry and, as far as I know, only one other person in this chapel actually ever met him (an attendant at the inanely-named Heaven’s Gate Hospice), you would know that he was an ordinary man. Like most people, he had the gifts most mortals receive as their birthright. He learned to crawl, walk and talk at an early age — not earlier than most, but not later either. At the right time, he attended school, got passing grades, suffered crushes, and made it without incident to his high school graduation. He did his hitch, got a job, held a job, married a girl, raised a child, lost a wife, lost a child, got old, got sick and died.

I say he was ordinary and I mean no offense. We are all ordinary — although many of us have secrets, some more interesting than others, some broadcast to the world, others hidden in closets, bedrooms, bars, barns or brothels. But nearly everyone harbors in the darkest depths of their nonexistent soul something unpardonable, unforgiveable or at least unmentionable. I don’t know if Larry was an exception. If he had secrets, he shared them with no one. I, of course, have many.

After Army basic training, Larry and I spent two years in cold storage in a series of godforsaken camps in Arizona with no one to kill and nothing but targets to shoot our M1s at. We clocked the months by polishing boots and brass, wasting time in mess halls, beer halls, marches, and misery. He never complained.

If you had actually met him and you looked into the coffin — a very simple, practical coffin — you’d see a dead body that looks nothing like him. As far as I know, he never wore makeup or lipstick. When alive and before the chemo yanked it out, he had a healthy head of grey hair. The mortician would never make it as a hairdresser — auburn was not his color.

You see before you the earthly remains of a boy who was a man and, then the shadow of a man who, according to the Rev. Tim, passed on to a better life: a proposition that I might challenge if we had the time, but I have been asked to be brief so we can get the service over with. You may be in a hurry to get home to read a story to your kids before lights out, but since this is lights out for my friend, please bear with me for a few more minutes. This funeral is the only chance he gets to be the center of attention.

Once upon a time when dials on telephones were the latest innovation, a boy named Larry was born in Nowhere, Pennsylvania. Larry was ordinary. His parents were ordinary. His body was ordinary, although during the endless days and nights that we spent on our bunks in Nowhere, Arizona, I noticed he was a little taller, a little more fit, and a bit more blessed with good looks than the other conscripts. I would never have mentioned that, of course.

Among the highlights of his youth was bobbing apples on Halloween in a neighbor’s garage, playing hide-and-seek and king-of-the-hill, skinny-dipping in the creek below his family’s farm, and — he confided this to me after a night of too much beer — he once compared the size of his dick with that of a neighbor’s boy. (His was larger, he was proud to reveal.) It was the most intimate discussion we ever had. We never whored — we were too young, too timid, and too isolated in the wastelands of that arid state. We masturbated, of course, but never together. This is a eulogy, not a confession.

After the Army, we talked from time to time: ‘How are you doing?” and “What are you doing?” —simple, phatic conversations mostly. Nothing actually true on my part; nothing unusual or unexpected on his.

I enjoyed the blanket blankness of his life because it gave dimension — a firmament — to my own. While my life pranced around the cusp of a volcanic crater and among the fumes and fury emanating from the bowels of the earth, his ambled slowly along a straight and narrow prairie path.

Six decades passed in this way. Larry never surprised me, never raised an eyebrow, never acknowledged the burning pain that must simmer in every human heart. So I was surprised when Larry — or someone Larry dictated to — wrote these florid words to me last month: “I am in Purgatory at Heaven’s Gate. The light of life is dimming and I can’t see the other side of the river Styx.”

It was a highly uncharacteristic allusion for a man whose life was devoid of poetry or emotion.

“More to the point, my friend,” he said, “I need you to help me get on the boat.”

I was both surprised and pleased. Dormant within him had been the spark that I believe all men share — the will to act decisively, to master their own lives or, in this case, their own deaths.

He was alone, he said, as he really had been all of his life. He had no one, and knew no one he could trust but me. He was, he said, a hostage to a hospice. Medicare refused to be his executioner. The neurotic nurse that checked in on him and the half dozen other demented denizens of that demi-world (my words, of course: I met them) had moral, religious, legal or financial reasons to refuse his requests. He needed someone to sign his discharge papers and, as his friend and former comrade at arms, he said I could be authorized to do it. “Please do it,” he wrote.

I did it. I did not receive the god gene and have had no desire to be born again, so I had no compunction about helping ease Larry into a better life.

I know I have belabored the “ordinary” point. Do I expect everyone to be exceptional? Well, perhaps I do, and I am usually disappointed. Larry had been the least likely candidate.

Perhaps the threads that tie errant lives together are stronger than the documents that we sign. His marriage contract was annulled by death. His parents died, he said, convulsing in tandem in twin hospital beds with tubes through their nostrils and into what remained of their emphysematic lungs. He duly authorized the empathetic pulling of the plugs.

His son — a boy familiarly possessed by the ordinary and terminally friendless — survived high school, only to succumb a few weeks later to the most outmoded infirmity. The kid stepped on a rusty nail at a time when no one in the civilized world ever died of tetanus. His crazy mother had failed to have him vaccinated. If it had not been for the lockjaw, the boy would have protested the injustice of it. Larry did not.

By the time he was the idiot’s age of 80, Larry had little to show for a life of works and days, of years of solitary meals, of punching clocks, of TV dinners and sitcoms, of wondering if the meaning of life was something that ordinary people should think about.

A eulogist usually lists the deceased’s achievements. To my knowledge, Larry had none. I don’t know if he had secrets, I hope so. But in all the years I knew the man, in all his letters, phone calls, and, finally, text messages, he never wavered from his steadfast ordinariness. He was an honest man.

I don’t think he has gone on to a better life. I think his time, like my time, and your time, has been the best time that he or any of us will ever have. I think that what we have experienced in the years we have survived on this planet have been our best years. If we don’t see it that way, we are truly idiots; we are blind and stumbling in the dark.

When we stop breathing and our veins are pumped with formaldehyde and we become facsimiles with makeup and bad hair, we are not more, we are not less: we are nothing.

Before that moment arrives, go home. Go to the baptisms, birthdays, weddings and anniversaries, Enjoy the ordinary moments of every day of your lives, cherish and guard your secrets, go on with living.

Funerals are for the dead. Let us bury them. Like Larry, you may want to hustle it along. That is your birthright. If you are lucky, you may have a friend who can steady your hand as you board that beneficent boat. Or if you are like most, you will just trudge slowly alone into the shadow of night.

You may not have known him, but I thank you for taking your time to be here with me and Reverend Tim to honor Larry — and to glimpse for an instant how an ordinary man can, if just for a moment, become extraordinary.