Paris...in memoriam...and how we are young

There were about 40 U of C students studying in Paris with me and I didn’t know any of them before I got there. In high school I had acquaintances but few real friends, and I was glad when I came to college and was able to find a group of close friends. I thought I was set; I had figured out how to interact with people. Then I was in Paris and it was like high school all over again.

So for the first few weeks I was lonely. I didn’t have people I could just hang out with, I could just be with.

Three weeks after I arrived in Paris, when I still didn’t have a group of good friends, I came back to my room that looked like the Ikea version of a prison cell and saw that Dennis had sent me a message.

I went to middle school with Dennis, then high school, then college. We were close in middle school, part of the same 4 person group of guys. Then in high school I think he got fed up with my talking and my whining and we stopped really hanging out. In college, we keep telling each other we’ll do coffee, but we’ve only done it once.

The most time we’ve spend together after middle school was when we went to Davenport, Iowa to canvass for John Kerry. We went out together in the Davenport volunteer coordinator’s red truck and talked about old times in middle school.

There were only 48 kids in my class, so we both knew all the players, and Dennis was my main source for gossip from middle and high school. So we went over who was where, doing what, all those things that make you want to go to reunions. It was a good time.

The message he sent me in Paris was less fun though. The message read:

Brian,

I appologize for neglecting to inform you of the first piece of information earlier.

In mid-December Peter Bildner overdosed on heroin and died. He had been in rehab in Florida and was apparently doing well.

This morning, Taryn King collapsed unexpectedly and died while on study abroad in Ireland. This cause is still unknown.

I can't believe that two members of our class have died in less than a month and half.

I hope you are enjoying Paris.

Dennis

I hadn’t been close with Peter or Taryn. I remembered that Peter had brown hair and deep brown eyes. I realize now they maybe looked deep all the time because he was on something. He was a funny kid. I hadn’t known he was in rehab, or even that he was in trouble.

I remember Taryn’s red hair, but that was about it. In what I now see as an absurd example of the ways technology has changed the world, I instinctively looked her up on the Facebook. I guess I wanted to see who she had become.

Her wall had become a bizarre forum for messages of grief, like a white cross on the side of the highway with flowers. She had turned into a beautiful young woman who seemed to be living a nice life, like so many people do.

And then she was in Ireland and then she was dead. She had just collapsed. One moment, alive and bright, the next, on the floor, deathly ill.

I was scared and I was sad. Out of 48 people, 2 were dead by 22, and everyone knew Sam didn’t have long, though not everyone knew why. When I saw Dennis in Iowa, he said they were considering having a 5-year reunion instead of a 10-year reunion so Sam could go.

And I couldn’t avoid seeing the parallels. I had been thinking of going to Ireland after the program in Paris was done. I was abroad, without real friends, out of my life, and tomorrow I could have been hit by a crazy French driver or just fallen down with no explanation. My mortality became uncomfortably real, and my death became maturely possible.