On Nov. 10, I wanted to get in touch with someone I had interviewed in the past for my newspaper. An expert in the field of excipients, if you want the nitty gritty here, and someone who was passionate about said excipients being regulated before being put into your medicine. A good guy in the hairy world of chemicals. So I wrote him an e-mail, asking him if he’d be interested in writing an article for me, telling him that I couldn’t believe how fast the year had gone, that my baby is almost one … and that I hoped the past year had been good to him as well.
Not five minutes later, his secretary called me and said that he had “died unexpectedly” over the weekend. Then she had a coughing fit and hung up.
It really does happen … the chin dropping, the dumb look, that comes with a mild case of shock. The secretary did call back once she stopped coughing and was kind enough to send me the funeral information.
I won’t pretend that I knew the guy well. Apart from the one interview I did and the subsequent telephone calls and occasional e-mails, I think I may have seen him one more time at a trade show. But somehow the whole idea that he was dead knocked the wind out of me that day. When I drove home from work, I stayed in the far-right lane, driving as slowly as possible without incurring the wrath of the Germans.
That evening, I was indulging in an embarrassing guilty pleasure – reading through a forum offered by the German version of Parenting magazine – when I came across one thread that said that a German soccer player was dead. I asked Björn, guru of all things soccer, if he had heard that Robert Enke had died. Shocked, he turned on the Teletext (something terribly unmodern but awesome in an old-school kind of way), and there was got our confirmation that this soccer player, just about our age with a baby and a wife, was dead. And later, the grim realization that he had killed himself.
Of course, I really didn’t know him at all personally, and I wasn’t a fan of his soccer team. But he always struck me as a nice guy. And somehow, his death made me endlessly sad.
It would be too hokey to wax wise on the irony of the two deaths, one wanted, the other not. Needless to say, Nov. 10 sucked big time.
Now, because of these two events happening close together, it has provided my brain with more worry fuel. What if …? I can make myself nuts by thinking about all of the possibilities for tragedy, lurking just around the corner. Particularly in times when all is well; I am always half-waiting for something to go wring. I know that it’s insane, and yet I can’t help myself. And I can do nothing admire the people – like Björn – who don’t spend the better part of their days worrying about eventualities. Must be nice. What do they do with all that extra brain capacity?
We watched Robert Enke’s funeral on TV last Sunday. The AWD-Stadium in Hannover was full, the governor of Lower Saxony made a speech, as did the mayor of Hannover and the president of the German soccer association.
On the following Tuesday, I went to Good Chemical Guy’s funeral, in a little chapel in a cemetery in Mainz. The only person I knew there was the one in the casket, and I felt like maybe I shouldn’t be there, since I didn’t really have that much of a connection with him. And yet it was all very sad, and I tried to keep my shit together by thinking of the whole thing as a lesson in German culture. It was my first German funeral, and I hope my last for a long time. I tried to find some mildly amusing points, but there just isn’t anything remotely funny about following a casket to the grave, where it is lowered into the ground so that the mourners can toss a shovelful of dirt onto it. They really do that here; I have never seen anything like that outside of my television.
Turns out you really can spell funeral without fun. Because when I get all uncomfortable, I like to make dumb-ass jokes.
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