A man I knew not very well died this past week. His name was Roland Haertl. He was well into his 80s, so I can hardly claim to be surprised, but I’d just seen him on our regular Zoom call, for the writing class we shared for the last two years. The small overlap of our lives, and its mutual amusement and regard was a kind of joy I think I can only appreciate in my own middle age.
Born in 1936, Roland was roughly the age of my mother, but had perhaps more the temperament and life experience of my father: exuberant and confident of his own wit, a survivor of war, familial separation, and geographic displacement. In our shared class he was writing a memoir of a very full life that began in what is now the Czech Republic, and wound its way across oceans, through financial success and misadventure, parenthood, and several marriages.
An engineer and entrepreneur by training, prose was not perhaps Roland’s best skill. But he had a way of capturing love and remembering beauty that spoke to me. His approach to reading and commenting on others’ stories was both gleeful and blunt. His writing conveyed diverse interests, his unfiltered appreciation of humanity, gratitude for his own considerable good fortune, and an appetite for knowing more, even as the years weighed down his limbs and he cheekily drafted his own obituary.
We were more than acquaintances, but I’d feel presumptuous calling us friends. A small corner of each of our lives fell into a small space in the other’s and it made that small bit of my life sparkle. Lives need those little interstitial pieces, with each bright spot here or there falling into a larger mosaic that sometimes I can’t even see.
I only met Roland in person a few times. When we met, he gave me a kiss on the cheek and an affectionate squeeze of the fingers. One of the first pieces of his that I read was his memory of sharing a pear with is grandfather, so when he hosted a gathering for our class, I brought him a jar of home canned pears.
When I was younger, at least into my twenties, if not longer, connections to other people came in large, gaudy chunks: passionate crushes, desperate need to fit in with friends, struggles to differentiate self from others that filled my whole field of vision. I had brief, interesting acquaintances in those years: the woman who taught me to make bobbin lace when I was a tween, a Kiowa WWII veteran who I met in a laundromat in Oklahoma in college, but I experienced them as detours from the larger path.
By my forties I could detect and value more diffuse relationships: long connections over space and time with college classmates and distant relatives. I learned the comfort of a web of subtler connections, and how to cultivate friendships that endure without either frequent or intense contact.
I might have known and appreciated Roland in my twenties or thirties, instead I knew him mostly as a Zoom square among a dozen others, for two years, as I entered my fifties. And we had the intimacy of one another’s stories: how he scarcely saw his father between the ages of 3 and 10, how I never knew my father as anything but an older, thwarted man. His stories were sometimes poignant, and never apologetic, although at times I thought they ought to be.
An imposing iceberg of a life can emerge a bright fragment in someone else’s story. I got to share a little bit of the end of Roland’s long, rocky and sometimes raucous path. He shared a bit of mine and I’m grateful.
One of the last things I wrote that Roland read was a bit where I ruminated on mortality—a topic he certainly had more experience with than I. His comment was, “I liked it! I read it! Twice!”. Here is the piece Roland read. Twice.
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Enough
I logged into Facebook on New Years Day to find a post from a former neighbor who moved to Medford a few years ago and who posts on Facebook maybe once a year. This year’s post was a picture of her husband Matt, who died last year of pancreatic cancer, a few months shy of his fiftieth birthday. She said “I still love him, and I miss him every day”.
I’m getting to the age where loss of my peers doesn’t seem so shocking as it did even five years ago, but I still feel some disquiet. When one of my dearest college friends passed away in 2019, her wife said at her memorial, “Ellis wanted more life.” She was not looking to be remembered for her graceful acceptance of her fate. And not only that, I wanted more Ellis. It was not enough life.
I think one of the (several) reasons I “hoard” people is to search for clues about what is enough, constantly measuring, comparing details. I keep track of the casual acquaintances, connecting on social media with elementary school classmates I haven’t seen since 1986 and will likely never meet again in person, sending Christmas cards to childhood friends or distant cousins whose politics and voting patterns are inimical to my values. I stay in touch not only with old boyfriends, but keep track of their nieces and nephews. I nourish a constant stream of data to tell me how much is “enough”, whether measured in years, love, or otherwise.
I am roughly a year older than Matt. Our oldest children were born within a month of one another, both part of the crop of about 8 babies born on our street that summer. Those babies are 16, most with younger brothers and sisters. Matt was a tall burly blond man. Perhaps one of his boys was able to grin and look him in the eye, measuring against his height, before he died. They won’t be able to look out and catch his eye in the crowd when they finish high school.
Whose “enough” counts? 49 is generous in some parts of the world. If the classical measure of a man’s life is Three Score and Ten, then Two Score and Nine sounds close. But if 49 is enough life for a man, it is not enough for Matt’s boys.
There was a time in my life when I was “the one without a baby” among my peers, and I would admire and envy the babies my friends brought to barbeques, or book group. One such baby who came to book group was solemn newborn named Maisie, with a thick tuft of brown hair. I kept loosely in touch with Maisie’s mother as we both moved away from the town where we met, then one day her social media held nothing but a link to Caring Bridge: a website primarily for communicating about health journeys, frequently terminal ones. Maisie had cancer. She was six. The treatment updates became less optimistic, and a rare update written by her father described how he found a bridal magazine in the hospital room and asked about it. His wife sternly informed him she and Maisie were planning Maisie’s wedding. A thousand miles away I cried in my office. There was not enough of Maisie’s life for Maisie’s mother.
Can one aggregate lives to get to enough? I know it doesn’t work that way, but I knew Maisie had an older brother and a younger sister. She died when my own two older children were tiny. I suspect her death played a part in my having a third child. I couldn’t bear to leave one of my children alone after my husband and I are gone, feeling they stood a better chance of being enough together.
Ten years ago this month I went to a funeral for the son of one my law partners. Joseph was just out of the Coast Guard Academy, training on the crew of a rescue helicopter lost at sea. I cried for his parents, and the universal rule that a parent should not have to bury a child. But ten years later I still cry for Joseph’s only sibling, his less athletic older brother who always came panting up the hill second when they went running and Joseph beat him to the top every time. His stoic, dry eyed eulogy for Joseph finished, “I’ll wait for you at the top.” Joseph certainly didn’t have enough life, but his older brother didn’t have enough of Joseph’s life either.
“Insurance” is not a good enough reason to have a child. Any wise person will tell you that. But when Joseph’s brother grieved him, I remembered Maisie’s brother and sister.
Matt’s death, the ending of a life that no longer overlapped with mine at all, caused me to tally the lives in my internal reference library, looking for one that I thought was “enough”: in duration, or depth, or some other measure. The women in my family reliably live into their 90s, and several to over 100. I think of myself as being half past life. But is it overly generous to live so long—an embarrassment of riches, perhaps?
Simply being not dead isn’t enough either. I think about my parents, or my father-in-law, who all lived to at least 80, but whose lives faded in one way or another before they flickered out entirely, leaving a layer of unrealized hopes. Or my sister’s former brother-in-law, dead this winter of a drug overdose at 45. Whatever the source of his pain was, it drove him to pills and repeated incarceration. His own life was not enough for him, long before it ended.
Deaths of people I scarcely knew—a girl met once as a newborn, a young man I saw once as his proud father introduced him around the office, a broken former welder and absent father two divorces removed—leave little trail markers along my path in life, like a single wolf track in the mud, or a bit of broken seabird egg on a beach. I’m scrying meaning from tiny bits of others’ whole stories.
It’s no easier to learn from lives where the whole story rests its weight on mine, like my Granny. I am born of her blood and her death is a dark gouge in my inventory of lives. I felt sure her life wasn’t done at 77, although her health had been troubling her. Perhaps because she died by violence, and whatever “enough” means, it shouldn’t mean one’s last minutes are pain, rage, and fear.
For now, after pondering for some days, I decide my Uncle Andrew might have had “enough” life. Married to one of my father’s older sisters, he was a genial, scholarly man who died at 96, in his sleep. He survived war, famine, displacement, immigration, possibly a mysterious tragic love affair, and the loss of two of his own children. He lived out his final years mostly sound of mind, in the luxury of a retirement community in northwest Portland. He basked in the epitome of Chinese patriarchal good fortune, seven successful adult grandsons, who wept at his funeral. I wept too, but surely that was enough life.
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Roland Haertl self-published his memoir “Escape to Freedom” last year. It is on Amazon. He supported the ACLU and the Democratic Party, which is particularly salient since he was among the last generation to have lived under actual Nazis.
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rage. creation - joy 