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              My friend Freeman lived for an unlikely outcome: that things, despite all the evidence that his restless, skeptical mind made regular and thorough note of, would somehow prove to be wonderful; that the Universe would be incontrovertibly revealed to be in balance; that it would be shown that there is a reality greater and holier than we can see; and that there is even room for restless, skeptical minds in the nest of Creation.

              This was a quest, the patient and rigorous adventure of a sweet, brave soul that happened to be harnessed to a merciless, razor-sharp intellect. He could not abide the tragic stupidity of cruelty, of greed, of unfounded bias. But he could no more abide the airy assumptions of people – and I could, at times, count myself among their number – who are so eager to believe that everything is metaphysically harmonic that they will accept the most amazing shams of reasoning. We all want to feel like we understand how things really are, because it is so difficult and scary and confusing to acknowledge that we don’t, in general, have the slightest idea of how things really are. Most of us content ourselves with a few talismans of belief, and do our best to ignore or rationalize the inevitable discrepancies. Freeman just kept looking, kept himself moving forward, not with a story told in scripture, and not with the sterile “that’s it” arguments for atheism, but with a kind of ongoing measurement of, and comparison to everything he saw, and thought, and felt

              It is difficult to describe how this manifested in daily life. Watching a horse run, Freeman was as likely to comment on vectors and evolutionary adaptation as he was to recite a poem, or break into a run himself. Once when I arrived in Boston after sailing there from Maine, he was happy about my exhilaration, serene in assessing this short voyage in the vast history of  voyaging, and curious as to the quality and effectiveness of my foulweather gear. In other words, he tended to treat any event as an opportunity to explore and find meaning on many levels.

              Once, he and Susan and I went out for supper at a classy little Italian restaurant that was buried deep in the heart of old Boston. We returned to the car to find it wedged so tightly between two other cars that you could barely fit a hand between the bumpers – it was obvious that we would have to wait for one of the other drivers to return. But then Freeman said, "Wait a minute...", and began looking closely. Then we all looked, and saw that each of the three cars was parked at some slight angle to the curb, and that the curb itself described a slightly convex arc, and that these factors, plus the ludicrously small space between cars, appeared to provide a way out. And sure enough, after a lot of forward and reverse, and a great lot of aerobic steering wheel activity, plus a bit of judicious bumper-nudging, we managed to get the car out of its space. And onto the sidewalk.

              It was a very narrow sidewalk, but we were able to get to an opening at the corner with only minor loss of paint. Giddy and elated beyond all reason, we drove away. After a while Freeman said, “Sometimes the only way out, is in.”

 

              He was married to a woman, Susan, who could be taken as an embodied definition of ebullience. He had two very young daughters, icons of zest and curiosity. He had a job as technical editor at Sail magazine, in which he got to study, use, and write about cutting-edge sailing gear, as well as to interact with the amazingly skilled, knowledgeable, and often foolhardy and ego-driven people who used that gear. He had a life, in other words, comprising stability and adventure, romance and pragmatism, poetry and tech-head tinkering.

              If this all sounds like a eulogy, it is, at least in part. Freeman died fourteen years ago this month, of Lou Gehrig’s Disease (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS). As a friend of mine once said, it is hard to imagine a more horrible way to die. Nerve by nerve, your body goes away from you, so that you lose control first of fine motions, then gross, and then ultimately everything, including breathing, and all the while your mind is perfectly fine, utterly aware of the ceaseless erosion of mobility, of expressive ability, of action. If ever there were a test of courage, this is it. Not the kind of courage it takes to run into a burning building, but the kind it takes to hold on to good-heartedness, generosity, optimism, and patience, in the face of an implacable, unbeatable enemy. There are many stories of people who have faced this killer with stalwart grace, including Mr. Gehrig himself, but surely none surpass that of Freeman in his final months. I will not even attempt to give you examples; instead, just imagine the most gracious, dynamic, caring, intelligent, and attentive friend you could ever have, and then somehow try to imagine that friend staying that way, while losing everything.

              If I believed, as many people seem to, that Heaven were a sure bet, or knew without a doubt that it at least existed, I might be able to manage that kind of nobility. And likewise if I were certain that my last breath was truly the end of me, I might be able to muster  a moment-by moment appreciation for life. But Freeman had neither of those things. Nor did he have a wishy-washy agnosticism, or a powerful sense of denial; his fine-grained intellectual honesty precluded that, as well as belief and disbelief, both of which are enemies of exploration; when you think you understand something, you limit what it is. What he had instead was that ongoing quest, and an ongoing delight in the quest.

              In short, I never met such a wholly spiritual being who more stoutly refused to acknowledge his spirituality. Which brings me to one of our last conversations. He had long since graduated from walking, to wheelchair, to powered wheelchair, with a little joystick that he could just manage to move. Breathing, for him, was an aerobic activity. We took a stroll down the block and talked of many things. The topic of an afterlife came up, and he promised me that, if there is anything beyond this life, he would do his best to let me know. As I recall, his words were, “I’ll try to make it unmistakable. I’ll lay it on thick, so you’ll know it’s really me.” And then we laughed. A few weeks later he was dead.

              Months go by, and more months. Grief turns into fond sadness. And then, one year later, the January 1996 edition of Sail shows up in my mailbox. The photo below is the cover to that issue. It shows Freeman on the deck of a boat at sea. He is walking aft towards the camera, eyes closed, arms raised, and caught in mid-stride, so that he appears to be rising from the deck. Behind him, a reinforcing patch on the jib makes a halo around his head. A serene smile is on his lips. The boat is a Freedom, and it is running “wing-and-wing.”

                                         

                  Photo by Billy Black, courtesy of Sail Magazine

              I call up the magazine to tell them how much I appreciate this memorial cover, and then the story comes out. See, when they chose a cover, back in those pre-digital days, the art director would place dozens of candidate slides, submitted by assorted photographers, on a big light-table. Then the art director and chief editor, perhaps with others on the staff, would do a quick, skilled scan of the table, looking for color, composition, tone – just trying to get impressions, waiting to see something that might click with the coming issue’s content and themes. They’d winnow most of the slides out, and then take a closer look at the remainder. Now they might bring out a loupe and check for focus and fine detail. More winnowing. The slide they finally selected worked for everybody. And every one of the staff  later swore that they had no idea that it was a picture of their Freeman until much later in the process, when the picture was blown up to cover size, and the magazine was going to press. They barely had time to change the “on the cover” insert to identify him.

              Okay, okay, seems cosmic, but as Freeman might have said, there were extenuating circumstances. He’d worked closely with these people for years. They knew and loved him. Very possibly they recognized him, on some unconscious level at least, especially for an issue that would come out on the anniversary of his death… Or so one part of my brain contends.

              Another part, the inclined-to-cosmic-harmony part, responds, “Oh come on! Eyes closed, as in when they lay you out for the funeral? When was the last time you saw a magazine cover, especially for a vibrant subject like sailing, where someone had their eyes closed? And that halo? The ascension? The smile? “Freedom”, for crying out loud? “

              To which the more rational me replies, “Yeah, seems compelling, but you can’t ignore our capacity to pick up on extremely subtle cues. I admit that it is an odd photo, but that might be exactly what your unconscious would be drawn to.”

              It was hard to argue with the rational explanation. So all of us who knew him tended to gravitate to, well, to a wishy-washy agnosticism on the subject.

              Years go by. The editors of Cruising World, Sail’s main competitor, are getting ready to choose a cover. For some reason, a slide from Billy Black, which has been kicking around the office files for years, has made it onto the table. A slide that has already made an appearance on the cover of a rival magazine. This is a big no-no in the biz, as you might imagine. But there it is, and somehow no one remembers seeing it before, and it is the one they choose, out of all the scores of slides before them. This time they don’t even have time to identify Freeman before the magazine goes to press, because no one at that magazine recognizes him, more than four years after he died. So here comes the May 2000 issue of Cruising World, just in time to commemorate Freeman’s birthday…

             

                  Photo courtesy Billy Black and Cruising World Magazine

              This time the sensible me is having a harder time explaining things. “Now let me get this straight.” it says, “You’re saying that, long before he died, before he even knew he had ALS, Freeman somehow arranged to have a picture taken that, years later, would convince you that there was an afterlife? And then, I don’t know, he hypnotizes two separate editorial teams, years apart, into making him a cover boy?”

              At which question my ethereal side pauses, for a moment. And then answers, “Yes, pretty much. What if death is not a wall that divides us, but a filter for rules? Where Freeman is, chronology, so essential for us, is not present. And in any event, there the picture is.”

              “No,” says the rational self, “No, no, no. The world of sailing magazines is tiny. He was unquestionably a wonderful man. People remember him still. If he was supposed to lay it on thick, why choose magazines run by his friends? He’d have to know that someone like himself would see reasonable alternative explanations.”

              “Oh,” says my woo-woo self, “You mean he should have gotten his picture on the cover of Good Housekeeping? Or  Esquire? Would you really have been convinced if he had, or would you have found some other way out? Like claiming that those magazines had nothing to do with his life, or his friends, so any appearance there would just be an ALS human-interest story coincidence. He said he’d lay it on thick, and he did. He never claimed that he could satisfy willful skepticism.”

              My rational self retires, muttering, to a corner.

              More years go by, and more. I have no other miracles to report. I think that Freeman’s hand in this matter is about as unmistakable as it could be, but anything short of a full, physical resurrection would not be able to silence my reasonable-explanation self. And even that might not be enough – I’m reminded of the story of the farmer, who, seeing a giraffe for the first time, said, “There ain’t no such animal.”

              Which brings me to my last question: What if there is such an animal? What if we assume that my dear departed friend returned, and laid it on thick, to let me know that Death does not claim us? “Wow, thanks Freeman,” says Mr. Rational, “Now we know there’s an afterlife, in which you get to influence magazine cover selection. Great.” Mr. Rational can get a little sarcastic when things don’t  make sense. He wants Meaning and Certainty, not some enigma to confound everything he knows. “What is the point?” he asks. And there really is no answer to that question. Or none that we can make that won’t break the rational self into pieces. We need that self, as it is ideally adapted to the logical processes of daily life. I can write this story, and you can read it, because of that self. Freeman made a living with it, and it appears that he even used it to present us with the impossible – or, okay, the highly improbable.

              Maybe someday I’ll learn to do a better job of reconciling my two inner voices. Maybe there’s a bridge joining the fantastic and the mundane, and my metaphysical and utilitarian selves can learn to meet in its middle. Until then, I miss the man, but not in quite the way that I used to. He is gone, not out, but in. Wherever/whatever he is I love him, and wish him well.      

Copyright Brion Toss 02010

             

Fair leads,
Brion Toss