Tragic Losses at the 50-Year Reunion

This post is not meant to be a downer, but it is somewhat cathartic for me to write it, meant to convey just how fragile life can be and the importance of keeping in touch with old friends.

My wife and I just attended my 50th high-school reunion on Saturday. There were about 475 kids in my public-school graduating class of 1976. Perhaps 200 or so showed up for the occasion held at a local yacht club. Some came to Cleveland from as far as Atlanta, Arizona, and Colorado. My wife and I live 3/4ths of a mile away and walked to it.

When I was first informed of the event by one of the organizers, who had been in all my classes since 6th grade, I wrote back to her giving a short list of people who I would love to meet up with again. The guy at the top of my list was Fred, a former wrestling buddy who, in the off-season, had won the National Greco-Roman Wrestling Championship in his weight class! I had known him since kindergarten but hadn't seen him since high school, and I knew from looking him up that he was involved in coaching and had won some sort of national veterans wrestling tournament at the age of 61 — at least according to his LinkedIn page.

The organizer wrote back to me and sadly informed me that Fred had died only two months earlier in April. I was, in a sense, devastated. I missed seeing him by only a few short months. I made a feeble attempt to contact him a few years ago, but I didn't follow through. I went looking for his obituary and found a YouTube video he posted only one month before he died, in which he was selling some wrestling apparel. He didn't look too well in the video, nor did he sound it. I would not have recognized him or his voice. I also discovered that he had tragedy in his life when his 22-year-old son, a recent Police Academy graduate, died in a drowning accident near his property about 15 years ago.

The reunion with the rest of my classmates was joyful and well worth the visit. However, shortly after we showed up, I was informed that Patty, another classmate whom I had known since kindergarten, had accepted her invitation and responded that she was coming just a couple of weeks earlier, and then died a couple of days afterward... I don't know what to say. I have yet to find an obituary on her.

I ran into one of my favorite people at the reunion, Jim. "Jimmy" was also a former wrestling buddy. I met him in 4th grade when we were put in an advanced placement program with 30 other kids. We all stayed in the same core class from elementary school through high school. Of the 15 boys in our class, he and I were among the few who played sports — football, baseball, and later wrestling. One of the others was comedian Drew Carey, who dabbled in wrestling for a while. If I remember correctly, the three of us were the only boys in the class who were in the school choir. In ninth grade we performed in a staged production of Gilbert & Sullivan's Pirates of Penzance, with Drew playing the lead role, Jim and me as pirates.

When I saw Jimmy, he had put on a good bit of weight and was using a walker, preferring to sit. Other than that, he looked and acted fine. He didn't look very old at all, and his handshake was plenty firm. The last time I had seen him was at our 25th reunion. I kind of regretted not looking him up during the interim. We had a good old time reminiscing together, as he did with many other people. Jim, my wife and I were among the last few people to leave the venue when they kicked us out at 10:00 PM. As we were walking out, with Jim behind me, I saw his ex-wife coming the other way, and they exchanged a few awkward but cordial-sounding words.

The next day, on Sunday, just before 7:00 in the evening, I received an e-mail from the organizing committee, thanking us for attending the reunion and mentioning the sad news that Jim had died earlier that day. No more details were given. His 68th birthday would have been the next day.