Life Goes On

Indeed, life does go on. This simple phrase carries a lot of wisdom – through challenges, joys, difficulties, and triumphs, the world continues to turn and time moves forward. I have noted this reality on many occasions. The most obvious of them is when someone you know or love passes on. Yes, “There’s got to be a morning after” – that’s the opening line to “The Morning After,” the Academy Award-winning song from the 1972 film “The Poseidon Adventure,” performed by Maureen McGovern. The song speaks to hope and perseverance through difficult times, suggesting that after darkness comes light, after storms come calm, and that we can find strength to continue forward even when things seem bleak. When my mother died in 2017, I used the few months following her death, a time when I was more at loose ends than normal, to sit down and write her biography. I often tell people that it is one of the most cathartic things you can do after the loss of a loved one. To put yourself into someone’s life from start to finish and immerse oneself completely in the life and times lived by another is the ultimate homage to that person’s life. You come away feeling that you know the person as well as anyone can and that you have, in a manner of speaking, walked a mile in their shoes.

A few years ago I lost a good friend. Forty years ago when I took over a large area of the bank I worked for, there was a person three levels below me who I happened to meet. His name was Greg. He was someone who worked for someone who reported directly to me. He was one of 4,000 under my command, but if I had gathered a list of sharp up-and-comers in the Department, he would have been one of the top people on that list. I was young in that job so he was only 7-8 years my junior at the time, but he had a young and fresh way about him and seemed to blend that knowledgeable insight that is so valuable with the socialization skills needed to get things done from a leadership perch. Despite our difference in rank, I kept an eye on him and made sure he knew that I knew who he was and what he was up to. A few years later, after we had each gone our own way from a few years, he found his way back to my doorstep, looking for his next opportunity. I happily pulled him into a project I was working on as I did with a half dozen other colleagues. We spent nine months working closely together and he became my clear number 2, a person I could say I saw as my protege. When a different situation came up for me, I very quickly offered him the opportunity to come aboard in a senior capacity. Despite the momentary sense he had that my departure was an abandonment, her readily agreed and resumed his role as my protege. To all the other subordinates around me at the time, he was my heir apparent even though I had no plans to go anywhere for some time. That put him in a challenging spot with his peers, but with me he was always the guy who seemed most like me in terms of skills and potential. He never let me down. When I got married to Kim in 2007, he and two other close colleagues compared and performed a song, “My Grogg” to the tune of My Girl. It was the hit of our wedding party and he was the lead vocalist. He and I kept in touch over the ensuing years and talked often of doing another project together. Then one day, out of the blue, I got a call informing me that on an after-dinner neighborhood walk, Greg had keeled over and died rather suddenly. In the blink of an eye, he was gone.

Every time I travel to New York City, I try to get together with the diminishing cadre of work friends I accumulated there. One of my favorite groups to gather with was the three guys who sang at my wedding to Kim. We would tell stories and laugh across the table for hours until someone had to go home. After Greg died and still to this day, the rest of us gather and try to recreate that feeling when we were all sitting around laughing. We still do a fairly good job at it, but we always take note of the fact that Greg is no longer with us. None of us can completely get our heads around the fact that life has simply gone on without Greg…and mostly hasn’t lost a beat. Greg will never know that he continues to occupy a warm place in our hearts and that he has served to teach us all an important lesson that we are all just another pebble on the beach and that our passing will likely not go unnoticed, but will fade into the backdrop of the world as surely as God made little green apples. “And it don’t rain in Indianapolis in the summertime…” Those are the lyrics from “Little Green Apples,” a classic song written by Bobby Russell that became a hit for several artists, including Roger Miller and O.C. Smith in the late 1960s. The song uses everyday certainties (like God making little green apples) as metaphors for the narrator’s certainty about their love. It’s a sweet, folksy way of expressing absolute confidence in something – in this case, love, but also the inevitability of loss and that life does, indeed, keep going on.

I just had another such moment. A dear friend of mine has been suffering from cancer and taking weekly chemotherapy treatments, with all that that entails. He just received word that they have now identified that he has another form of cancer as well and will have to have surgery next month to determine the best course of action for that new cancer. We had made plans for he and his wife to join us on a trip on an old steam train from London to Edinburgh Scotland later this Fall. It was a Christmas Market tour of the Edinburgh Christmas Market. My friend is very fond of London, having done his graduate studies there many years ago. He was clearly looking forward to it, both to recapture some of his youth, but also to demarcate the end of his chemotherapy. Now that won’t be the case and as the diagnosis was confirmed, he had to say that he could no longer expect to go with us to London. We were sad for a number of obvious reasons. I happened to see on LinkedIn, a notice from an old high school friend who produces movies, that his recent film has been given an award by the Prague Film Festival. He noted that it was even more meaningful since he family was originally from Prague. Our travel plans after Edinburgh are to fly to Prague to enjoy that Christmas Market. So, I noted in the LinkedIn comments that we were doing that and that he and his wife should meet us there. Instead of hearing from that high school friend, another friend who apparently follows my high school friend on LinkedIn (who knew?) commented and asked about the trip to Prague. Apparently, it was on his and his wife’s bucket list. I called and explained the itinerary and that we might be able to swap out my ill friend’s tickets for the benefit of securing a spot on the train and trip for these folks. Strangely enough, both men are my only friends who share the first name Frank. Before we knew it, we had switched over the tickets, saving Frank #1 the cancellation fee and securing for Frank #2 a seat on the steam train (with high tea included) and an onward visit to Prague.

I am hoping that Frank #1 comes through his cancer ordeals with flying colors and I will stay close to that situation despite the travel plans changes. But it is hard not to be reminded of the reality that life goes on and we will all have people quick to fill in for whatever it is that we do on this earth that we think is so special or unique. We are all very special and unique individuals, but like the cherry blossoms in The Last Samurai, we are all beautiful because we are also all the same.