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At the end of the summer of 1981, my roommate Jeff and I left our apartment in Berkeley to go back to our homes for a few days. Our other roommate, Steve, stayed behind. When Jeff's sister called, she reached Steve, and he then phoned my parents' home. He later said he used the exact same words that Jeff's sister had. "I don't know how to tell you this, so I will just tell you. Jeff is dead." Apparently, Jeff and a high school buddy had been cruising on the roads near his parents' home not far from Santa Cruz. The buddy failed to turn at a curve and went off the road and over a cliff. When the car rolled over, the roof collapsed and broke Jeff's neck, killing him instantly. The driver survived with heavy injuries, and stayed unconscious for many days. Nobody ever figured out why the car went off the cliff. The curve wasn't a sharp one, and the car behind them hadn't seen anything unusual. When the buddy awoke in the hospital, he couldn't remember the accident. Jeff's parents decided to come get his things before the funeral. I returned to Berkeley, and Steve and I sorted through Jeff's stuff. It turned out to be quick work. Like most sophomores, everything Jeff needed for college fit in a few boxes. That was disturbing, of course. Our friend had died, and all that remained for his parents were a couple of boxes. But we paused when we found a marijuana pipe and a bag of Playboy magazines in the closet. Steve and I debated what to do. Would Jeff have wanted to keep them secret? What would his parents do with them, anyway? We searched for the right principle to honor, but failed to think of one. We wound up throwing away the pipe and keeping the magazines. Jeff's parents were polite and pleasant, but their presence brought an uneasy familiarity to the apartment. They had countless recognizable facial and body gestures--a way of walking, a sweep of the hand, a distribution of weight along the waistline. Jeff's mother twitched her eye and raised her eyebrows in the same distinct way Jeff had. It was as if I knew her well. After the funeral, most of Jeff's friends at Cal passed into the benign anonymity that I now remember as being such a distinctive feature of the school. But Jeff's mother didn't let Steve and me become anonymous, at least not right away. She kept finding excuses to call. Why did she call? I'm not sure. At first, she probably just wanted to connect with another griever. Unfortunately, I wasn't mature enough for that. Like most 20-year-old males, I didn't know how to discuss my feelings, least of all with a dead roommate's mother. More likely she wanted a connection to the life her son had led at Berkeley. Jeff, Steve, and I had spent two years together, eating dorm food, watching football, playing pool and poker, and fighting over the television. These were the details of Jeff's life as we knew him. His mother probably wanted to see something familiar in those details, just as I had seen something familiar in the twitch of her brow. It still makes me feel guilty to say this, but I didn't understand that routine things about Jeff--his eating habits, his backgammon savvy, even his choice of TV shows--had relevance to her. At the time, those details didn't seem to add up to a narrative. There were long silences. It was awkward. Jeff's mother called one day after she had gone through the boxes. She was surprised that Jeff didn't have any--to use her phrase--"girlie magazines." A silence fell and I felt a pang of embarrassment. I told her about the magazines, but not about the pipe. On a later occasion, she called and suggested that we hold a party in Jeff's memory. There were four of us in the apartment by that time, and we all resisted the idea. It just seemed odd. We had attended the family memorial service at Jeff's home, which was filled with food, relatives, and friends. Yet that didn't seem a relevant example. We knew how to throw a party, but had no idea how to organize a wake--and we didn't understand that in many cultures these are the same thing. Jeff's mother offered to send us a check for expenses, though money wasn't the issue. She sent the check anyway, which meant we had to do it. So on a cool Friday evening in November, several dozen people came to our apartment, an otherwise undistinguished place at the end of a hallway in an ugly stucco building on Hillegass Avenue. There were no solemn speeches nor any hazy photographs of the deceased. The party was sophomoric and raucous. As the music swelled, the void momentarily faded from view, lost in the intoxicating release of an indulgent dance of youth. To my surprise, this produced closure in a way that the funeral hadn't. I sent a thank-you note to Jeff's mother. She called once more and then we never spoke again. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Shane Greenstein '83 teaches at the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University. We invite alumni to write about their Cal experiences for "Recalling Cal," California Monthly, Alumni House, Berkeley 94720. Contributors will be paid $100 upon publication. |
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