90 percent of life

A friend told me that his father had died this morning. It's one of those situations where, usually, we don't know what to say. I knew exactly what I wasn't going to say: "I'm so sorry."

Nearly everyone said that to me when my own father died several years ago, and my black humor response — springing from a coping mechanism and slightly screwy worldview I've been honing methodically since grammar school — never went over as well as I hoped it would.

"Don't be sorry," I'd say. "After all, you didn't kill him."

Pretending not to see the somewhat stricken look that invariably followed, I'd pause for a beat or two, then lean in and inquire with an air of dark conspiracy, "Did you?"

All you need to know about my admittedly odd response to what was no doubt well-intentioned and genuine concern is that, for a variety of complicated reasons, my mother and I spent a good portion of dad's funeral laughing, to ourselves and with each other. It's sort of the ultimate "you to be there" — or, rather, you had to be us — joke. Long story. Remind me to tell you over drinks sometime.

But I know better than to try to presume the depth and intensity of another's grief, especially when my own is ultimately unfathomable. I stopped crying at funerals a long time before I laughed at dad's. Crossing out eight names from your address book in three months will do that to you, not harden you, necessarily, but certainly make tears seem particularly pointless.

Anyway, fathers and sons have such complicated relationships. But they're relationships that never end, even with distance or death. The things we got or didn't get from them — or, to be perfectly fair, that we did or didn't allow them to get from us — hang around for quite a while.

If we're very, very lucky.

Who am I to say, then, that I share sorrow or laughter or rage or envy or anything with the ones who survive? I don't and I can't.

What I can say, and did, is this: I'm here if you need anything, and I'm thinking warmly of you and your loved ones. I'm happy to provide a shoulder to lean upon, an ear to bend, or any other body part you think might be helpful.

That's all I, or anyone else, can really do. Be present. If, as Woody Allen quipped, ninety percent of life is just showing up, it must be true that the larger part of friendship, love and support is too.

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