"Phantom friend pain"

That was a phrase Robin Williams used on David Letterman's show back in April to describe how he was feeling about his old and dear friend Christopher Reeve, who had died about six months prior to the interview. I only caught it by happenstance: I must have just turned off my VCR or something. I never watch Letterman, and in fact I don't even like Letterman, but the default station for watching auxiliary devices on my television set is 3, which is a local CBS affiliate in this market. I jotted the phrase down on a sheet of notepaper, because it was an arresting image that I thought might be worth using someday in a poem or a short story. This is the first occasion I've had to use it since I made a note of it--and I'm having much the same experience as Williams did, it would appear.

I went to do my grocery shopping after Mass this morning. The sky had been a brilliant cerulean blue when I left for church, but the clouds had come rolling in during the service, and it was more or less completely overcast by the time I walked out to the car afterwards for the drive to the store. I did my shopping, and was coming past a neighborhood park just before my street when out of the corner of my eye I glimpsed a clown standing by the curb.

Clowns are not a common sight around these parts. While the annual Pumpkin Festival is going on this weekend up the road in the county seat, there were no parades (or even people) nearby to explain the presence of this clown. He wasn't doing a routine or anything; just standing by the side of the road. I suppose maybe he was waiting for a bus to come along so he could get to Sycamore, or maybe it was some kind of pre-Halloween prank, and the guy just decided to stand outside his house in costume for the morning and the early part of the afternoon.

The reason I mention "phantom friend pain" in conjunction with a clown sighting is that my late friend and spiritual director, who died a couple of months before Chris Reeve, was a clown. He used to do clown ministry classes, and when he was healthy, he never missed a chance to get out his Butterfly gear (that was his clown name). For an instant, as I drove past the clown, I almost thought it might have been Butterfly standing there--and perhaps he was the "clown behind the clown," to borrow a turn of phrase from Andrew Greeley's fey Irish singer Nuala Anne McGrail.

The costume wasn't the same, the hair and the makeup were all different. And Stephen would have no earthly or supernatural reason to be hanging out here in my neck of the woods. He ministered here for close to 20 years, and did his undergraduate degree here, but it was a decade ago that he was transferred to another parish--and he died miles away in Rockford in intensive care.

But whether it was a revenant (I doubt it) or not, the sight of that clown standing by the roadside awoke an ache in my heart. Even though it's been eight months since I had the proud but mournful duty of singing at his funeral, it's hard to think of him as gone. Even after he'd been transferred, I always had a sense that he was still connected to me, still thinking about me, praying for me, taking care of me--and that that was always going to be the way it was.

According to my faith, that is the way it is, and always will be. But while Stephen rests in the Blessed Presence forevermore, I'm still used to thinking of him as being here on earth, only a phone call or an e-mail away. And I miss him.

While most people are looking forward to the celebration of Halloween tomorrow, I've got a different day circled on my calendar. Halloween is the secular name for what is properly described as the Vigil of the Feast of All Saints. All Saints falls on November 1st, and it's a holy day in the Catholic tradition--a day on which the faithful are obliged to attend Mass. And I'll do that. But the celebration that I'm most looking forward to this coming week is the day after that, November 2, which is the Feast of All Souls. That's the day on which Catholics commemorate the Faithful Departed--the friends and loved ones whose lives, as one of the prefaces for the Mass of the Resurrection reminds us, are changed, but not ended. All throughout November, but especially on that day, we pause to remember and to pray for those who have gone before us in faith to that bourn from which no traveller returns, as Shakespeare put it.

It's been a personal tradition of mine for a number of years to wear black on All Souls Day if I have lost a friend or a loved one in the preceding year. Seems like I'm having to get the black clothes out more and more often these days. Stephen is only one of the ones I'll be wearing mourning for this Wednesday. God be good to him, and to all the faithful departed, including those whose faith is known to God alone.

Comments

[Andrea]

I knew where this post was going as soon as I saw the word "clown". And I can't believe it's been 8 months. I mean, I KNOW it has been but... he's certainly on my mind a lot for someone I hadn't seen in quite literally years.

Sigh...

[Michael]

I think that's why the metaphor works so well. It's not until you reach to scratch that persistent itch that you realize the limb--or the friend--isn't there anymore.

[erikthered]

Micheal, by chance are talking about the Sycamore, IL Pumpkin parade? Are you form around there, too?

I'm in DeKalb, myself and even marched in that parade with DeKalb County Dems.