Last Saturday night my best friend and long time adventure companion Rich Beckman died suddenly. We still don’t know why, and even after the autopsy is completed in several months we may not have a definitive answer. All I know for certain is that night he, some friends and I had a few beers after work and Rich appeared in top form. He regaled us all with some of his horror stories from Covid and we made plans for future bike rides and maybe a spring snowboard trip. Now if I do any of those things he can only be with me heavily in spirit.
This profound loss has left me somewhat fractured. I feel halfway between swearing off alcohol and nicotine and starting two-a-days at the gym, or throwing myself off of a tall building. To be clear, the second option is entirely not a possibility, I only use it as a metaphor to illustrate how broken I feel. The strange thing is I feel mostly unable to express this feeling in a physical way. I generally avoid emotional displays and I’d like to keep my behavior as cerebral as possible. I’ve had a few breakdowns in the past, and I want to do anything I can from becoming unhinged. Unfortunately a complete dedication to physical health seems almost unlikely as suicide, but maybe I can make small steps towards self improvement, beginning with writing this.
I met Rich while taking smoke breaks during our Microbology class in my prerequisites for nursing. Rich got an A in the class and I barely snuck by with a B. This is a fact of which he rarely would hesitate to remind me. We talked about our love of snowboarding, and that winter I helped him get a job teaching snowboarding at Snow Summit in Big Bear. I don’t teach snowboarding professionally any more, but his Mom told me that he was planning to work up there again next winter. Rich didn’t need the money or the free lift pass, but he loved an audience.
He was always looking for an opportunity to entertain and to help. Service to the community had been a lifelong passion of his, from his time in the Army, as a firefighter and paramedic and most recently performing emergency medical technician duties in the hospital. He was pursuing a Master’s degree in medical diagnostics, mostly with the hope of improving his odds for acceptance into a physician assistant program.
His professional acumen does not truly define him because above all Rich was a comedian. In virtually any situation he was looking for a laugh. If he didn’t make a joke I usually felt like he was just setting me up to deliver the punchline. Like most comedians he also carried an air of confidence in his insecurities. He wasn’t afraid to admit that he felt disappointed in his ability to find a wife or sire a child. He felt something must be fundamentally wrong to not have been accepted into PA school but he still pursued it with fierce determination. He compensated for these self perceived flaws by flexing his biggest muscle, his mind. Rich had taken a series of advanced calculus courses and found a plethora of inopportune times to share equations with friends and acquaintances, even after we had made it abundantly clear that we had no desire for this knowledge.
Everything fun I like to do outdoors was better with Rich along. He could snowboard anywhere on the mountain and had a bag full of buttery tricks and nose rolls. I usually had to wait for him a little bit at the bottom, but he always made the lift rides back up the highlights of the trip. The best thing about his snowboarding was that even at 48 years old he was always improving. When we first rode together he was very hesitant to go off a jump and now he would regularly do 180s and could pull a few grabs. He could link together some proper carved turns, which is something 90% of snowboarders don’t even realize they can’t do. In the summers we rode mountain bikes together a few times a month. I let him borrow a kayak one time and the next time we talked he’d already purchased his own so we could do more of that together too.
Now as I look forward to doing all these things that we loved I know that a particular piece of that joy won’t be with me. It is the nature of humanity to search for patterns and find meaning in the world. I’ve tried to make peace with this loss by seeing balance in the world through it. I believe that we cannot have miracles without tragedies. That rainbows would not exist without the preceding storm. For us to deeply savor great joy we must also know the bitterness of grief. But knowing this, doesn’t make it any better right now. All I can do in this moment is to be aware of my thoughts and emotions. Let the pain enter and recede and enter again. I can have faith that this cycle will improve over time and the happy times will gradually become longer than the sorrowful.
I’ve heard that there are several stages of grief. I’m not sure if they will all apply to me but I briefly wanted to flirt with anger. In this situation there is nothing to be angry at or with. Some might want to blame God and demand satisfaction from such a tragic and sudden death. How can someone so kind, hilarious, talented and smart be gone so suddenly? And why? I suppose the only meaning in life is that which we create for ourselves. I can also feel grateful for having him in my life at all. Six years ago Rich came about as close as possible to dying in a motorcycle accident. Everyday with him since then has been a miracle. The best I can do for now is to take steps that increase my wisdom and wellbeing.
I’d given Rich a copy of a book that I don’t think he ever read. The Power of Now by Ekart Tolle describes the author's pursuit of mindfulness meditation. In essence the practice is to recognize that your thoughts do not define you. To meditate is to focus on a period of time where you listen to your thoughts as an impartial observer, and then willfully allow them to pass along. This can be aided by sitting in a still area and focusing on your body. One internally assesses themselves and listens to their breath, breathing in and out with intention rather than letting the autonomic nervous system carry out the function. While doing this it is only natural that thoughts will enter one’s mind. The key is to hear them and let them go so you can resume focus on breathing. Some people also include a mantra, a simple saying or sound to help avoid the mind becoming obsessed with thought. A quote from the book summarizes “You'll soon realize: there is the voice, and here I am listening to it, watching it. This I am realization, this sense of your own presence, is not a thought. It arises from beyond the mind.”
Dealing with Rich’s loss has given me more desire to meditate and examine my own soul. I hope that other people going through this or similar grief can do so as well. I think as I go forward I am much more likely to follow up with my primary Dr. for a check up, quit smoking and reduce alcohol use, but I’m not completely confident just yet. It’s only been three days so far, at least I didn’t get drunk on one of them. In any case I believe that everything that happens in life is an opportunity to improve myself and gain wisdom and strength. I just wish this lesson didn’t have to hurt so much right now.
