People Remembered: David Heath

September 28, 2017

I’ve been thinking of my childhood friend David Heath lately.  Fifty years ago today he died.  16.  Dead within two weeks of a diagnosis of leukemia.

We had been friends all through high school.  In early September of 1967 I left for college.  He stayed behind a high school senior.

The first weekend of the school year, the weekend after Labor Day, I came home.  We went to a football game.  Two weeks later I went to his wake.

David.  Someone in the neighborhood introduced us.  His family had moved north from the Albany area when we’d just started high school.  Our families became friends and he and I did all sorts of things you do when you’re in high school.  We were always at each other’s homes.  His father taught me to make fried peppers and onions.  I still have photos of us swimming at the Oxbow in Cadyville during that summer before college.

I’d only been at school for a few days when my mother called to tell me that David had gotten sick.  A day later he was in the hospital.  The dominoes fell rapidly.  Within a week he was in a coma.  A diagnosis of cancer had come in.  On the 28^th Mom called to tell me he’d died.

I was 18 and had lost all my grandparents.  I was no stranger to death.  But this was different. This was my friend.  My contemporary.  He was only two years younger than I.  I came home.  Went to his wake.  Thought of the football game two weeks earlier.  The next day—the 30^th—it rained.  His funeral was at the Methodist Church.  I never saw his family.  He was buried near Albany.

I went back to college, moved on with my life.  At 18 the grieving process is different.  My cognitive/emotional development was not fully matured.  There are things that are just impossible to understand at that point in life.  I’d visit his parents when I returned to Plattsburgh.   His mother was clearly in a far deeper grief. I think she appreciated my visits.  I don’t know.  We never really talked about that.  I’d just listen and tell her I missed my friend, which I did.

The following spring, I tracked down the cemetery but it would be years before I went again.  Ten years after David died, 1977, I wrote his parents.  “I haven’t forgotten,” I wrote them.  But, like most 20 somethings, I moved in with my life and never contacted them again.

Sometime well into the 1990’s I went back to the cemetery and saw that his father had died.  I went through a new level of grief because I noticed that his father was my age then when his son had died.  He seemed so much older to me when I was 18.  By now, the emotional/cognitive process was fully in place and I could see what loss this was for his family.  Their only son.

The last time I visited, in the mid 2010s, his mom had died.  His sister and I the last surviving members of a small family.  Life’s circle.

I’m more able today to embrace mystery.  Why did he die at 16 and I why was allowed to live 50 more years? Why have I had four lifetimes to his one?  There are no answers, and that’s ok.

Fifty years!  All death is loss and it always diminished us in some way.  For me it deprived me of the possibility of a lifelong friend.  There’s never a September 28^th that rolls around when I don’t think of him.

Thanks, David.  It was wonderful to have called you friend.

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