Wert’s Werds: When death starts to become a regular visitor

I hate to start out a column by being morbid, but the 2020s so far have been a real Decade of Death for me. 

Since the calendar flipped to 2020, I’ve lost both my parents, my journalism mentor, my musical mentor and multiple co-workers I’ve enjoyed the partnerships with over the course of my career. I’ve had them leave us from illnesses where we knew the end was coming and we could be ready; I had one who decided they had enough and punched their own ticket to the afterlife. It’s part and parcel of aging; now that I’m in my 50s I shouldn’t be surprised that it seems like death is a consistent companion on the path of life.

That’s why I was so shocked and how much the death of an old high school friend hit me last week.

It was a Tuesday afternoon and I was preparing to go downtown to play at a jam session. I was packing up my drumsticks and gathering all the little things drummers use to make the sounds they make which most folks don’t see, when I had a message pop up on my phone. All it said was “Dave died.”

As you can imagine, I dropped what I was doing and found out that one of my best high school friends, someone who was a key part of one of my bands in high school, someone I’ve known for about 40 years was suddenly gone. 

Now, he wasn’t the first person from my high school’s graduating class to pass on. However, when you have hundreds of kids in your class, you don’t know everyone, and so the fact I lost someone with whom I had a serious history during a formative time of life had never crossed the board. Now, I suddenly found myself looking at my drum set and thinking about all the times I’d look out and see Dave standing behind his keyboard or just hanging out in the practice room.

I didn’t go to the jam session that night. I really didn’t do much of anything the rest of that night. I just sat in one of the recliners in the living room, thinking how 55 is really too young to head into the next life and how Dave still had so much to give to the world. 

Earlier that day I learned of the death of ZZ Top drummer Frank Beard, so I was already in a down mood, but I really believe the news of Dave’s passing would have hit me just as hard even if I wasn’t already down. Thus, it should probably be no surprise to you I ran to my usual place of refuge: music. I started pulling out vinyl records from the era of when Dave and I were closest; I listened to bands I haven’t listened to in literally decades. 

Realizing there were bands whose vinyls I didn’t have, it sent me to YouTube to go down a rabbit hole finding bands which I had not listened to since the ‘80s flipped to the ‘90s and now I may not listen to again because in hindsight…the bands weren’t that great. For example, Dave and I and our friends all thought Stormtroopers of Death amazing with such classics as “Kill Yourself,” and “The Ballad of Jimi Hendrix” which consisted of five seconds of the riff from Purple Haze and then Billy Milano saying to the microphone “you’re dead.” Let’s just say our little circle of friends were the only ones in our area sharing that view. (Side note, if you ever watched Headbangers Ball on MTV, the crunching themes to the show was S.O.D.’s “March of the S.O.D” and “Chromatic Death.”)

Ah, the stupidity of youth. But it bonded us at the time. In an odd way, it bonded us for life because I’m listening to it now.

Since the news broke, I’m doing a little better dealing with knowing someone significant from my high school days has moved on, but I feel like a little more innocence has been stripped away. I’ve had enough reminders of my mortality, hence the reason I’m where I am now chasing my dreams because even before Dave passed I’d felt like time was short. 

So do today what you think you can “do tomorrow.” The last thing you want to feel on your last day is regret.