Eulogy
This one is pretty self-explanatory. It was very difficult to write, for obvious reasons. I tried to make it a short story at first, making myself a fictional character, but it really didn’t work. I changed the voice, and then the tense (it was first written in an odd mix of present and past tenses), and it finally began to come close to conveying my actual feelings on the matter. It is an essay, as it should be, since this is no fiction tale. I hope it reveals a little bit of Andy, for his is a character that should be known.
Eulogy
When I first looked at the picture on the stage, I thought it must have been from years ago — back when I knew him. But he was wearing his uniform, and so it must have been a much more recent one. The thing is, he hadn't changed a bit.
We were in an auditorium, and the picture was large enough for me to see it clearly from near the back. I don't know how many people were there, probably eight hundred to a thousand. I knew a few of them, but I was avoiding them. I didn't want to speak. I didn't want to explain how I knew Andy. I especially didn't want someone to ask me to tell a story about him. I don't know how early I was aware of that fear, but it was there.
It might have been easier for me if he looked different. I couldn't say why the death of this particular childhood friend was affecting me so much, but it was. Fifteen years I hadn't spoken a word to him, but I found myself crying.
The tears were not overwhelming, but they were close. I was only just keeping myself from breaking down completely (a battle I would lose once I got home), but it was as though the tears were so many that they were leaking out despite my efforts. They were warm on my cheeks, and they caused the skin under my eyes to tighten as they dried there.
They tighten your skin, the writer within me said with excitement. I can use that!
Guilt overcame me for the first (but not the last) time that night as the thought skirted across my mind. I've read other artists (mostly writers, but actors also) talk about that little voice. It's like you're watching yourself from the outside, observing. It's something a writer needs, because I can use that observation about tears. I cannot write about grief if I don't remember what it is like. That may be the difference between artists and others. The artist may simply remember, while the others let those little details go in the emotion. But in that moment it was the worst thing ever, because I was trying to pay my respects to a childhood friend, and it felt as though I wasn't being respectful.
The man who was giving the eulogy was Andy's high school principal. It is a memorial service, not a funeral, and Andy had been buried a couple of days before at West Point. He died a week before, on August 9, 2004, a month after being shot in the head in Iraq.
He had never been my best friend. He had not really been a friend at all, at least recently. Long ago, certainly, but not recently. When he went to Iraq, I had only known because of the articles in the local paper. Likewise, when I had gotten married, Andy had not been on the guest list. We were too far apart then.
Yet I wept there, the tears tight on my skin, part of me wondering at that, part of me embarrassed, but most of me feeling a sense of towering loss, a feeling that I could hardly keep contained. It is the effort of containment that would make me skip the reception and hurry home. There, with only my wife as witness, I could no longer contain it, and it overcame me until mercy was granted by sleep.
Sleep is one of the reasons I believe in a God. Whenever it becomes too much, and there's nothing left, you cannot help but to sleep. And in the morning, it's a little more bearable. Maybe only just bearable, but maybe that's enough.
* * *
I think that friendship is mostly a matter of convenience, but that is more true for children. Even as adults, we will make friends of coworkers or people who live nearby. There will be some lingering college friends that are only really accessible through the phone and internet, but they are more rare.
As a child, especially for a child of the early '80s, those latter options were not as available. When Andy and I were kids, we didn't have the internet or e-mail. My friends were mostly the people less than a half mile away — that way I could ride my bike over there on a whim. There were school friends, but they were different, because I had to get someone to drive you in order to see them. That only happened a couple of times a month, even in the summer. They were not the everyday summer friends.
Andy lived right on that half mile mark for me, which was almost a long-distance relationship for a kid. For a boy on a bike, you just showed up at someone else's house, and if he wasn't there, you rode away and headed to the next kid's house. A half mile was almost not worth the trip. More than likely, I would go there when none of the closer friends were at home.
* * *
But what came next? I looked down, suddenly back at the service, tuning out the men's choir as they sing "Army Blue" so that I could think for a minute. The song slipped from my mind, the rhythms became cluttered simply because I wasn't listening, and later I wasn't able to catch the melody again. It was almost like a trance, this thing that fell over me. My wife was beside me, and she never knew Andy, but she was skipping a meeting at work so that she can be there when her husband says goodbye to . . . who? Who was he to me?
For the life of me, I could not remember. I remembered the bike ride over to his house, or is it because I had a friend later that lived on the same street? I couldn't remember how old I was in that memory, so I couldn't remember where I was going.
To my mind, that was the only bad thing about living in one place for nearly all of my childhood. The memory of locations can help focus your mind to a time period. If my wife remembered a place, then she can tell me about what year the memory happened, because she was only at each home a few years. I cannot. Me riding that bike down that street could have been any of a dozen years. I don't know.
One thing I do remember is that game.
* * *
I had a Commodore 64. It was my family's first computer, and the only game we had at first was a spelling game that, despite being educational, turned out to be pretty fun. Later we got several more, but the best ones were River Raid, Ghostbusters, and Heart of Africa. The computer was massive, according to modern standards, and sometimes it would take fifteen or twenty minutes just to load a game (and sometimes it never loaded the game at all). We could use the word processor, but couldn't save our files because we had completely run out of memory. The printer used that paper that you have to tear apart after you print it, feed using those cog and wheel devices where you load the paper using the line of holes on each side of the ream. But until the kid across the street got an Atari, that machine was the greatest technology in my life.
But Andy had the Commodore 128, which was twice as fast as my machine. He had a game on that computer about spies and guns and sneaking into buildings. I have no idea what it was called, but it could never be run on the Commodore 64. In truth, I never really cared that much for the game itself, at least not playing it, but it was so fast that it was fascinating to watch.
* * *
Is that all I could remember? A game? There had to have been more to the friendship, especially since Andy and I didn't really play video games that often. For kids our age, computer games were not big yet, and wouldn't be for a while.
In fact, I only remember playing that game one time.
House Majority Leader Tom DeLay came to the service, and he began speaking. He is the Representative from my old neighborhood, the place both Andy and I grew up. But I could only listen halfheartedly. He spoke about the great sacrifice for freedom that Andy had made. He spoke highly of the war, saying that Andy died to free millions. He spoke also of faith, which is a subject many politicians would shun, except in glancing comments which don't really say anything. I am happy he mentioned it. It was not inappropriate, but it is a speech of faith and national pride, so some may have questioned his motives that day. There was no doubt as to his political leanings from his words. Truly, it was a speech from a point of view, but luckily it happens to have been a point of view that Andy shared. Andy believed in what he was doing. He would have been proud of what he had done, even if it did cost him his life.
A woman, perhaps a friend of Andy, though it was unclear, began to sing "The Old Rugged Cross." At the same time, I caught the tail end of a memory, and I held on for a moment.
* * *
Amongst that age group in that place at that time, there began a short-lived following of the Monkees, mainly due to the reruns of the old shows that were playing locally. I found some records of the Monkees that my mother owned and recorded them onto cassette, and one time Andy was over and I put on the tape. Then we just listened.
That is something that adults might do sometimes, but for kids that young, it was extraordinary. We only sat, and we listened, very occasionally speaking. It wasn't about the music at all, because there were a couple that I did not care for ("(I'm Not Your) Steppin' Stone" was certainly an odd choice for the group, even if it was a respectable hit), and there were some that Andy did not enjoy. I don't even believe that Andy was really into the Monkees like I was.
Then, after I turned the tape over to the second side, Andy said that this would make a good movie — two guys just hanging out and listening to music. Maybe something happens to them, but I didn't like that part as much. No, I thought, it would make a great movie, but forget that part about something happening. It was perfect even without that.
* * *
It would, of course, make an absolutely rotten movie. I should have known that even then. Maybe the soundtrack would be worth buying (I still have a soft spot for the Monkees, I confess), but there would be no plot, no characterization, and not even any action.
I sighed and would have chuckled, if the moment would have allowed me to do so. What had been so fascinating about that night was incomprehensible. I cannot explain why I would have sat there at that age, for two hours, listening to music, and actually enjoying it.
I could not possibly sell a book based on that night. I wouldn't even want to buy it, but the memory was warm to me.
And then the next thought nearly destroyed me. Was that even Andy? I couldn't remember whether he had still been in the neighborhood when the Monkees phase hit me. It might have been Sean — no, it was too late to be Sean. It certainly wasn't Dave, because Dave just wasn't like that. The words feel like Andy, but I could not place a face on the moment.
The next speaker stood, the man who turned out to be Andy's best friend. The man spoke of their relationship almost as a love affair, but there is no mistaking his meaning. He loved Andy, truly, and sometimes the only words for that kind of friendship, the only ones that make sense, are words normally reserved for romance.
He spoke of Andy's smile. The smile that had haunted me that evening. Later, another speaker would say that no one who met Andy would forget him. That is true, and it is mainly to do with the smile. Andy hadn't changed a bit in fifteen years. He might have grown taller, but he remained the boy a half mile away. He still had a twelve year old's smile. There was no difference between the boy and the man.
And for both boy and man, his smile was unforgettable. It was a smile that involved his whole face — wide and tall. His mouth truly turned up at the ends, considerably more than a common grin. At twenty-five, he had definite wrinkles on his cheeks where his skin moved out of the way of that smile.
And then I realized why that smile was so familiar to me — I had rarely seen Andy without it. It was not merely there for pictures. It was always there.
* * *
My family had a house down at the beach. Actually, it was on a canal off of the beach, where there was a neighborhood of more reasonably priced summer homes for people of reasonable means who just liked the beach. We bought it from family, which made it a little more reasonable. For a good chunk of the summer, my family would be there, fishing for crab off of the pier, feeding the ducks, and playing baseball in the vacant lot that sat beside the house.
I found Andy there almost by accident. I was walking down the street and suddenly came across him. Andy's family had a house there too, about a half mile away. I do not know if it was pure coincidence that this happened, or if, perhaps, Andy's family had found out about the neighborhood through my family. I do not know, and it did not matter then.
For children, friendships are almost always based on convenience, and while a half mile was a lot when there were five other kids their age a little closer, it was not so much at the beach. We were most often together there, even though we were just as near to each other at home. But in those times the smile was always present. Andy's house had a vacant lot nearby also, but it was hilly, as though someone had dumped dirt there for a project that never got off the ground. So the one by my house would be used for sports, and the one by Andy's for war games.
* * *
I cringed at the thought. Did I really play at war on that dirt pile? The memories are still vague, but that is the impression I get.
Of course we had to have played at war sometime. We played at war constantly — as much as we played football and baseball. It was something we did, and it never occurred to us that, for some, the war would be real.
I also couldn't remember whether Andy took command of these "raids" or not. Earlier in the evening, Andy's high school teacher said that he dug up the soldier's application to the school, and one of the things he claimed as his best qualities was that he was a leader. He graduated from West Point and led soldiers on the battlefield — the true battlefield. That didn't seem unlike the boy that had been before the soldier, and so I didn't think it unlikely that I merely followed through that weedy dirt hill.
In fact, as the memories became a little more clear, I could clearly see myself in the rear. Where we were going and who we were fighting, I cannot say. That's hardly the point. The image of Andy that the speakers were painting was very familiar to me.
The best friend said that he had a kind of long-distance relationship with Andy. Not just while Andy was in Iraq, but even in high school and college. But when the two got together, it was almost as though they were never apart. They would hardly speak, but just sit together.
That used to bother him, the best friend said, but one time Andy had told him, "What is great about our friendship is that we can just sit and have a beer and be happy just being together," or something to that effect.
At first, that made me feel worse. Before that, I could blame the fact that they had drifted apart on the fact that Andy had moved away. But that hadn't stopped those two. A lack of convenience did not seem to affect them at all. That part of the evening would tear at me for a couple of days. Not even sleep would help me very much for a while.
* * *
What sparked the Ghostbusters obsession was hard to say. It may have just been the movie itself, though by that time it was on video. Maybe it was that great game I had got for the Commodore 64, in which you basically catch ghosts for an hour. It had no plot and no characters, and the action was sort of repetitive, but sometimes overdone graphics and story can get in the way of a good video game, and the Ghostbusters game didn't need either.
Or maybe the obsession simply came because I was, at the time, convinced that a painting in his house was haunted. It was the kind of portrait where the eyes follow you everywhere, and I had a nightmare or two about it, so certainly it had to have been possessed. Such is the logic of children.
But my friends and I were not the type to run from a fight, especially since my mother was determined to keep the painting. After all, she had painted it. And so Andy and I decided to become Ghostbusters. Mike, who lived on the next street, joined in, and he typed out everyone's name using his grandmother's typewriter to make it official. Of course, he misspelled everyone's name, including his own, because he didn't know how to type, and we wasted half a bottle of White-Out trying to correct his mistakes.
The equipment used by the real Ghostbusters at least cost a few thousand dollars, if not tens or hundreds of thousands (let's just pretend that the movie was real for a minute), but we three friends had a toy gun with the Ghostbusters symbol on it, and so that would surely work just as well.
One day Andy and I sat on my swingset, searching for ghosts. I was wearing my racquetball goggles (since the curvature of the glasses differed from the curvature of his own eyes, they would allow me to see the ghosts when they came — again, it made sense to us) and holding the gun. We hadn't been able to afford another weapon yet, but we were convinced once we started the business we would be rich.
But that's as far as we got, sitting on the swingset, looking like idiots. The painting, by the way, is still in my parents' living room.
* * *
My wife cried that night also. She never met Andy, but the men doing the eulogies are good enough at description to make her feel it. He hadn't changed at all, as I was understanding more and more. The man they were describing did not only look like the boy he knew, but he acted like that boy also.
Use it for a story, said that part of my mind that made me a writer. Make it a tribute to him.
I can't, I answered, though I truly wanted to. I can't remember any stories.
It is so strange. With some of my childhood friends, all I remember are stories. Most are stupid and wouldn't make good fiction, things that are interesting to kids, but no one else. But with Andy, all I can recall are small moments. Scenes, and not plot. Dialogue without action.
I cursed myself again, and almost lost control of my tears. Later they defeated me. I had been working on a novel for a few months. It was a Fantasy about the afterlife like The Divine Comedy or The Great Divorce, and I went to the computer to open it. Because it was the afterlife, I had already put several historical figures in there such as Shakespeare, Plato, and J. R. R. Tolkien. But I wanted a tribute to Andy, and so I made him the only cameo appearance who was not immediately recognizable. I had one of the characters point him out, and that character said, "I had not spoken to him for several years before it happened, and I was always sorry that I hadn't," but I broke a rule there. They were not the character's words, but my own. It may have been self-indulgent, but I had to do something. I needed to say something about this life that I had once, long ago, been a part of. I am a writer, after all, and this is what we do. We witness what tears feel like and write it down. We look at people around us and turn them into characters in a book. We witness and we use, and I needed to use him in something. It was as though he was pressing against my brain, and I couldn't shake him.
And after all of that, after altering part of the book for him, I felt no better. He was still there, pressing and pressing until I could think of nothing else. And I still didn't understand why I was even sad. I had not thought of Andy often in fifteen years. He was not really a friend anymore. He was a passing interest to me, but all of the sudden he was right in my ear, and he was screaming.
Writing didn't help, even when I was done, and I collapsed. I cried until sleep took me.
The next day, my wife asked me about it. In her questions I heard all the questions I had asked myself. What is making me feel this death more than another, especially since I hadn't talked to the Andy for fifteen years?
And I thought about it a very long time, longer than I would ever want to dwell upon such a question. Maybe it is because I was barely twenty-seven when Andy died, and Andy himself was twenty-five. That makes him the first of my group of friends and childhood friends to pass away.
That voice within me, that selfish voice which wants to use everything, told me that it was because the soldier will not be remembered, meaning that his tale will not live on. That is what is important to the voice — stories. They are important to me too, but not like that. But the suggestion is untrue anyway. Maybe a thousand people sat in a memorial service. I don't know how many went to the funeral. But they all prove otherwise. Andy died for something he truly believed in. Something that was more important than anything else.
It wasn't that he was lost to me, because both Andy and me, believe in something after. Besides, Andy was gone to me years ago. And so was I to him.
But that touched on it. There was something lost. When my wife asked me about it, I finally said, "I should know a part of that story. I should know something about him that no one else knows. We spent ages together. I could take that and write it down so that everyone would know, and they would get some great insight into the motivation of this man who dedicated his life to his country, traveled halfway across the world to die fifty years before he should have. I should have some knowledge from our time together that would put it all together and have it make sense. But I can't remember. I am a storyteller, and I have no idea what this story is."
And that is it.
But there is something else too. It is that the soldier never once changed, never lost his direction. It is that I knew him fifteen years before but didn't think that much of it. Yes, we were friends, but a half mile is far, and then he moved away. Andy wasn't exciting enough to continue that friendship over that long a distance.
But then, at twenty-seven, I had come around, and I was only at that moment realizing that Andy could have been the friend that I had wanted for many years. Only now, when silence is sometimes better than sound, when company is better than toys, and when a smile is sometimes the best thing in the world.
One time, to another person, Andy had said, "What is great about our friendship is that we can just sit and have a beer and be happy just being together." And I at last understood that it had to have been Andy that night listening to the Monkees, because that wouldn't have been interesting with anyone else.
It was a night utterly without a plot, with no story whatsoever, but I remember it with more affection than almost anything else in my childhood.
It was not until the tears have fallen and the night of the service is gone that I would understand that all of my childhood friends are only remembered in stories. With Mike it had been computer games and music. With John it was sports and baseball cards. But though I can't remember all the things he did with Andy, I can recognize the smile at a glance, and I can recognize the descriptions made by Andy's best friend, even though fifteen years separated us.
With everyone else, it was only plot. What remains with me of Andy was just Andy. There is no one else, and nothing going on that was more important. In that way, I remember Andy best of all.
I cannot say for sure whether that makes me happy or sad. All I can say is that I am, and always will remain, in awe.
In Memory of Captain Andrew Houghton
1978-2004
Well done, be thou at peace.
Note: A foundation has been established in Andy's honor, and you can find it at http://andyhoughton.org/. You can also learn more about Andy's life at that website. We hope that we will at least visit to remember one of our country's great heroes.
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Paul Lytle
