…but only in one sense. Yesterday, I attended the funeral of my friend of 47 years, Len Wein. The thing I once had to get over about funerals in general was the erroneous assumption that your participation was some kind of acceptance that the deceased was gone and could no longer be part of your life. I think it flowed from a comment I heard from an alleged grown-up — a friend of my parents — when I was a tot. This woman said, "I don't go to funerals because I don't want to agree to eliminate that person from my world. If I don't go, I can still think of them in the present-tense. They're still alive in my world. I just haven't talked to them lately."
For a time, I thought that was what a funeral was. And since when you're young and not a lot of people you know die, I continued to think that way. Eventually, I learned my presence did not denote any admission of anything. You showed up because it was polite to show up…because it showed others that the person mattered to you…and maybe because it was a good place to process in your own mind how you felt about that person and their life and the loss of it. In my fields of endeavor, there are also folks who show up at funerals because they can be a good place to network, rub shoulders with important folks and maybe get some work out of it. Happily, I did not see any of that yesterday but I've certainly seen it elsewhere.
My thoughts yesterday were dominated by the many times over the years that some mutual friend told me, "Len's not going to be with us much longer." Dating back farther than our 47 years of friendship, Len had a series of ailments, mostly kidney-related, that made his demise seem imminent. Balanced against the sadness that the prediction had finally come true was the awareness of how many times it hadn't. It was like, "Good for you, Len, for proving them wrong and making it this far!" And it's hard not to appreciate, in a perverse way, that so many who told me Len would be dying shortly died before he did.
I wasn't the only one there thinking like this. Several others there who'd known Len a long time, like Elliott Maggin and Alan Brennert, mentioned having much the same thoughts. In the manner of the old glass half-empty/half-full choice, you could mourn that Len had died or — and I sure prefer this option — celebrate all the times he could have but hadn't. The latter selection allowed you to also smile at all the accolades (and financial rewards) he lived to see as characters he'd co-created became movie and TV characters known the world over. We all have friends who died too soon to reap certain benefits of fame and fortune that happened after they were gone. Len also lived long enough to have around a quarter-century of a very happy life with a woman he loved dearly…and she got all those years with him.
They say you can't cheat death. Well, you can in a way. You can decide that a friend is still part of your world even though he or she is no longer actively contributing. When I said here that I'd tell some stories about being with Len, I said there were a few I couldn't tell. Some of those are for reasons of decorum but some are because while they might mean a lot to me, they'd seem kind of pointless to you and/or wouldn't have good punch lines. When Len told or wrote a story, it always had a good punch line so I don't want to tell one about him that doesn't.
This one doesn't, I'm afraid…but then, it's not really a story about Len, isn't it? It's about me and how I felt about being at the funeral of my friend. To the extent a funeral can be lovely, this one was, and it was well-attended. I saw an awful lot of people I knew and an impressive number that I didn't. In sum, the turnout reminded me how good Len was at making friends. He did it better than just about anybody I've ever known. He did a lot of things like that.