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It was very early in the morning in Mumbai, and I was getting ready for my flight to Jaipur for a week of wedding celebrations where I would stand as best man, when another friend in the US messaged to ask whether I had heard from a friend in our NYC group. Somehow I knew there was more, but I hesitated to reply. I went to shower, and when I came back dressed, the next message was waiting to tell me, "He's gone." The car service wasn't due for a little while, so I FaceTimed her, and the screen filled with our other friends gathered around her, all crying over news none of us had been given any time to brace for. Then the hotel room bell rang, and I left for Jaipur with their faces etched in my mind.
I have survived cancer twice, and I call what I am living now my second life, partly because the first one taught me that the worst news and the best news will sometimes book the same flight. Knowing that did nothing to soften the week...it only meant I recognized what was happening while it was happening.
Even so, I knew I was exactly where I needed to be. The bride and I graduated from the same high school without ever crossing paths there, and we only found each other years later through, of all people, the school's alumni coordinator. From New Delhi to New York and a dozen cities in between, our bond has only strengthened and deepened with time, and nothing that happened anywhere else that week changed what I owed her.
So I lived in two places at once. Nearly every morning I woke up to messages or calls bringing more answers and more questions, as all of us tried to process the loss and find some way to hold our sadness, anger, guilt and pain in check from opposite sides of the world. Then I would get dressed in my best and go stand beside my friend, which meant putting on a smile for her...and somewhere in the day, often before I noticed, the smile stopped being something I had put on. The happiness sat beside the grief without betraying it, and neither asked the other to leave.
On one particular day I wrote two speeches at once, and nobody had asked me to write either of them. The bride had asked me to MC some of the wedding events, which meant most of my time with the microphone went to announcing other people, and I wanted at least a few minutes of my own to tell her and her new husband what I felt, however brief... and since I was the last one holding the mic, why not.
The eulogy came from the same need. I was a writer on the other side of the world from the friends grieving him together, unable to say anything to them in person, so I wrote down who he was and sent it to them. We had been asked not to share the details of his death, which made it matter even more to me that he be remembered for the whole of the person he was rather than for how his life ended. I am known for speeches that run long, but both of these came out short, as if grief and joy had taken the same red pen to me, and the eulogy opened like this:
I didn't know him the longest. I didn't know him the most. But I feel incredibly lucky to have known him at all, and the man I knew and will remember was him at his fullest.
The toast opened like this:
Our friendship has entered its second decade, and what started as a school connection has blossomed into a third culture kid bond that has seen us move from Manhattan to Maastricht and beyond.
One measured a friendship by its depth and the other by its length, yet the two forms sit closer together than they look, since a eulogy and a wedding toast are built from stories only the speaker can tell and ask a room to laugh and cry within the same few minutes. The tense is the only real difference, present for one friend and newly past for the other. Further into the eulogy, I tried to say who he actually was:
He was one of the most loyal friends I've made. He showed up. That's not an easy thing for people to do, but he seemed to do it so easily. I genuinely respected his complete openness to say yes to anything we said let's go and do, explore, drink, see, listen to, discuss. But of course you had to be ready for the sarcasm, the dark, twisted humor he so masterfully acquired, I think, through his deep love for pop culture. He might be the only person who has watched as much TV as I have, and for a minute I thought it was a competition, but then I realized there was no way I could catch up.
I only saw later how much the two texts borrowed from each other. The phrase "no matter what" appears in both, belonging in the toast to the bride, whom I have watched thrive no matter where and no matter what, and in the eulogy to him, the friend who was always there with a smile, no matter what. The toast also promised the couple that through the ups and downs of their lives they would keep returning to each other, and I wrote that sentence on the same day I said goodbye to someone who could not return.
I gave the toast in Jaipur, at the party after the wedding, with the microphone still mine from MC duty that had started at the sangeet. Near the end I admitted that I used to sing well and now sing only because music has always been the soundtrack to my life, and then I sang Cyndi Lauper's "Time After Time" to the couple, a song built on the promise to keep showing up for someone. I meant every word of it for them. Looking back, I was also singing to a friend who had always kept that promise to me and couldn't keep it anymore, and the smile I wore through it was real.
Then we all moved from Jaipur to Delhi for the reception, and on the morning of it the second piece of news reached me. A friend I had known since elementary school had died without warning, a man who always made a point of seeing me whenever I passed through his city. I had taken him for granted the way you take a wall for granted, because it had always been there. Two men who had seemed permanent were gone within a week, and by evening I was expected at a reception with a smile on my face. Richard Curtis once wrote Four Weddings and a Funeral as a romantic comedy, and my week ran the ratio backward... nobody would mistake it for a comedy, though there was laughter in it anyway.
Cancer made death familiar to me long ago, but the people I lost in those years were people I had met sick. It had been a while since I lost anyone I had met healthy, and that hits different. Watching men around my age die while I am still standing brings gratitude, of course, and it also brings the survivor's question of why I am still here. I never let my mind stay there for long, because I learned years ago to simply accept the why not in life.
I spent time among Jain renunciants in the months after I realized my cancer was nearing remission, when years spent preparing for my death were suddenly being reframed, once again, as planning a life ahead. One of them, a sadhvi, studied my birth chart and told me that unlike most people's, my life showed a continuous run of extremes, soaring highs followed by devastating lows, and that my task in this life was to learn how to weather them. I told her that maybe the highs and the lows were the same. Maybe the variance only showed how much life and love a person gets to live...and how much a person gets to survive.
Without knowing it, I had handed her an idea from her own tradition, because Jain philosophy teaches anekantavada, the doctrine that truth has many sides and that no single vantage point can see all of them. A eulogy and a toast written on the same day are two faces of the same love, and that week never asked me to pick one.
The sadhvi's word was weathering, and mine had been variance, a word I borrowed from economics, which I have spent two decades applying to fame. In that world variance is the polite word for risk, though it is also where every return comes from, because a portfolio that never moves never grows, and a life without its lows would have to surrender its highs as well. Weathering imagines the storm as something that passes over you while you wait, but this month suggested something harder. The high and the low did not take turns...they arrived on the same day, sometimes in the same hour, the way a screen full of crying friends gave way to a flight to a wedding, and the only work available was to hold them both.
Then came Italy, a trip planned as a celebration, and I kept it as one. Paolo Sorrentino built The Great Beauty around a writer drifting through Rome's terraces and parties after news of a death reminds him of everything he has lost, and the film never treats the beauty as a distraction from the grief. In Sorrentino's Italy the two share a table, and they shared mine. I ate well and laughed often, and I cried without warning, mainly at 30,000 feet or above, the one place where I perhaps felt closer to the sun, the truth and them. My two friends came with me, in the way the dead travel now, through photos on my phone and all the jokes, food porn pics and random wtf observations I kept wanting to send them.
People keep asking whether I have found my normal again, and I understand the question, but I no longer believe in the destination it describes. If the sadhvi was right about my chart, then the swing is my normal, and the amplitude is the measure of how much I have been allowed to love. I have not learned to weather it, and I am no longer sure weathering is the goal. What I have learned is that a person can write a eulogy and a wedding toast on the same day, mean every word of both, and still stand up at the end of the night and sing.
If you or someone you love is struggling, you can call or text 988 in the US to reach the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. Outside the US, findahelpline.com lists free, confidential support by country.
