My Friends Are Immortal to Me

New York Times

2 days ago

The deaths of three friends in the past seven months has me thinking about immortality — not Plato's view of the immortal soul, or the Bible's, but simply what lasts of our lives after we go.
The lives of my friends were prominent, so one might think that their works would long outlast them. Lance Morrow, the essayist; Jules Feiffer, the cartoonist and writer; and David Childs, the architect who built One World Trade Center (also known as the Freedom Tower), oversaw the Moynihan Train Hall extension of Penn Station in New York, 7 World Trade Center and much more. If anyone could achieve immortality on earth, these three should qualify.
Yet history teaches otherwise. David Childs's masterworks could crumble to dust. The words of Jules and Lance could be forgotten in a trice. Practically no one would have heard of John Donne today had T.S. Eliot not resurrected his name. We want valued things to last, but so often they don't.
The lives of my three friends, though, are vivid in my mind. I easily and gladly resurrect our conversations, the artistic and political opinions we shared, our special terms of reference, our shorthand private language. These are my souvenirs.
David and I met when our families lived near each other in Washington, in the '70s. Our wives and children were friends and remain so, though distances intervened. David was especially good with our children. He taught our eldest, Carl, a trick with algebra, which Carl, now 59, remembers to this day. A major international figure in architecture, David remained quiet and modest throughout his life. Amused if annoyed by the prevailing assumption that the tallest building was the best, he spoke of installing a device in his home with a button he could push to raise the needle of Freedom Tower a few feet whenever a taller building went up, so that his would always be in first place.
David died with an especially pernicious form of dementia. He could not recall building anything in his life, the cruelest way a thing can crumble.
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