Pause, in Passing

Goodbye Ritz

The last picture I took of Ritz was surreal, my sister said. When I looked at it again, I thought it was spectral, and now I can’t bring myself to view it again.

It was surreal, though, to stand before his bier, to engage with the fact that Ritz was gone.

59 is not old. It’s too soon for someone to leave the world.

But it felt a lot worse because the Ritz who had left was not 59 years old; for me he was 19, impossible in his energy and his eagerness for love. 

His days were chains of explosions, of hugs and laughs, of little piques, of exploding up the stairs to our office, of roaring off on his scooter. Even when he stood still, which was seldom, it was on the balls of his feet, ready for his next move, which would be sharp, rapid, and unexpected.

Ritz wanted to love, and he wanted to be loved. He wanted. This was his gift, and his curse.

Beneath the still white beard that lay on the bier, I saw that mobile face, which would laugh one second, grimace the next, then peer into your eyes to see whether you were responding to him the way he wanted. Even as he clutched your forearm in the firm grasp of bonding, he watched your every flickering emotion for rejection or redemption, his acute sensitivity a scant millimeter below the macho Rajput persona of which he was so proud.

Waiting for the hearse to bring Ritz to the crematorium, Lillette remembered his nuanced performance in Whose Life is it Anyway. Barry John, who directed him, tilted his head ever so slightly and reflected - “To hold the audience like that, without moving from his hospital bed...”

We stood before his inert body, and our time together unspooled, the joy, the intensity of being together on stage - in rehearsal, and under the lights. You can’t bring back that intensity, nor should you try. Moving on is in the nature of being, relationships fade. 

But it is in crucibles of intensity that our beings are forged, our depth and our sensibilities shaped. To those times of our lives, to those who shared it, we owe the very nature of our being.

In a crowd of mourners, you stand alone; in my isolation, I thought about gratitude, and the debt owed to the past. Those photographs that were faded, look how they sprung to life, here, in the presence of death, where they brought tears and deep sorrow. Maybe I should have carried them to life, to a dinner, or a walk by the sea. They would have been good for a chuckle, maybe even a firm grasp of the forearm. 

Time keeps slipping into the future, my son’s profile reads. 

I allow myself to slip with time, joyfully investing energy in what is to come. I give to now, with as little let as the smallness of a mortal heart allows. 

Pause a while, Ritz reminded me in his passing, to observe what went before. There, too, lies immense joy, immense sharing.