Memorial to a Friend Eric was not what I was expecting. The first time that I met him basically established what I had to learn over and over during the short time that I knew him - don't be deceived by assumptions. It was easy to take certain things for granted with Eric, though; he was reliable, his mood was steady, he was the kind of person one could "count on." He had an easy-going, unpretentious nature that just sort of quietly made those around him comfortable, more peaceful. With an unimposing person such as Eric, others are likely to make certain assumptions, not the least of which is that he will always be around. The trouncing of this particular expectation was the hardest for me to accept. I met Eric a short time after his wife Mary and I had become friends. I knew Mary to be a bold and direct person who was very clear about what she saw as her life's mission: doing whatever she could to improve the lives of animals. I knew through our conversations that she was recently married and that her husband was a biker. The idea of Eric being a biker set off a whole series of associations in my mind: he would be burly, domineering and belligerent. His hands would be big enough to crush me, and he would laugh with delight while he did it. In my imaginings I had created a cartoon composite of the man I had not yet met, drawn from the images in popular culture that comprised the sum of my knowledge of bikers. As we were driving to the restaurant to meet Mary with Eric for the first time, I was wondering what, if anything, my boyfriend John would have in common with who I was sure was going to be a hulking, silent giant. The moment we were introduced, my expectations of Eric shattered like glass. There he stood shaking my hand, a small and trim man with one of the most engaging, open smiles I'd ever seen. He had very dark eyes that sparkled and a laugh, sort of a staccato guffaw, that is very rare, usually only heard from children at a carnival or a playground. With his warm, generous nature, he was pretty much the diametrical opposite of what I had been anticipating; this was the first of my assumptions that Eric gently burst. Over the years that I knew him, he never stopped surprising me in the same way as he did the first night we met: quietly and without much fanfare. This doesn't mean that I wasn't blown away every time. As we begin to know any person, layers of illusion and understanding are stripped, rebuilt and disassembled until we feel that that person's essence has finally been reached. On rare occasions of connection, we can know a person the first time we meet, although it's usually a more circuitous process. Getting to know and understand Eric, though, was an absolute journey. He was a slippery type of person; as soon as I thought I had a handle on him, he'd throw me a curve ball. He never stopped revealing pieces of him here and there that would shake at the foundation upon which I'd built my understanding of him. He completely defied categorization; Eric was a patriotic Gulf War veteran but he was also a vegetarian biker who loved heavy metal music and making people laugh. Most of all, though, he adored his wife, their animals, and the home they built together. When I met him, the wild days were behind him; his life with Mary was where he wanted to be. It was at her urging that Eric first became a vegetarian. The more he learned about it, though, the more it became a personal choice that he embraced. He began cooking wonderful, spicy meals in earnest, he started reading about animal rights, he stood behind the bullhorn at rodeo protests, quickly becoming the most spirited of us all. I think that though the initial reason he gave up meat was because of his love and respect for Mary, the deeper reason Eric became so involved was because of his love and respect for justice. Over the years Eric, Mary, John and I went to restaurants, movies, haunted houses, plays, carnivals, and arcades. If an entire week went by without seeing them, it seemed unnatural. When John and I decided to get married, they were the first people we thought of asking to stand up at the wedding. Despite the fact that it was an easy decision on our part, Eric seemed so honored that we asked him. On the day of the final fitting of my wedding dress, Eric dropped off Mary to meet me in the shop, while he went to join John at a restauant a few blocks away. Apparently, as he was parking his motorcycle, he and Mary could see me in my dress from the window while I was talking to the seamstress. Later, as Mary and I met up with the other two, Eric gave me a silent, smiling thumbs-up, acknowledging his approval, without letting my betrothed know that he had seen me in my dress first. Despite outward appearances, Eric was a gentleman to the core. Just ten days before our wedding, I was cooking dinner, thinking about the ceremony and the honeymoon and the friends coming into town, when the phone rang. It was Mary. Her voice sounded so frail and strained, like she was thousands of miles away. I could barely hear her. She asked me to come to a hospital, to the intensive care ward where Eric had just been taken. "Marla, please pray for him," she cried before we hung up and I called a cab. I jotted a frantic note for John and ran out the door. On the taxi ride to the hospital, I went over everything that I knew from our brief conversation: Eric was hit by a car while on his bike, he was unconscious with a serious head injury. Alternately crying and praying, it was impossible to imagine this man, this incredible life-force, lying on a gurney, depending on others for his survival. I hung onto my image of him as the strong, vital person that I knew him to be throughout the next day and a half as he went in for surgery after surgery. He never regained consciousness. After what seemed an eternity of crying and hoping and praying, the doctors gave us the news: the injuries Eric sustained were too severe, he was existing right now because of the many machines that he was hooked up to. There weren't any more brain waves emanating from his skull, so bashed and so bloated. Mary made the decision to turn off the machines that were sustaining him. He was brain-dead and, as excrutiating as it was for her, she felt that it was time for him to move on. We all had our chance to say goodbye to Eric, to squeeze his puffy hands, once so firm, to send our love. Memories that were almost tangible unraveled in my mind, of the healthy, vigorous Eric I had seen just a few days before. His voice, that child-like laugh, echoed inside my head. When I tried to reconcile the man I knew and loved with this broken form on the bed, I knew that it was time for him to move on, too. If Eric were truly alive, he would have filled up the whole room with his spirit. My friend had ceased to exist. About a month after he passed away, after our wedding and honeymoon, John and I went to a protest at a rodeo. The year before, we were at the very same event with Mary and Eric, dressed as rodeo clowns and a bull. This time, as we walked up to the exact place where we had stood only one year before, visions washed over me. I palpably felt the absence of my friend, and it seemed as though a big part of me was missing, too. Standing there without Eric, the lively, proletariat animal activist, I had to content myself with his apparition that I saw everywhere I looked. But something happened that would make this afternoon unforgettable. There was a pile of posters and signs that was stacked on the ground, unused. With no provocation, there wasn't a great wind or anything, two posters lifted into the air, flying above and past the activists. I think we all assumed that they would just fall back down, there didn't seem to be enough of a wind to support them, so we watched to see where they would land. Except they kept lifting higher and higher in the air. Finally, after teasing us with several boomerang-like motions, one of the posters fell back to the ground. The other one, though, was on a journey. It rose higher, then would swoop down like a bird, only to gain more momentum and get swept up farther than before, well above the clouds. We all stood there gape-mouthed, looking at each other and back to the poster that was lifting to an incredible altitude on this still July day. Other than a few gasps of amazement, we were silent in wonder. We watched the red poster flicker in the sky as it twirled over and over for at least a half hour. Finally, it was no bigger than a tiny speck, it was so high and far away. Then it disappeared, swallowed by the sky. Someone broke the silence, saying, "Way to go, Eric". I'm a pragmatic person, but I'm convinced that he had something to do with it, too. I'm certain that Eric wanted to show his new friends a little of what he was doing on earth. I could see him, floating around with a few other spirits, talking about his life. He could have been explaining why protecting animals was so important to him when he saw us millions of miles away, standing in front of the rodeo arena where he had stood one year before, and he said something to the effect of, "Here, I’ll show you why I did what I did." He selected a poster that was meaningful to him, one that expressed a message succinctly and passionately, as he would. He then lifted it up to where he skimmed the clouds with his friends. I don’t know if this scenario is just a construct of my imagination, but I’ve taken to heart the lesson Eric taught me through the example of his life. That he could have summoned his powers to lift a poster way up past the birds, clouds and airplanes is perhaps impossible, even with vegan biker Mettalica fans who live their lives to the fullest. Then again, maybe not. The lesson of his life, that anything is possible, that we are bound only by our lack of imagination and our lack of faith, is a powerful conviction for anyone to hold, particularly those who are carrying on the work that Eric did, lovingly, passionately, and guilelessly.

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