Lost and Wanted(20)

“I remember the first time my parents took me to a Ghanaian funeral,” he said. “I was amazed. The coffin was in the shape of a stack of American dollars, because he was a businessman. Funerals are almost like weddings there, and equally expensive. People dance.”

“It’s a carnival,” his wife said. “Unimaginable until you experience it.” She was sharp-featured, petite, with a confident, intelligent way of speaking, and I had the strange thought that Charlie would be disappointed not to have met her.

“No one is required to”—Kwesi seemed to search for what he wanted to say—“to sit quietly in their grief.”

“You’ve been to more memorial services than Ghanaian funerals,” his wife pointed out, needling him in a gentle, marital way.

“True,” Kwesi said, “and I’ve always been more comfortable at this type. But I have a great deal of admiration for the other.”

I was afraid that Jack wouldn’t want to stay in the pew when I went up to make my speech, or that I would become too upset to speak, or that I wouldn’t feel anything and that would be apparent in my voice. I was used to public speaking, even used to talking about things that mattered to me a great deal. But at a physics conference, you knew there would always be a conversation after the presentation, sometimes even a collaborative working-out of ideas that continued after that was finished. There was always the next conference, the next paper; nothing was fixed forever. How could I tell just one anecdote about Charlie?

William had begun to speak. Back when we were in college, Charlie’s parents were frequently in a state of panic about William, who was three years ahead of us, ran the radio station with a bunch of his stoner friends, and tended to sleep through his classes. This was in spite (or perhaps because) of all the chess tournaments as a child, Charlie often explained. Although they didn’t always get along, the glamour of William’s life wasn’t lost on his sister. As a young adult, William preferred cards, and in the summers—when other students got jobs in their hometowns, or went off to spend a few weeks building houses in Haiti or Honduras—William went to Vegas as a prop player. He came back rich in the fall, ready to commence partying again.

    Since college William had put his talents to work for a hedge fund in Manhattan. He had acquired a very sociable Chilean wife, and adorable, undoubtedly chess-playing twin boys. It was a turn toward convention that I’d seen in other Harvard students who had been disaffected with the university for one reason or another. William had been as reticent and sardonic as Kwesi was earnest and outgoing, and although Charlie had once been in love with Kwesi, I knew her perspective had been more like her brother’s. If either of them had felt discriminated against at Harvard, they would never have said it. Once I’d forwarded an image from the “I too am Harvard” social media campaign—a girl holding a sign that said, “No, you can’t touch my hair”—to Charlie, who didn’t keep up with Harvard news or attend reunions; she had heard of it, but had expressed amazement at the amount of activism around race on campus these days. “Maybe this is totally gen X of me,” she wrote back. “I mean, more power to them. But I can’t imagine us doing any of this, back then.”

William said that he’d chosen to read a poem that his sister liked. He himself had always been more interested in poker than in poetry (this got a laugh), but his sister had helped him understand it.

    This like a dream

Keeps other time

And daytime is

The loss of this.



Like William, I’d never had the patience for poetry, but I liked this one. I liked its short lines and the way it seemed easy to understand, at first—it was about the moon—but how the “this” of the poem kept slipping away.

    For time is inches

And the heart’s changes

Where ghost has haunted

Lost and wanted.



Later I checked Auden’s dates to see whether “time is inches” could be a reference to relativity—based on another poem of his, called “After Reading a Child’s Guide to Modern Physics,” he seemed to take a dim view of our discipline—and discovered that it could. At the time, though, I just sat there listening to William, who was so changed from the college student I remembered—saying that love was particular even though it was directed at the same person, that we hadn’t lost just one Charlie but as many as the number of people who were seated here today.

William’s black shoes descended the steps from the chancel on silent red plush, and there was a space that applause might have filled in any other setting. A middle school teacher spoke about Charlie’s multifarious artistic talents, and then the chaplain got up to read from the Second Letter of Paul. When he was finished, it would be my turn. I had prepared my remarks, but I didn’t want to deliver them. Sometimes at work, our team would identify a problem in the question we’d asked rather than the solution we’d devised. It wasn’t that I had too much to say, but that I didn’t want to say anything. And that wasn’t because I didn’t love Charlie, but because I couldn’t believe that she was really dead.

Jack had been patient but he was starting to fidget; it would be a disaster if he needed to be taken out just as I was starting to speak. (This was the kind of single-parent problem, purely to do with logistics, that I hadn’t fully considered in advance.) I looked around, but I wasn’t the only one: two other children in our immediate vicinity were looking down in their laps, their faces vaguely glowing. I muted all sounds and handed Jack my phone: he was immediately perfectly still and absorbed in a game, almost as if I’d switched him off.