I met Conor in 5th grade. His family had just moved to my town from Okinawa, where his father had been stationed. I don’t recall how we began to hit it off, but we did; perhaps it was the shared interest in ice hockey, plus the fact that Conor was my only friend to live within a 5 minute bike ride from my house. Throughout elementary and junior high school, and our friendship grew, as our shared social circles waxed and waned.
We separated for school, with my going to a local private school because of “discipline problems” that resulted in my regularly getting harassed and assaulted (today, they would say “bullied”, and say it loudly) and my father being sick of dealing with school administrators who seemed more interested in running an orderly school-prison, than making sure I could get to class with all my books, and my dignity, intact. Despite the school change, our friendship stayed strong, especially once we discovered the local BBS systems and began interacting with each other, and other people, online, (once we got tired of waiting for graphics to load whenever we signed onto Prodigy). We’d spend the summers playing weird videogames like Aerobiz and Cyborg Justice; we’d play epic sessions of Axis & Allies; we’d drink absurd amounts of soda, and then fill the empty bottles with water, playing slo-pitch softball on my parents’ roof with my Louisville Slugger. When Conor got his license (he was a year older than me), it was night after night of late night hooliganery, doing doughnuts on a local golf course or driving onto the beach; drinking lots of coffee at the all-night Bickford’s and wondering what our future might end up like. If we’d known. If only we’d known.
Conor and I knew we were the “weird ones”. While we were both somewhat smart, and marked by interests in computers, electronics, pyrotechnics and anything we had to figure out, schoolwork came more easily to someone like Conor, and I alternately envied and hated him for it. We weren’t really nerds per se, and I resented being lumped into that group. I felt like we weren’t nerds, because we also had interests in sports, being outdoors and performing strange physical feats, like trying to climb up a tree in his yard and flip ourselves, still holding onto the branch, without popping our shoulders out of their sockets. We rode our bikes fast and tried to find the steepest jumps; We built potato cannons and blew stuff up with the firecrackers he’d somehow smuggle home from New Hampshire every summer.
Our friendship seemed so pristine to me, I had a sense of foreboding about it. I feared something tragic was bound to happen. Once, when jumping off some rocks into a pool one lazy summer day, Conor hit an underwater obstruction and failed to come up for a while. I became somewhat frantic and began diving trying to find him, before I saw him surface a few yards from me. His face pitched in pain, I thought I’d have to drag him to shore and save his life; the reality was he swam over himself (faster than me), climbed up and grimaced at a nasty bruise developing on his back, and declared an end to his day of swimming.
In high school, I found myself attracted to the punk rock DIY ethos, and found some friends through that circle who’d later become permanent fixtures in my life. I started going to shows for local bands and bigger acts, and bringing him along; his normal look, standard T-shirt and trainers stood out for how they didn’t match the rest of us trying desperately to prove our punk rock bona fides to one another. We’d travel to Providence, New Hampshire, Northampton, and Boston to see bands like Shootyz Groove, Bim Skala Bim, Gang Green, as well as countless local bands in Knights of Columbus halls throughout the South Shore.
Naturally, many of these car trips revolved around girls, and discussions of how they work, how to attract them, et cetera. We each had our respective crushes, and talked about what we were doing to woo them. To anyone who knew Conor, thinking of him trying to convince a woman to like him was like convincing a kid to eat candy. I’m secure enough in my masculinity to say that Conor was a fine physical specimen. A high school wrestler, he was in prime physical shape, with a sharp jawline and masculine features, I never understood how girls didn’t simply swoon over him. His modest success with women was inexplicable.
So one summer, when he told me he found a girl he really liked, and they began dating, I was apprehensive. I had seen TV, I knew this is where the best friend becomes the third wheel, pushed to the side while the friend focused on the woman. Instead, Conor began including me in their regular outings. Feeling weird about being a bachelor, interloping on something I shouldn’t be seeing, eventually I became comfortable with them.
We went away to college, he to a school in Connecticut, and me to Boston University. We visited each other a couple times, and when he returned from school we would strike up our friendship again — until I betrayed him in a way so notable for its banality that it doesn’t bear mention. But I knew I’d wounded him, and I sought to make things right. Except I had my own demons to fight through. When we agreed to meet, on a break from school, at a nearby pizza place, I spent most of my time explaining why I didn’t feel as if I were in a position to even beg forgiveness, but I did anyway. Conor accepted my apology, and I thought I’d done the first mature thing in my life: admit I fucked up, royally, ask for someone the chance to begin rebuilding trust, and then going about that task.
Except that never seemed to happen. I knew, somehow, that Conor was a person one should not lose track of. To paraphrase another source, there’s a shortage of perfect friendships in this world, and it would be a pity to damage ours. Yet as I tried to re-establish our friendship, it was clear I had damaged it beyond repair. Or had I? Conor had obviously begun finding his own friends at school — despite the fact he’d later drop out — and I began to feel like a hanger-on. I wasn’t ever socially adept, but I had become good at understanding when I was taking more from a situation, than adding to it — and I began to reduce my contact with Conor, more for his benefit than for mine.
We’d go on to trade emails on occasion and catch up for coffee whenever one of us was within hailing distance. The coffees were always cordial, but with a familiarity only a relationship like we’d had could create; the emails a mixed bag of hey-whats-up-lately happenings and remember-when nostalgia. We were both sentimental to a fault. The last time I saw Conor in the flesh, I was in San Francisco for a conference, around the time of my birthday, and I was convening my Bay Area friends for dinner and a bar crawl. I’d come to discover he was getting married that weekend (!) to the woman who would eventually become his widow. Despite the business that comes with a wedding weekend, he nevertheless carved out time to meet with me, letting me snap this blurry photo — my most recent of him — and telling me how excited he was to be marrying this person, and of the future that awaited him. Later, he would excitedly tell me he was expecting a child! I didn’t have any immediate plans for parenthood at the time, but I was looking forward to introducing our kids to one another. I was glad to see one of us had got started.
I was not far behind, and just this past week my wife gave birth to our son. All the worries I’d struggled with had faded away with this cute little face, just days old but already with his own idiosyncrasies. After a short post-labor stay at the hospital, we came home and began to rearrange our lives around this face.
And the next morning, my phone rang. It was a friend in SF, who only called with news. As I swiped the “answer” toggle, I anticipated some good news of his own to share.
Conor was the first person I knew who had the courage to admit he didn’t have all the answers, but would soldier on towards his future, often reluctantly (and then soon enough — gleefully). He didn’t always have the best relationships with people, myself included. He had a natural aptitude for, and desire to indulge in, more physical aspects of living — the kind of which I tried to follow along. Conor is the reason I am not a simple bookworm who can barely lift his own bodyweight. Hockey, bike riding, weightlifting, freerunning and parkour — if there’s a singular reason I continued playing hockey and lacrosse and everything else, it was simply to keep up with him.
Conor often dove headfirst into things in a way I did not think wise, but I did like the possibility of its outcomes. But where I would stop and say “let’s think about this”, he would already be gone, leaping off the seawall without regard for consequence. He seemed to have a sense that, whatever happened, it was survivable. Where I focused on the consequences, he focused on the adventure of adapting to those consequences.
Yet strangely enough, it was me who was dressing weird in high school, and taking this preppy looking guy to punk rock shows. It’s probably strange to think of this guy, with his boys-regular haircut in its natural brown, wearing polo shirts and trainers, that this was his default look for much of the time I knew him. In truth, it was me who was the more mainstream, and he’d just gone on to let his eccentricity blossom in ways I could never possibly imagine. After a while, I was left behind, as he ventured ahead into his uncharted territory at a speed I could not match. I could only watch the dust and hope our trails would cross again, and frequently.
They did not. And now I find myself trolling his facebook and twitter accounts, and those of his current friends, searching vainly for signs of who he now was, and of When Things Went Wrong. I know Conor and I battled the same demons in many ways — we talked about it. I know that he had a lot of pain relating to life, and to certain people in it. And at this point, my memories of him are filling with footnotes of That’s-When-I-Should’ve-Known.
I’ve often thought of how we, as individuals, become projections of the people we see in front of each other every day. Throughout our lives, our personalities appear at times like a kind of quantum entanglement, where the emission and absorption of personality photons create another projection, but this, of the individual we are underneath. Beginning with family and close friends, one can build a pie-chart of influencers, whose influences combine to make up a large portion of who we are, or appear to be. We’re always our own unique individuals, but this melting pot effect of people we care about has a huge impact on who we are. We like these influencers; we strive to internalize their influence, and on occasion we may even attempt a kind of masquerade of it as our own.
I am continually returning to this wellspring of personality, to understand who my influencers are, in a better attempt to understand myself. There’s no better way to do this, than to return to the influencers themselves. I now find one of those major influencers is gone. In turn, that influencer, and the influence on oneself, becomes frozen in time, the last times you remember this person. Without refreshing this source of influencers, one runs the risk of ossifying one’s own personality with each subsequent loss. So we seek to continually expand and refresh our pool of influencers.
A huge part of me now seems completely unmoored in any reality, packed away and closed off like a museum exhibit. The associated impulses, thoughts, opinions and principles, are now outwardly inexplicable (or at least, now lacking any suitable cognitive empathizer). I will not be able to explain to my son, some day, that this crazy fucker is part of the reason his dad is ever so slightly bent off true; I can’t say “let’s go visit my old buddy Conor so you can understand a little bit of why I’m the weird you know”. I won’t be able to sit at a barstool with Conor and our kids, while we bore the young ones to tears with stories of the time we offroaded his car in Norwell, conned the Hingham marina into letting us use their air compressor to loft potato projectiles over Hingham Harbor, or shot bottle rockets like mortars and accidentally hit a passing police car. These shared experiences are now mine alone. And now, all who knew him have those same isolated memories, dereferenced pointers in a shared memory of history. I found life with Conor was best experienced in as small a group as possible. I was lucky that so much of my life was spent with Conor as my sole partner in crime. And now, all those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Now, I alone am their sole caretaker; awaiting nothing more than someone who may be interested in hearing them.
I can’t seek to explain or fathom even the summary reasons that lead Conor to take his life. It’d be insulting to his memory to attempt to do so. Believing the reports of his depression to be true, I can only urge people to read Rob Delaney’s article on depression, or read William Styron’s Darkness Visible to get a sense of what depression can do, and how it might (might!) be dealt with. More importantly, adding to the testimony beginning to appear is an important step in recognizing the community of individuals impacted by his life; most notably those closest to him: his parents, sister, wife and child, and those of friends and family, radiating outwards. His memory will not die, simply because of the ever-expanding circle of individuals who were influenced by him, and are now heartbroken at his sudden disappearance from our world.
For anyone who knew him in real life, Conor’s courage in attacking life should not and cannot be overstated. Nor can I explain the kind of loyalty he had to the people he really cared about. The weirdness, and uniqueness, of Conor Michael Fahey will continue on, but it’ll be up to those of us who knew him to carry on his influence in the best ways we, individually, are able.
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