Marvin&Company: Stories About Death And Entrepreneurship

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Tag: Marvin

August 10, 2020

About Marvin

When I tell people about you, those who never got to know you when you were in the world, this is what I say:

You were brilliant. Able to take a building apart and put it back together in your head, then write the instructions. You loved architecture, history, and railroads the way a potter loves clay. You were one of the smartest people I’ve ever known, and yet you possessed the charisma to speak with anyone without a hint of superiority. You could command a room with a look or a word. This was the best of you.

I also got to see the worst parts of you. Your temper, that deep fiery rage with teeth and claws. How your eloquent words, when turned loose in anger, could tear your opponent apart, even when, especially when, you didn’t raise your voice. I saw your insecurities, how you hated yourself more than anyone else ever could. Our shared fear that the world would find out the secret to our success was just pretending to have a plan.

Most of the time, though, you showed up for our friendship with your best self, and challenged me to do the same. Problem solving was our language. We built a company and a life like an old couple working through a crossword together.

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August 9, 2020

The Beginning of Everything

We’ve been friends for less than a year, and you’ve just quit your job. Well, sort of; you’ve told the executive director to perform an unlikely sexual act upon himself and stormed out.

I follow you, of course, like I will for the next fourteen years.

I know you’ll be at our project. It has walls now, and a floor, and we’re both wearing shoes this time, so things are already looking up. I find you pacing around the skeletal interior walls. You need to rant for awhile so I listen. For what it’s worth, the disagreement spinning out of control wasn’t your fault. We work for a temperamental man whose grandiose ideas aren’t always rational or legal. You pointed out the flaws in his latest shenanigans and it was not well received. He is an asshat. If you want to keep your job, though, you’ll need to apologize.

You pause the tirade to ask me what I think, so I say “are you ready to go?”. For a moment you think I mean are you done complaining, can we leave the building now, and the hurt look on your face shocks me. Your entire body deflates at the realization that I may not be on your side this time. Up to this point I still suspected you were just letting me follow you around because I typed fast and you felt sorry for me. I understand, finally, that this friendship was never about pity.

So I continue, explaining how you should not give our boss the satisfaction of quitting unless you are ready to leave on your own terms, sure of a brilliant and successful future. We aren’t quite there yet, so perhaps an insincere apology will buy you the time to plan what’s next. You smile, thank me for listening, and we leave.

Later, after an apology so sarcastic I still cannot believe it worked, we are downstairs in our little closet office. Sitting beside me you quietly say, “I can’t do this alone” and hand me a coffee stained business plan created on a typewriter in 1979. The cover says, simply, Marvin & Company.

This is the beginning of everything.

August 8, 2020

Navigating

We are arguing about a map. I’ve spent half a year completing a housing condition survey of the entire West side of Saratoga and now that the map is complete you don’t like where I’ve drawn the target area boundaries. A brilliant idea, I thought, a bit of gerrymandering to ensure a high score on the grant we’re about to submit. I’ve created a target area that includes the lowest income areas with the worst housing conditions and I’m too proud of my work to consider who that choice has left off the map.

You’re listing names now: all the people who need roofs and furnaces and accessible bathrooms, elderly ladies who make you cookies and tea, who you’ve told you would try your best to help. I’ve unintentionally excluded them in favor of statistics, and you are enraged. Your fists pound the table and your eyes are on fire. I’ve never seen you so upset – although this is nothing compared to our years of arguments to come.

Too angry and hurt to say anything, I walk out. Through the back door and down the street, headed toward the project we’re currently managing. It’s an abandoned building, torn apart with two walls and no roof, on its way to becoming three rent controlled senior apartments. While grinding my teeth and imagining witty comebacks, I’ve overlooked the fact that I walked down the street and onto an active construction site in a dress, with no shoes.

You follow me, of course, because you always do, and for the next decade you always will.

We’re calmer now, making tentative eye contact. You, a mountain man in a purple polo shirt, smiling in mild frustration. Me, blue silk skirt and bare feet, balanced precariously on a metal I-beam, surrounded by all the reasons I should have updated my tetanus shot. “Well…” you say, raising your eyebrows and spreading your hands. “Yeah” I respond. It’s as close as we’ll come to apologies today.

In two steps you’ve expertly traversing the space between us. You pick me up, flinging me over your shoulder with more force than I believe is truly necessary, and carry me back to the sidewalk. When I am back on the ground, you hand me my shoes.

I look up at you to say something, anything, to redeem myself, as this is clearly not my most professional moment. Before I can speak you say “They poured concrete this morning.” So we walk to the back of the building where a new concrete pad cures in the late afternoon sun. Without a word you take the pencil from behind your ear and write your initials, pass it to me so I can write mine. Somewhere on Washington Street in Saratoga, there is a utility room crawl space where MO & MRD is forever inscribed on the rear left corner of the concrete.

Later, we will revisit the map, add the missing data, give up a point or two so that a dozen more people are eligible for the grant program. I’ve learned the importance of valuing people over scoring criteria. Years from now you’ll tell me this was the day you knew ours was a friendship destined for longevity.

August 8, 2020

The Best Parts

Simple truths. You adored my children as if you were their beloved crazy uncle. Never missed a play or concert, carried their school photos in your wallet and hung their school achievement certificates on the wall above your desk. From the first day you met six month old Elder Child, you were in love. You talked to Younger Child throughout my pregnancy, wondering if she’d recognize your voice when she was born. You showered them with gifts and praise, fed them junk food and life lessons. Sat beside them to read the same book a dozen times. You held YC when she’d been in the world less than a dozen hours. When EC walked to the office after school you stopped work to ask about her day.

One drizzly February day, when EC was at daycare and Husband working days during winter break, you came to my house with a Vivaldi CD you’d bought at a truck stop. I sat in the rocking chair, nursing my five week old infant while you tactfully averted your eyes. We talked about NPR and funny bumper stickers you saw on the road. I sang all my favorite James Taylor and Barry Manilow songs to soothe the baby and you asked me to keep singing long after she slept. Later you brought me lunch and made me tea.

I didn’t realize how I longed for the outside world, still immersed as I was on the hormone cocktail of breastfeeding and new baby smell. It was just an afternoon filled with simple acts of love and it was magnificent.

Some people asked why I played Vivaldi at your memorial service. Why not Grateful Dead or Talking Heads? Surely that was more your style. It was my selfish desire to remember this day. The tenderness with which you handed me the heavy hand-thrown pottery mug of mint tea. The way your shoulders relaxed and your face became peaceful when you held my babies. You were absolutely head over heels for the small humans I love more than everything. That’s maybe the best part of our story.

December 2, 2013

Guilt

A letter to my friend on the anniversary of your death:

I was collateral damage. Insulting as that sounds, it brings me comfort to think that in the end, I didn’t matter anymore. It wasn’t personal. It wasn’t emotional. It wasn’t a choice. I, my family, our company, the people who loved you and tried to circle the wagons when you started to get “sick”, we didn’t matter.

You, a recovering addict when we first met, were a ticking time bomb of sorts. From what I’ve learned about your life before we met, and addiction in general, every day was a struggle. Every waking moment you made a gut-wrenching choice to maintain your tenuous hold on recovery. For more than twenty years you chose to be present in your life, and for your last fourteen years in the world you chose to spend that life with me. I will never know what happened, what was the tipping point that led you to make a single disastrous choice after so many years of staying clean. I do, however, need to accept that it had nothing at all to do with me.

Six days after you died, your sister told me that I drove you to use cocaine. An eerily similar accusation to those you made in fits of rage during the awful two years preceding your death. When faced with irrefutable proof of your failing business and deteriorating health, you reverted to blaming me for everything. If I wasn’t such a nagging bitch you could do your job. If my expectations weren’t so high, the company would be fine. If I was a better grant writer, or a better program manager, or a better person in general, your job would be easier and you’d get more work done. You can’t do your job well because you must “babysit” me so often. I am emotionally unstable, which is terribly distracting to you. Look at the filing cabinets full of finished projects (from the previous ten years). Why isn’t anything you do ever good enough? Why must I continually crack the whip. I’m always making you out to be the bad guy, and you’re not going to take it anymore. This isn’t friendship, this is business. I am not your friend, and you are not mine. Bitch. Whore. Liar. Thief.

Those words, your words, still haunt me. I watched you disappear, without explanation or acknowledgement, and you took my life’s work with you. I stood by, enabling you, covering for you, allowing you to treat me this way. Paralyzed by a toxic cocktail of co-dependence, loyalty, and disbelief. And yet I feel guilty. I hate that your perception of reality was that I stabbed you in the back. I hate that your last hours on earth were spent in an empty office, while I hid from you upstairs, watching your truck from the window to make sure I could leave without seeing you, because I didn’t want you to yell at me again.

You called me ten hours before you died. I did not answer the phone. I was having a quiet evening with my children, and I wanted to avoid another screaming match. I wanted to read bedtime stories and get a good night’s sleep for once. So I screened your call, and you did not leave a message. It was my last opportunity to speak with you, and I missed it. I have such profound regret for missing that phone call. For hiding from you in our office building, less than 400 feet away, as you sat in an empty room, faced with the broken pieces of our empire. I regret that you died alone.

But dying alone was your choice.

I would have stayed by your side until the end, if only you had let me. I tried my best. I threw myself against the brick wall of your “illness” until I was broken.

The ugly truth is that grieving your death this year has been much easier than watching you die. You took your time leaving the world. It was a slow march toward oblivion, and I was with you every step of the way. I did your job for you, invested my meager savings in our company as everything spiraled out of control, as you bled it dry to feed your addiction. You betrayed our staff and clients, wonderful people who respected and trusted you. I could have walked away from you, and taken our clients with me, at any point during those awful two years, and yet I stayed. Because you were my friend and I loved you, I stayed, and by staying I helped you kill yourself. Blindly, fiercely attempting to save you until there was nothing left to save.

When you died, I was beyond exhaustion. I missed my friend. I missed your morning phone call, so often interrupting me in the shower, to discuss the coming day. I missed joking with you while I cooked dinner, and the late night chats when we watched PBS documentaries or listened to NPR. For over a decade my days began and ended with you. You disappeared slowly at first, then all at once, until one day I was left with a gaping hole in the middle of my life, and found a very angry man who looked and sounded like you had taken your place.

In the final two years of your life, you acted as if you hated me. This paradox still confounds me. You used our friendship as a weapon against me in ways that are unforgivable. What an awful thing, to let me love you and then use that love against me. You turned into a horrible person, and I stayed by your side to witness your long, slow shamble toward death. And in the end, your family blamed me, just like you blamed me.

And for awhile, I blamed me too.

In the end, I don’t think you even knew who I was anymore. Our arguments were absurd – you accusing me of things that happened before I was born or screaming racial slurs. In the last photo I ever took of you, just before you died, you look so sad. Zombie-like, no life in your eyes, nothing left of you. While gathering pictures for your memorial service, I was struck by how different you looked in the years before you started to slip away. How alive you looked, the way your eyes crinkled when you laughed. In 2009 you stood, handsome and poised in the lobby of our office building, a hundred people listening to you speak passionately about historic preservation. Eight days before you died, you slumped in a chair as if simply being upright was a huge effort. Your thousand-mile-stare, the way you no longer lifted your feet when you walked, uncertain, unbalanced. The way you spoke changed, not just the tone but the cadence of your voice. As if your body were inhabited by another person altogether. I didn’t know you anymore.

In the end, I got no recognition, no medal of honor, not even a friendly nod to acknowledge the hell through which I accompanied you. I lost you, I lost our company, and I lost two years of my life. Your death was a relief. Grieving you has not been easy, but there is no denying that my life this year has been significantly more pleasant without you. Sometimes I feel only the slightest twinge of residual guilt in thinking such a callous statement, and just as easily the same truth overwhelms me with crushing guilt, as if I have been knocked down by an ocean wave.

I cannot possibly be the only person to feel this way when a loved one dies of addiction, slowly, horribly, leaving a trail of destruction in their wake. I needed these words this past year. I hope by writing them, another person who needs the words can find them and be comforted.

December 2, 2013

Introduction

My friend, with whom I had run a successful consulting firm for over 14 years, died on October 31, 2012.

Five days later his siblings, who I had not met until the funeral, informed me that they now owned the company I created. I conceded the company name and attempted to keep the clients I had signed – people who knew my parents and grandparents (I’m from a really small town). The siblings then attempted to sue me. An inadequate understanding of business law caused me to lose my life’s work. Their first demand was to take down the company website.

 In doing so, I discovered that I owned the domain name. This led me to the idea of making it into something useful.

 This is me standing up for myself, claiming the last, small piece of my friend, and my former life, that no one can take from me. 

 I may write every day, or once a year. My first crack at blogging will be a collection of essays about navigating my way through grief, but I expect it may branch out into other things. We’ll see how it goes.