Dave Schlachter died in his hometown at about 11:20 a.m. on March 2, 1970.
(A phone call saying that David was back in the hospital expected to die that night. A hastily arranged thousand-mile drive that brought three of us to be with him. A couple of days while he hung on. And then, he died. In those last moments, one of us held his mother, another held his girlfriend, and I put cooling cloths on Dave’s head and stroked his forehead, and talked to him and said goodbye.)
The following week, we were in northern New Jersey, where his father had family, and on a bitter cold Friday we buried him, as the rabbi and his father said the ancient words that probably none of Dave’s friends believed in.
While we were standing as pallbearers, Dennis, who had been Dave’s closest friend, leaned over to me and quietly quoted Kahlil Gibran: “Pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses the understanding.” I had plenty of pain, but not much understanding. (I couldn’t even understand why I had pain. Intellectually, I knew Dave was better off dead than trapped in a malfunctioning body. Intellectually, I believed he was now free. Intellectually, I believed in reincarnation, so intellectually I couldn’t see death as a tragedy, right? This from the same brain that was still lacerated from the murders of JFK and RFK, men it hadn’t even met!)
Dave had been one of my three closest friends in college; in some ways the closest. He and I were instinctively on the same wavelength, even though he was a well-motivated, scholastically successful, solidly middle-class Jewish Midwesterner, and I was none of these.
When he was hospitalized, my reaction was fierce: Fight this thing! Something told me that Will would have more to do with Dave’s survival than anyone was admitting. And I wanted desperately to help. Had the feeling that I could help, if I only knew how. But no one could tell me how. Our mutual friends were defeated by it. I read in their eyes that they thought I was merely refusing to accept the reality that Dave had been given a death sentence.
The worst of it was that I could see that Dave thought so too. In those days, even more than today, the surrounding culture called despair realism. In 1970 the consensus was that his only hopes were medical intervention or spontaneous remission (whatever that was supposed to mean) or a miracle. Medical intervention had failed, spontaneous remission wasn’t happening, and I don’t think anybody in Dave’s hospital room believed in miracles. I did, I suppose, but I sure didn’t know how to summon one.
Two weeks after he died, I was writing this in my journal:
Remembering times with Dave,
Like when he drove me to Solomon’s Island because I was sick with anger.
Like when we watched the inauguration together.
Like riding, talking, till 4 a.m.
Like discussing all the things that need discussing on the way to growing up.
Like sitting in my room choosing the 20 greatest men who ever lived.
Like planning a congressional race.
Like watching kindred minds follow kindred paths.
Like him arguing with me when I was depressed.
Like me arguing with him when he was depressed.
Like talking out all the doubts and half-fears that moulder and paralyze.
And so forth. Dave and I had had that kind of relationship. But he had died, not quite 23 years old, and we who were left had to live; had to figure out how to live.