Two eulogies for Saafir

2007

Here lies Saafir.

Isn’t it remarkable?

He came out of the mindless buzz and fury, 15,000,000,000 years after the beginning of time.

Isn’t it remarkable?

He will soon disappear back into the mindless buzz and fury. Bit by bit, his body will return to the earth and sky. Microbes will eat his carbon and phosphorous. Next year’s grass will grow green with his nitrogen. His water will drift into the sky and join the clouds. Soon, most of his body will rain down from the sky and find it’s way back to the sea.

Isn’t it remarkable?

This quiet body was so recently animated and inspired. For 27 years it moved through the earth. It loved and laughed. It wept and dreamed. It sang and shouted. Now it is quiet, forever.

Isn’t it remarkable?

Even though breath no longer passes his lips, his voice still echoes in our heads. We still feel his arms embracing us. We still feel his warm breath, still hear his kind words ringing in our ears.

Even though the years will march on and his echo will fade;

Even though our voices will dim, then go silent;

Even though our sun will dim, then vanish into the mindless buzz and fury;

Isn’t it remarkable,

that his voice lived at all?

2065

The first time I saw Saafir, he had just moved into the house down the street. I can picture it vividly. He had on a colorful tie and he had taken off his jacket and spread it over the grass. He and a little girl in pink pajamas were lying on the lawn, looking up at the sky. They were surrounded by piles of boxes and an antique bedroom set, the wardrobe sitting askew and looking decidedly out of place on the lawn. Saafir gestured wildly and pointed at the sky. They both laughed. I never did find out what they were looking at that day (whether it was clouds, airplanes, rainbows, or dust motes) but this was a typical moment for the Saafir I came to know.

He was one of the most curious people I’ve ever known. He had a voracious appetite for learning. He passed up no chance to learn and spent most of his waking hours hunched over a book, brow furrowed, scribbling furiously in a notebook. His shelves overflowed with books on physics, poetry, and a hundred other topics. His willingness to lend them out was legendary among the neighborhood children. The only catch was that he might make you read the first chapter of Through the Looking Glass before you scurried off with it. His wife would often tease him, saying he should’ve married a librarian instead of an anthropologist.

We had a great friendship and spent many hours over coffee in his study, but I think Saafir ultimately had more in common with my kids than me. At my son’s insistence, Saafir would drag his congas out of the garage and across the street, set them up in my kitchen and help the 12-year old play. They would put Art Blakey’s Holiday for Skins on the record player for inspiration. Their playing would get louder and louder until, finally, my wife would come storming down the stairs, yelling for some peace. My son was never a particularly good conga player, but you’d never have known it from Saafir’s encouragement. My youngest daughter also adored him. He’d never show up at our door without a pocketful of chocolate coins that he would make magically disappear and reappear, to her delight. He would then sit patiently on our living room rug while she played with his hair and carefully lined up and named all twenty of her stuffed animals.

Here was a man who was thrilled by the fact that he was alive. You could see it in his eyes. In the way he laughed. I think he had a deeper appreciation for the high moments in his life from his intimacy with its depths. He struggled valiantly with depressive illness for his whole life, and towards the end, with a debilitating disease that slowly sapped the life from his body. But his mind never faltered. He cared about people, especially little people, and he had a fierce drive to understand the world around him.

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