Condolences
A little over 40 people who I had not invited showed up to Dylan’s funeral.
The strangers had no discernible commonality. Adults, the elderly, some teenagers. All walks of life. Some weren’t dressed appropriately, seeming to have come straight from work. Hard hats, blue/grey suits, some fast-food workers still in their uniforms.
My sister’s guess was that Dylan must have been in some twelve-step program like AA. Were these people he had helped? His friends from church?
At the reception I approached two men in matching T-Mobile polos, on break I assumed. One of them produced an invitation sent to him by our estate planner.
These people, the T-Mobile employee explained, were Dylan’s enemies. My thoughtful, funny, and intelligent 63-year-old husband was apparently a menace, an instigator of shouting matches, arguments, and sometimes physical altercations with these poor people. I couldn’t believe the stories.
A young man in his twenties said Dylan poured industrial grease from the top of the local skate park’s quarter pipe. A Wendy’s manager said Dylan would periodically demand refunds and throw tantrums when denied. A woman in her eighties asked Dylan not to walk through her garden once and woke up the next morning to a hole in the ground that he had apparently rented an excavator to dig.
Notebooks I found that night in a locked drawer of Dylan’s desk were filled cover-to-cover with names (sometimes just ‘Starbucks Barista’ or ‘Mom with Stroller’) and occasional addresses of people with whom he had feuded. Meticulous records of dates, and the nature of the fights. Many were from out of state (Dylan had traveled for work before he retired). For months following his passing I received gleeful letters from those who lived too far to make the trip to his wake.
The odd thing (other than the quasi-betrayal-akin-to-infidelity of learning your partner lived two lives) was that many Dylan’s nemeses seemed to be experiencing real grief. They weren’t necessarily happy that Dylan had passed. They were bonded by their adversary. They stayed at the church long after the caterers had packed and left. I heard they took the party to a bar, exchanging stories about Dylan, laughing, crying. Despite what some said in their letters—and to my face at the funeral—they clearly were going to miss my husband.
My therapist’s theory is that some of us live our lives in such isolation, mundane and similar in the day-to-day, that we crave an enemy. Somebody to exist in contrast against. And maybe Dylan knew this, which is why he had our lawyer send out the invites.
For my own part, I think I would have liked to meet the Dylan whom these people loved to hate. A part of me feels as though I missed out on a part of the man I married. Of course, I just wanted him back. I simply wanted more Dylan. And if that meant a spiteful, insane weirdo who had the inexplicable time and resources (as well as access to construction-grade equipment) to devote to terrorizing the community at large, then so be it.