death Archives - Ramblin' with Roger

Dead friends on FB

brutal

My old friend Dan asked “Seriously, folks. What do we do with dead friends on FB?” He linked to a Pickles cartoon.

Opal: I just noticed that my cousin Ethel is still one of my Facebook friends. I wonder if I should remove her name?

Earl: Why, are you mad at her?

Opal: Oh, no, she died two years ago, and it’s kind of annoying that she still has more Facebook friends than I do.

Someone responded to Dan, “Every day I’m reminded of old FB friends who have passed away and always wonder if I should unfriend them.” Dan replied, “Right! I feel like deleting is like I’m finally finishing them off, or desecrating their memories. It’s actually painful.”

I get that. I added, “Back in the day, when I had an address book – with paper and you entered records with pencil- when someone died, it took me a couple of years to erase them. It was brutal.”

What do all y’all do with the social media you interact with friends and family who have died? To delete or not delete; that is the question.

Armen

Simultaneously, I kept seeing “happy birthday” wishes to my old buddy Armen Boyajian, whom I knew from Binghamton Central High School because his birthday is March 2nd. Unfortunately, Armen died a couple of years ago.

I looked at the comments to his Facebook page and believe that some of them don’t know he’s gone. These weren’t “heavenly birthday” or similar. No wonder; he was only 68 then and would only be 71 now.

I took it upon myself to post on his FB page: “I was pleased that we reconnected. You were even following my blog! So I was so sad when you passed on 12/5/2022. You were a talented guy and a good man.” Heck, I wrote a response to a question he asked on December 2, but curiously, he didn’t acknowledge it. I doubt he ever saw it.

This begs a different question: what do I want to have happened to my Facebook when I die? I suppose I should talk to my daughter about it. My wife isn’t on Facebook, which is fine, but she does not understand its value, so my daughter would be a better party to decide.

The first MLK assassination attempt

“He was just a sneeze away from death”

The first MLK assassination attempt I knew of came up in a discussion at the Albany Public Library in January 2025 about Salman Rushbie’s book Knife. As you may know, Rushdie was stabbed in 2022 at Chautauqua Institution in western New York State. It’s a place my wife and I visited two years later, with greater security measures. Rushdie dreamed of something untoward happening to him the night before.

Someone in the book talk audience recalled that Martin Luther King, Jr. had been stabbed. The person thought it took place between the time of March on Washington on August 28, 1963, and when MLK was shot, presumably by James Earl Ray, on April 4, 1968. But I was sure that was not accurate. I suggested it had to have been earlier because, after 1963, he was an internationally known entity. Sure enough, it was in 1958.

I was recounting this to someone else, adding, “It was noted at the time that if he had sneezed, he would have died.” He thought I was BSing him. Nope.

“On 20 September 1958, Izola Ware Curry, a 42-year-old mentally disturbed woman, stabbed Martin Luther King, Jr., while he signed copies of his book, Stride Toward Freedom, at Blumstein’s Department Store in Harlem, New York. Curry approached King with a seven-inch steel letter opener and drove the blade into the upper left side of his chest. King was rushed to Harlem Hospital, where he underwent more than two hours of surgery to repair the wound. Doctors operating on the 29-year-old civil rights leader said: “Had Dr. King sneezed or coughed, the weapon would have penetrated the aorta.… He was just a sneeze away from death” (Papers 4:499n).”

Moreover

Not only did I recall this, but I wrote about it in 2013. The day before he died in 1968, MLK gave the Mountaintop speech. I had forgotten that he mentioned the 1958 assassination attempt as a part of that talk.

“It came out in the New York Times the next morning that if I had merely sneezed, I would have died. Well, about four days later, they allowed me, after the operation, they allowed me to read some of the mail that came in, and I’ll never forget it. It said simply, Dear Dr. King, I am a ninth-grade student at the White Plains High School. She said, while it should not matter, I would like to mention that I am a white girl. I read in the paper of your misfortune and of your suffering. And I read that if you had sneezed, you would have died. And I’m simply writing you to say that I’m so happy that you didn’t sneeze.”

In 1970, I was with a school group that drove past the Lorraine Hotel, where MLK was killed two years earlier. “In 1991, the Lorraine Motel was converted into the National Civil Rights Museum.”

One of the extremely few things I agree about 47’s actions: He signed an executive order to release more JFK, RFK, and MLK assassination files.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar said

In his Substack for this week, Kareem quotes MLK: “Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable… Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle- the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals.”

He notes: “Man, Dr. King could be a real downer. I mean, he’s not wrong, but that quote challenges people to rise above obsessing over their daily lives of pursuing personal goals in careers and relationships to take on the additional burden of seeking justice. Who’s got the time for sacrifice? I’m okay with people who choose not to sacrifice; it’s people who brag about sacrifices that aren’t really sacrifices who bug me. It diminishes those who really do sacrifice for the greater good.”

He complains that athletes and reality show contestants misuse the word sacrifice, even his former self: He had said, “’I think that the good and the great are only separated by the willingness to sacrifice.’ I would modify that today to say, ‘The good and the great are only separated by the intensity of their dedication…’

“True sacrifice is when one chooses to give up something precious in order to do something that doesn’t directly benefit them but does directly benefit others. Sacrifice for the greater good has many levels: from sacrificing one’s life—like Dr. King, Gandhi, Malcolm X, and Jesus—to sacrificing free time to help those in need within their community. Parents sacrifice constantly for their children because they love them. If we can learn to extend that feeling of love to a larger ‘family’ of neighbors, towns, country, and the world, then we are sacrificing in service of a just humanity. …”

My dad is still in my head

Hamlet, but I’m less than 1% Danish

Obviously, my dad is still in my head.

In April, when I was at my Dad’s group at church, the pastor was reading a piece on joy by Fred Buechner. We talked about the concept. Then, I mentioned that my go-to emotional state was melancholy.

I related this story, which I wrote about back in 2010. But I left details out, which I will add in italics.

We had a piano which my father painted, lilac, I think. “When I was four or five years old, Leslie marked up the piano with some crayons. In retrospect, it seemed like a reasonable thing; he colored the piano so she could too. My father went to Leslie and asked her who had marked the piano, and she said that Roger had done it.

“So my father got the strap that hung in the kitchen – this brown leather thing about a foot long that barbers used to sharpen their razors – and started wailing on me. One of the things he was looking for from me was an apology, yet even in the midst of my pain, I was unable to do so. ‘I didn’t do it, I didn’t do it!’ I sobbed.

“Eventually, and these are pretty much in the words of my father, recounting the incident years later, he figured that I was either really stupid or I was actually innocent. Finally, he requestioned Leslie, who finally confessed, and he started wailing on her.”

I’ve told this story a few times, but usually one-on-one, to my wife or a close friend. But this time, I added, “But he didn’t f**in’ BELIEVE me!”

Huh

Hmm. That was interesting. And surprising. Me cursing, even in our closed group, is not in my nature. So the telling of this thing that happened in 1958 somehow still has a visceral reaction in me. Among other things, it informs the pain when I feel when I’m not heard, or when people make assumptions about me that are untrue. It can tick me off but later, the melancholy takes hold.

The next morning, one of my online buddies wrote to say he was having prostate surgery; it was benign. My father died of prostate cancer. It was an interesting coincidence.

And the stories on CBS Sunday Morning that day – this is why Allah invented the DVR – about “The Covenant of Water” author Abraham Verghese, who was inspired by his mother and grandmothers; and Photographer James Balog on documenting climate change: “Adventure with a purpose” somehow leaned into the melancholy.

My relationship with my father was complicated. I’m sure my sisters would say that about their respective dealings with him, too. It’s been 24 years to the day since he died. I had the ridiculous thought that everyone should die in years ending in zero because it makes the math easier.

The Juice

get it out of my head

It was oddly unsettling. When I was traveling across New York State, anticipating the April 8 eclipse with my best friend from college, the subject of O J Simpson, The Juice, came up.

I could not remember why, but MAK noted that he had seen a boxy white vehicle that perhaps reminded him of a Ford Bronco involved in the slow-speed highway chase after Simpson was supposed to surrender to police.

So he asked if Simpson was out of jail. I was fairly sure that he was, which proved to be accurate. He was “released from prison in 2017 after serving about nine years of a 33-year sentence for a kidnapping and armed robbery in Las Vegas.”

As I noted, in 2016, I watched O.J.: Made in America, “a sprawling five-part documentary on the cable sports network ESPN,” which I still recommend. It’s still on ESPN and available on other platforms as well.

After I watched the series, I wrote: ” I concluded that 1) O.J. likely did the murders but that 2) the prosecution did not make its case due to the tremendous efforts of the defense team and some of the rulings of Judge Lance Ito.” The most angry I ever saw a mild-manned work colleague was when the not guilty verdict, watched by an estimated 95 million people, was announced.

So it was weird that a person whom I hadn’t even thought about in over six years until that trip died four days later of prostate cancer, the same disease that killed my father and which basketball legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is currently fighting.

Who are we?

On the trip, I said that the murder trial told a lot about America in terms of race, celebrity, media, and the justice system. Interestingly, Med Page Today touched on some of those in its story: “The public was mesmerized by his ‘trial of the century’ on live TV. His case sparked debates on race, gender, domestic abuse, celebrity justice, and police misconduct.”

Of course, there were countless comments after Simpson’s death. Caitlyn Jenner, “who married Kris Jenner shortly after the Kardashian matriarch’s divorce from Robert Kardashian, who was Simpson’s defense attorney during the murder trial, was among the first to react on social media. ‘Good Riddance #OJSimpson,’ she tweeted.”

I was more interested in the response by Ron Goldman’s family. They called Simpson’s death “a mixed bag of complicated emotions” tied to the civil case Nicole Brown Simpson and Goldman’s families filed in part to direct the proceeds of Simpson’s sort of confessional, If I Did It. They did not receive all they were due in the judgment. And the executor of Simpson’s willl says he’ll ‘do everything’ to ensure Goldman family gets ‘zero’ from the estate.

I’ve now purged the topic from my head. Probably.

Our mom knew stuff

1 Corinthians 12

In the ZOOM conversations I have with my sisters about 45 times yearly, I keep learning things about my parents.

Now, we realized early on that our mom knew stuff about finance. She was a bookkeeper in two Binghamton institutions, McLean’s Department Store and Columbia Gas and Electric. Later, she was a teller in Charlotte, NC.

I didn’t know until recently why she did not impart her wisdom to her children. She thought we were more intelligent than she was and that we would “figure it out.”

This sounds utterly Trudy. And it bugs me because we could have used her wisdom in this area. I know I had accumulated credit card debt for a time, which only got wiped out by my wife’s much better handle on finances, a topic that would make MEGO. It was also aided by winning money on a game show a quarter of a century ago.

But I’m also sad because it was her diminishing her gifts, her talents. She saw her husband as gifted in singing, painting, organizing, writing, schmoozing, etc. By comparison, she didn’t feel she had nearly as much to offer. And to suggest that her children know more than she did was incorrect.

Even though she went to church since before I was born, she never embraced the message of 1 Corinthians 12.

The Good Book

“There are different kinds of gifts, but the same Spirit distributes them. There are different kinds of service, but the same Lord. There are different kinds of working, but in all of them and in everyone it is the same God at work.

^“Now to each one the manifestation of the Spirit is given for the common good. To one there is given through the Spirit a message of wisdom, to another a message of knowledge by means of the same Spirit, to another faith by the same Spirit, to another gifts of healing by that one Spirit, to another miraculous powers, to another prophecy, to another distinguishing between spirits, to another speaking in different kinds of tongues, and to still another the interpretation of tongues. All these are the work of one and the same Spirit, and he distributes them to each one, just as he determines….

^”Even so the body is not made up of one part but of many… God has put the body together, giving greater honor to the parts that lacked itso that there should be no division in the body but that its parts should have equal concern for each other. If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it.”

My mom had many gifts, including understanding, compassion, and a fantastic mind for math, which meant the ability to stretch a dollar. I wish she knew how to share the latter. Some of my friends suggest her reluctance was just a generational thing, but I think it was more that she was squeezed emotionally by her husband and her mother. My mom died on 2 February 2011.