Put Your Stick Out

Grief, hockey, and the things that matter before it’s too late

Grief is strange.

A friend of mine died last night. A hockey friend, which maybe sounds like unnecessary detail unless you have never had one of those. But if you know, you know. Sunday mornings. Over-50 league. 6 a.m. games. Getting up in the dark to go play a sport we do not play well anymore, but still crave in some deep and embarrassing and necessary way.

That locker room. The ice. That stupid ritual of taping sticks and pulling on gear and chirping each other and pretending our knees still work like they used to. There is something there I do not really know how to describe without sounding overly sentimental about old men playing a game badly, except that it is real. A kind of camaraderie that is harder to find as you get older. Maybe impossible to replace once you do find it. A place where men who are carrying all kinds of private feelings and troubles come together and, for an hour or two, become part of something shared where those things don’t matter. It’s a ritual and release adult life doesn’t allow for most days.

A lot of us have tried to quit over the years. And a lot of us have come back, injuries and breaking bodies be damned. Because it turns out that whatever that thing is in the locker room, whatever that thing is on the ice, it is not easy to live without.

A week and a half ago, one of the guys on our team lost his balance on the ice and went headfirst into the boards. No big hit. No dramatic cheap shot. Just one terrible, irreversible accident. One second of physics. One moment where a body goes the wrong way and life splits cleanly into before and after.

Catastrophic spinal injury. Paralyzed from the neck down.

I went to see him that Saturday morning, the first chance I had.

And there he was.

Wayne.

Alive, but trapped inside a moment that happened too fast for any of us to understand. Talking was hard for him. Strained. Effortful. A few words at a time. Yes. Okay. All right. That kind of thing. And even that looked like work. He was exhausted in a primal sense.

This was a guy who used to sit next to me in the locker room and just tear into people. Laughing, talking shit, telling stories, nonstop. The kind of guy who was fully alive in every direction. A trash talker. A wheeler and dealer. The kind of teammate who, if somebody took a run at you, would absolutely be in the mess a second later. Probably started it. Certainly ended it. That was just him. He was in it. He was one of us in the oldest sense of that phrase.

And now I was sitting next to his hospital bed, trying to have a conversation made out of single words.

I do not know what to do with the brutality of that contrast.

While I was at the hospital, there was a small heartbreaking moment. He had been on pureed food. Pureed pork, pureed chicken and veggies, whatever else the kitchen could blend. It was the best he could have, but it was still indignity on a hospital tray. He hated it. Of course he hated it. Wayne was picky anyway. He liked burgers, pizza, fries, and more broadly regular food instead of soupified versions of it. Same as most of us. And at some point the nutrition specialist said maybe he could handle small soft bites. So I asked if they could get him a broken up hamburger patty with ketchup. Familiar food. Normal food. Food he might actually want.

It felt, at the time, like maybe that meant direction. A good one. Maybe recovery. Maybe a little piece of himself was coming back through all of this. Maybe it meant that we were still in a world where effort and time equaled results.

I left before lunch. I do not even know if he got the burger.

The next day another teammate visited him and sent out word that Wayne had gotten worse. He was on a ventilator. He could not breathe on his own anymore.

And then, not long after that, we learned that he had made his decision.

If this was permanent, he did not want to live on a vent.

So we went back.

A few of us this time, over several days. Teammates. His family was there too. His mother had flown in from Tennessee. A cousin. People gathering around the edge of the unimaginable. Wayne could not talk anymore. Tubes down his throat. Eyes open. Awake. A page with letters and basic responses on it. A nod. A look. Tiny movements standing in for a whole human being still fully present, still fully aware, still having to make the most final decision a person can make.

And he made it.

He knew what his life would be. He knew what it would mean. He knew what he could no longer do, and what would never come back. And he decided.

I do not know how to write about the courage of that without diminishing it. I can’t. I can barely put this thing together at all, but I have to. It’s the only way I know how to process.

We sat with him. We told him things would be okay, and said things like “see you later,” which I am not even sure was for him as much as it was for us. Maybe both. Probably both. We said goodbye in the soft, dishonest language people use when the truth is sitting right there in the room with them. We loved him. He knew it. I think that matters. I told him, which stupidly I never would have done sitting next to him in the locker room.

Then we left and waited.

And even then Wayne was still being Wayne. Holding on long enough to get his affairs in order. Handling power of attorney. Taking care of the legal and practical things that needed to be done. Imagine that. Imagine being that close to death, having already decided to meet it, and still making sure the paperwork is right, still making sure other people are protected, still carrying responsibility with whatever strength you have left.

That is a strong man.

That is a man.

And last night, Sunday, March 29, at 10:45 p.m., Wayne came off the vent and died.

This morning I woke up to the team text thread.

Usually that thread is jokes. Ball-breaking. Random hockey bullshit. Shit talking about who overslept and who brought what beer and whether any of us are actually stretching enough not to break into a million pieces on the ice. That kind of thing. Dumb, familiar, living things. The patter of aging with friends.

This morning it was memorials. Rest in peace. Broken hearts in the language men use when they are trying to say something enormous through a device built for almost nothing. All of sitting in our own homes, without the protective shield of the locker room.

And then the pictures started showing up.

Hockey sticks, standing outside front doors. Leaning against houses. Alone.

Just a stick outside a home.

And I lost it.

I put mine out too.

I took the picture. I sent it in.

And I do not fully know why that mattered so much, except that it did. Maybe because grief is always looking for a shape. Maybe because love is. Maybe because when a terrible thing happens, you want at least one small act that says: I was here. He was here. We were here together. This mattered. He mattered. Because we were and he did.

Maybe that is all a memorial is. Love trying to make itself visible.

What gets me, maybe more than anything, is how beautiful it was. How beautiful these men were in that moment. Men who would mostly rather make a joke than a declaration. Men who know each other through skates and sweat and trash talk and years of dumb rituals. Men who probably do not say half of what they feel even to themselves.

And yet there it was. All over the Bay Area, I imagine. Sticks outside houses. Little signals in the dark that no one else will understand. A language no one planned, but seemed natural once it happened. A tenderness emerging from exactly the place people least expect tenderness to live.

Sometimes grief burns away all the stupid intermediate bullshit and leaves only the truth.

Which is that we loved him.

And that we love each other.

And that whatever this thing is we find in those early Sunday mornings, in that freezing rink, in those locker rooms, in all those years of half-assed hockey and full-assed companionship, it was real.

It is real.

I keep thinking about how easy it is to forget that.

How easy it is, in ordinary life, to mistake the daily conversation for the real one. To think the world is made out of the arguments we are having, the positions we defend, the identities we polish, the teams we pretend matter most. Wayne and I probably were not on the same page on all the “important” issues. Not even close, really. In another context, that may have been an obstacle. Another modern barrier. Another way to reduce a person, and each of our worlds, before actually figuring each other out.

But none of that mattered in the locker room.

None of it mattered on the ice.

And none of it matters now.

What matters is that he was our friend, and that he showed up. What matters is that he made life bigger and louder and funnier by being in it. That he had our backs. What matters is that when it was time for us to show up for him, we did. And I think we would again. Every single one of us.

We are here for such a short time.

And the only thing that keeps proving itself to me, over and over, is that the only thing that really matters is how we treat each other while we are here. Forget the abstractions and the posturing. Put away the scorecards we carry around in our heads. Unlearn the stupid, reflexive reasons we give ourselves for withholding kindness or friendship.

Just this.

Love people.

Be kind to them.

Show up for them.

Treat them like real people before they die.

God damn it, do it before they die.

Because one day you are sitting next to a guy in a locker room while he laughs and talks shit and gives you grief for some dumb play you made in the neutral zone. And then one day you are standing in a hospital room saying goodbye while he nods at you with the only movement he has left. And then one day you are putting your hockey stick outside your front door because words have failed again and this is all your hands know how to do.

Grief is so strange.

It breaks you open, yes. But sometimes, if you are lucky, it also lets you see what was there all along.

And what was there was more important than agreement, or sameness, or ideology. Or even daily connection.

What was there was deeper. Something that survives all the surface differences. A thing that exists underneath the noise, but only shows up when you can’t hide from it or disguise it anymore. And I hate that this is the moment that revealed it. I hate that Wayne is gone.

But I love what I saw from these men today. I love what Wayne called out of us just by being loved. I love that somewhere, all over, there are hockey sticks standing alone outside houses like a kind of prayer.

And I think maybe that is what grief is, too.

Love, with nowhere to go.

Thank you Wayne.