This was how Sage suggested they start the eulogy: Nathan Noriega had it coming.
Millie pulled the pen out of her hand and grabbed the sheet of paper away from her, her blonde ponytail nearly whipping Sage in the face. “You can’t say that!”
“I don’t even know why you guys invited me for this little brainstorming session,” Sage shot back, her dark eyes narrowed with barely-concealed frustration as she stood over the kitchen table, Millie to her left, Bryan and Jeremy to her right. “You know I have nothing good to say about him. Besides, I didn’t even get to say what ‘it’ was.”
“Dying? Wasn’t that implied, based on– oh, I don’t know– the fact that this is supposed to be a eulogy?”
Instead of responding to that, Sage grabbed the pen and paper and began writing again.
He didn’t deserve to die in that car accident, obviously, but dying alone? Yeah, I could’ve seen that coming. From miles away. Blindfolded. In my sleep. If I were an oddsmaker, it would’ve been, like, one hundred to one.
“Sage, come on. You know you can’t say that,” interrupted Bryan’s tired voice. He didn’t exactly want to be here either, but Nathan’s parents had gotten in touch with Jeremy and asked him if the four of them would be willing to write a eulogy for their friend’s funeral.
If they’d come to him, Bryan would’ve responded, “We haven’t been friends for months.” It didn’t exactly please him to say, especially since he had, at one point, considered Nathan his best friend. Back when they were still on speaking terms.
“Fine.” Sage shoved the page towards Bryan. “You write something then.”
“No, I will,” Jeremy said, taking it from him. He was beginning to regret inviting everyone over. It had felt right at the time– they had all been very close with Nathan, even if things hadn’t exactly ended well. But now, he was wondering if he should’ve just done this whole eulogy thing alone. After all, Nathan had made it clear that he wanted nothing to do with all of them. But here they were anyway.
Jeremy wondered if it was bad luck to go against a dead man’s will like that. Although maybe if Nathan knew he was going to die so soon, he would’ve reached out and tried to make up with everyone.
Although he doubted Nathan was that self-aware.
Jeremy crossed out Sage’s sloping, interconnected lettering and replaced it with:
Nathan Noriega was a good friend.
“Oh, so we’re lying now?” Sage asked before he could write more.
“That’s not a lie,” Jeremy said. “He was a good friend, once. We don’t have to specify how long ago.”
“It kinda feels like a lie, Jere,” Bryan mumbled.
Jeremy shot him a look. “Not helpful.”
“How about this?” Millie reached over and took the pen and paper from Jeremy, crossing his chicken scratch out, writing tidily underneath:
The four of us were once very close with Nathan.
They all stared at the sentence for a moment.
“I guess that’s true,” Sage said.
Bryan nodded in agreement. So did Jeremy. That was enough for Millie to keep going.
Though it’s been a while since we’ve spoken to him, it’s easy to remember the good times we shared. From movie nights to board game cafes to even just hanging out and talking for hours after class, there are so many moments of joy and laughter that we’ll never get to have again.
“Well, it’s not like we were going to get them again, even if he didn’t die,” Bryan cut in.
“They don’t need to know that,” Millie responded, putting the pen down. “I think it’s alright to give them the kindest version of the events.”
“What, we’re going to launder his image just because he died? That’s bullshit.” Sage’s hand grabbed the pen before anyone else could stop her.
Unfortunately, that wasn’t because of his death. That was because of the choices he made. Maybe, in his last moments, he recalled those memories too, and realized what a horrible friend he’d been to people who just wanted to help. Maybe in his last moments, his ego finally gave way to lucidity. After all, it was obvious to everyone else that what he was doing to himself was going to end badly.
“Sage!”
Sage ignored the protests and kept writing.
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That’s the tragedy about this whole thing, isn’t it? That it didn’t have to end this way? Or maybe it was always going to end this way, because of who he was and because of who we were. That makes it more tragic, I think. The delusion we all had that our friendship might have been enough to save him from his own self-destructive tendencies.
Sage stopped writing.
“Okay,” she said, surrendering the pen to the middle of the table. “Go on. Cross it out.”
Nobody took the pen.
After a moment, Millie spoke. “Do you think his family knows how bad it was? Should we talk about it in detail?”
Jeremy went pale. “I don’t think–”
“If we want to keep what Sage has written, we should,” declared Bryan, reminding everyone of his presence. “It’s only fair to do that if we’re alluding to it anyway.”
“Fair?” Jeremy shook his head in disbelief. “Fair to who? To his grieving family? To the people who don’t know anything about us? To him?”
Really, he knew that it was fair to them more than it was fair to anybody– none of them had stopped talking or thinking about Nathan even after his ceremoniously unceremonious exit from the friend group.
Jeremy had spoken to Nathan just once after everything happened. Not intentionally, either. He’d caught him on the street and asked him where he’d been, and Nathan had averted his gaze and mumbled something about not wanting to be around people who didn’t support him anymore, like Sage and Bryan and Millie, and Jeremy had asked, “What about me?”
Nathan hadn’t had an answer for that. He’d just said he had to go now.
Jeremy thought about it a lot afterwards– about whether or not there was anything he could’ve said to Nathan that would have brought him back into the fold. If there was a way he could’ve cleared the air, explained that everyone really just wanted him back, and they never meant to alienate him or make him feel like they were ganging up on him. It was frustrating to see him fall back into cycles of anger and depression and self-destruction and then take it out on everyone else. There was only so much they could take.
Jeremy hadn’t told anyone about his run-in with Nathan. Not even Millie, who, frankly, was the one who wanted to reconcile the most. He didn’t see the point of it. Nothing had come of it, anyway. But when Nathan’s parents called him to tell him about the accident, Jeremy had that thought again– that maybe if he’d said just the right thing that day when he saw Nathan, he could’ve fixed things. That he could’ve helped him out of it. And then they could’ve all made amends.
Unfortunately, there was going to be none of that anymore.
“I might have to agree with Jere on this one,” Sage said after a few moments of tense silence. Her voice was a lot less certain than it had been just several moments ago. She ran her ink-stained hands through her equally dark hair. “I don’t think it’s worth it to get into specifics. I just think they ought to know that Nathan died friendless and it was his fault, not particularly the specific reasons why.”
Millie stared at her like she’d just grown another head, but to be honest, Sage was not saying this to preserve Nathan’s dignity. She didn’t particularly care about that. What she was more concerned about was if Nathan had told anyone the version of events that he believed happened, and if they would suddenly realize that the villain of his story was speaking at his funeral.
She didn’t think that anyone would appreciate that.
But even though Nathan thought she was a villain (and on her worst days, she did too), Sage really had a hard time believing that everything was her fault. She knew she hadn’t been perfect– really, who could have expected her to be, when one of her best friends in the entire world was constantly choosing to actively harm himself? What she felt like Nathan didn’t understand, though, was that she wanted him to be happy. She just had the foresight to know that what he was doing wasn’t going to make him happy in the long run.
It sucked that he died hating her. She didn’t want to admit that out loud, but it did. She knew she wasn’t faultless– she’d overstepped countless times, and she hadn’t been as kind or soft as the others– and from Nathan’s point of view, she hadn’t had any right to. But was she just supposed to stand there and watch as he ruined his own life over and over again?
Honestly, he probably thought she was trying to stop him from achieving happiness. Never mind that his version of “happiness” included jumping from toxic relationship to toxic relationship, smoking inhumane amounts of weed, and getting wasted every other night.
But she always wondered how he talked about her to others after that last fight they’d had. Maybe it was that self-absorption Nathan had accused her of. As if he wasn’t self-absorbed either, always expecting everyone to drop everything for him at a moment’s notice when he needed them. As if he wasn’t constantly thinking about himself, unwilling to acknowledge the way he was hurting people, whether he was being intentional about it or not.
“Okay,” said Jeremy slowly. “Well, if that’s the case, I don’t think we should be airing out any part of the dirty laundry at all.”
“Especially not in front of his family,” Millie added. It was no secret to anybody that Nathan didn’t have a good relationship with his family. He still lived with them but barely left his room most days, preferring to hole up in there and complain for hours on voice calls. While they were in school, he’d alternate between crashing at Jeremy’s and Bryan’s to sometimes asking Millie or Sage if he could sleep on their couches. Millie never indulged him, but Sage had a couple of times. But when Jeremy and Bryan moved back home after graduation, and Sage put her foot down after her roommate complained, Nathan had nowhere to go but home.
That was when he started looking for new people’s beds to sleep in so he wouldn’t have to return home. He’d confessed to Millie once that he didn’t even have sex with them. He just wanted to spend as much time out of his house as possible.
Really, Nathan was more vulnerable than people gave him credit for. Millie knew that, at least. It was why she wasn’t going so hard on the guy in the first place. But Nathan hadn’t wanted to hear it. Apparently, Millie was already guilty by association.
That really hurt her, honestly. She’d been trying, really trying. And all she got was cold, dead silence, which was not at all like the Nathan she knew and loved. Even though it got rocky towards the end, Millie wanted to remember him fondly. Maybe that was why she was softening out all of Sage’s sharpness. None of what Sage was saying was false. It was just not how Millie wanted to remember Nathan.
She was entitled to that.
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Millie grabbed the pen. She didn’t cross out what Sage had written above, but she drew an arrow from what she’d written previously to her next words, moving around Sage’s paragraphs.
Nathan’s life being cut short is a tragedy. There is so much growth he could have experienced, so much he still had left to learn, the first and foremost being that he had people who loved him, even when he didn’t realize it. Now, the person Nathan could’ve become will all be a giant “what if” that we’ll never get the answer to.
Sage pursed her lips, but she didn’t seem to have anything to say in opposition to what Millie had written. Jeremy, too, seemed in agreement.
It was Bryan who didn’t like it at all.
“That’s a terrible eulogy,” he piped up.
“Thank you, Bryan, for halting your brooding to join us,” said Millie.
“I’m just saying,” said Bryan. “I don’t think you’re supposed to write a eulogy to lament about wasted potential or what could’ve been. It’s about remembering who he was.”
“Do you have anything you want to add?” Jeremy asked.
“No,” lied Bryan.
Millie threw her hands up. “Great. Thanks for the feedback, then.”
Bryan fiddled with the strings on his hoodie. Really, he did have a lot to say about Nathan, about how they’d originally bonded over video games and then, after hours of late nights on calls playing whatever game they were into at the time, they began to become real friends, not just gaming friends. They’d talk until two in the morning about their childhoods and their lives before university and how their friends from back home had moved on without them. And they’d joke around, and that was nice, until it became more and more clear that while Bryan had his own issues, he was working through them, but Nathan was stuck. He knew he was in a bad place, but he couldn’t dig himself out of the hole. And he’d slapped away every hand that reached out to help him.
That was when the bitterness really sank in for Bryan. One of the last times they’d spoken, Nathan had told him he didn’t know anything about his life, that he couldn’t possibly understand what he was going through. But Bryan did. Nathan had told him everything.
And then he just stopped responding after a couple of days. Stopped saying anything. Honestly, Bryan would’ve preferred a big confrontation like the one Sage had with him. At least there was a sense of finality there, no matter how explosive. But with him, the friendship had gone out with not a bang, but a whimper.
And when he found out that Nathan died…
Well, Bryan hadn’t eaten in a week. And he hadn’t had any real social interaction either, save for with his family, who tried to poke and prod at him to find out what was wrong. He was surprised he’d even made it here.
But of course, being around Millie and Jeremy and Sage only made the Nathan-shaped hole in his chest pulse more. He’d begun filling it in the last few months, with new hobbies and new interests and all that, but hearing about Nathan’s death had undone any bit of healing he’d felt. And being here, writing his eulogy… it felt like someone was repeatedly bashing the sharp end of a shovel into the dirt and digging it all back up.
Really, Bryan knew this wasn’t really just about the eulogy. The eulogy would happen at the funeral, and then it would be done. What this was really about was putting on paper who they wanted to remember Nathan being. Defining his legacy within their friend group, cementing it in the memories of everyone at the funeral.
Was he a tragic, misunderstood antihero who might have come back around in time? Or was he a total mess who chose to lash out at his friends instead of accepting their help?
He figured the answer was both, even if it made writing this eulogy more complicated.
“Actually, give me the pen,” said Bryan.
Millie obliged. Bryan flipped the sheet over and began to write on the fresh side of the paper.
Who was Nathan Noriega? That’s the question you want us to answer today, right? How should you remember him?
We thought about this question for a while. Really, a long time. What story did we want to tell about Nathan? What adjectives could we use to describe him that would tie his life story up in a neat little bow?
The problem is, Nathan was a person made of pure contradictions.
He was kind. He was cruel. He was funny. He was humourless. He was a brick wall that felt nothing. He was soft and full of emotion. He loved so many things. He didn’t care about so many more. He was fun to hang out with. He was awful to be around. He was easy to love. He was easy to hate. He cared for us. He hurt us. He was a hero. He was a villain. He was the best of the best. He was the worst of the worst.
And even if our friendship didn’t end in the way we thought it would, when all is said and done, he was our friend.
Bryan looked up to see everyone else peering over his shoulders to catch a glimpse of what he wrote.
“Well?” he asked.
“That’s good,” came Jeremy’s soft reply.
“Agreed,” said Millie.
Sage was quiet. Her fingers traced over that last sentence.
“Sage?” Bryan asked.
“Yeah,” Sage said, and for the first time all day, she softened. “That’s Nathan, alright.”
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