Sean Ryan Schwartz (1993-2021)
In the days since receiving the news last week of the abrupt, cruel death of our friend Sean Schwartz in the pre-dawn hours of September 4th, I've moved through my own life in a daze of grief—occasionally feeling as though it was someone else's life, one that I was observing from a distance.
I'm told this is not uncommon when the loss is at a geographical distance, when rushing to the side of the people you feel you most need to be with at that moment—the ones who share your grief—is somehow impeded, in this case by the practical logistics of crossing borders in the age of COVID-19.
In that sense, distance can be its own anaesthetic, but like all anaesthetics, it eventually wears off.
Often at the start of a particularly violent storm, you will see a blinding flash of silent lightning so bright that leaves a ghost-imprint of the objects around you behind your eyes, and you will still be in that state of momentary blindness before a thunderclap that shakes the window glass in its casements.
The light makes you blind, but it's the thunder that makes you startle. So it is with the news of untimely death, particularly the untimely death of a vibrant, beloved twenty-eight-year old man at the threshold of nearly any life he could have chosen. The shock of the news is the lighting. The thunder is the grief, and it rolls on and on.
Even writing these words makes me cringe a bit, and feel the most dreadful imposter syndrome.
Of Sean's mourners, I probably knew him the least well, and in the most limited capacity. But in a way, that was one of the things that made Sean unique. The phrase "to know him was to love him" may be a bit of a shopworn cliché, but in Sean's case it went a step beyond. The obverse was also true: to love him was to know him. To be let into Sean's golden orbit, even for a short time, was to know true decency, and a much more complex and nuanced young man than might have been immediately apparent on first meeting.
The pathways to the constructions of families of the heart are as varied as the families themselves, and this is an abbreviated version of how we became one.
Sean's mother, Lynn Palutke, is the lifelong best friend of my great friend Laurie Braun.
Laurie and her late husband, Mark, and their three children, Alexis, Kyle, and Jessica (all of them now parents, and well into adulthood) define the concept of family of the heart. When Mark, whom I loved like a brother, died in 2012, I wrote and delivered the eulogy at his funeral. When Jessica married in 2016, I walked her down the aisle in Mark's stead, in the traditional role of father of the bride. One of Jessica's twins, born this summer, bears my surname as his middle name.
As so often happens in those situations, those whom they love became those whom I love, which is where Lynn and her three children, Sean, Addie, and Trisha (now also adults) entered my life, and my heart.
The week of Mark's funeral is a blur. I can tell you exactly where I was when Kyle telephoned me to tell me that his father's motorcycle had crashed. I can tell you which table I was sitting at in which restaurant. I can tell you the position of my left hand on the table as my right hand held my cell phone, almost tight enough to break it.
But I have no memory of booking a plane ticket to Chicago. I have a faint memory of Jessica picking me up at the airport. There are flashes of Laurie and I together; her ocean of grief; my often incoherent attempts to be there for hers while keeping my own in check as much as possible in order to be strong. It was a bruised, pulpy time, those swollen, sodden days after my arrival in Chicago, and so much of it is literally inaccessible in my memory today.
Clarity begins for me with the arrival of Lynn and her children two nights or so before the funeral.
My dominant impression is of a car pulling up to Lauren's house and offloading three utterly gregarious, glorious young people with even features and beautiful smiles—warm, lovely, maternal Trisha, glamorous Addie who, even then, struck me as having fallen out of the pages of a sophisticated fashion magazine, and Sean, the handsome, laconic eighteen-year old brother, who seemed a bit shy on first meeting, but who, in short order, revealed himself to be less shy than possessed of a quality of inner stillness that vastly belied his relative youth.
In any case, the effect of their arrival was electric.
Inside the house, it was as though someone had opened a window on the gloom and the grief and let in some much needed light; or if a black and white film had been abruptly colorized. I'd never seen that effect before, nor have I seen it done since.
With every deference to our shared grief, the three young people simply lifted it as though it were a weight they made easy work of as a trio. They clearly adored each other, and the joy they took in each other's company seemed to be on tap and there was enough for all of us. At the centre of it seemed to be Sean, in whom everyone present seemed to take a particular delight.
In short order, we were laughing. The reminiscences became tinged with joy. For a brief moment, it seemed possible to imagine life beyond this wall of sadness.
And I distinctly remember thinking: Mark would have loved this. He would have loved what these kids are doing in his house, and for his beloved Laurie.
I was still writing Mark's eulogy in the chapel office an hour before I was to deliver it, squinting with raw, red eyes to read the words in splotched ink.
At one point, recalling a particularly tender memory of Mark, I utterly lost it. I wept great wracking sobs. In the end, the act of writing Mark's life, and our love for him—including my particular love for him—unleashed all the tears I had been holding back.
At that moment some of the kids, Sean included, were in the chapel office. As one, they rose to their feet and walked over to me and put their arms around me. There were no words. There was just a silent, strong wall of empathy. They held me until I stopped sobbing and began to write again. Once they saw my pen move across the paper they released me and let me finish. I delivered the eulogy an hour later, and they were all sitting in the front pew as I read.
I confess I felt a pang when the kids returned to Wisconsin after the funeral. As they drove away, the brief, unexpected glitter of sunlight was subsumed by the clouds we'd always known were there waiting.
During subsequent visits to Chicago, I came to know Sean better, and grew to like him immensely. Even within the parameters of the things that separated us—for instance, he primarily (and correctly) placed me in the context of his mother's and Laurie's lives—the intelligence and curiosity I sensed in him on first meeting allowed an actual friendship based on mutual curiosity and respect to blossom.
Having no children of my own, I've always taken a deep interest in the children of my close friends. As a novelist, my primary material is families, and I was absolutely fascinated by the dynamic between Sean and his sisters. The love they shared was startling. It was like oxygen they passed between the three of them. At one point I had to remind myself that Sean and Addie weren't actually twins, even though their energy was utterly twin-like. They finished each other's sentences, literally and metaphorically.
Sean was one of the most wonderfully unpretentious young men I had ever known, and this was reflected in many of the private conversations he and I had over the years.
I once asked him in an email how he got the nickname "Moose." It seemed curiously on-point as a nickname even though there was nothing mooselike about him.
"I don't remember exactly," he wrote by way of reply. "I was sitting in class with friends and we were watching a movie in environmental bio. We were goofing around mimicking the video and I got a detention after mimicking the moose mating call which made everyone laugh really loud getting us all in trouble by the substitute teacher."
Flawless.
In many ways, he was what you most want to imagine when you imagine young midwestern manhood, at least based on the established ideal: grounded kindness, generosity, self-effacement, instinctive self-respect well-grounded in dignity, and, as I mentioned, genuine, respectful curiosity about others. He played sports, he attended church, he loved his family, and he loved his friends.
I was intrigued by the depth of his faith, which I nonetheless admired, as he never made it an issue. I occasionally had a sense of him perhaps trying to impose order on the chaos life naturally throws at all of us, but it was a neutral thought, and I never got around to asking him about it—something I very much regret in the aftermath of his death.
I was fascinated by how anyone who might have appeared so ordinary on paper could be so extraordinary in person.
In 2012, I wrote to ask him if he'd like to be a character in my second novel, Wild Fell, a ghost story set in northern Ontario cottage country. He readily agreed, and, with typical grace, asked me to make sure I let him know where he could buy a copy, as though the thought that I was grateful to him for allowing me to sketch a version of him in the novel had never occurred to him, or that I would send him one of my author copies immediately when I had them in hand. Because, of course, it wouldn't have occurred to him. He would have considered it hubris on his part.
In December of 2013, I received an exquisite hand-written card from Sean congratulating me on the book. The sentiments and insights he expressed in the card were stunning, and they moved me beyond measure. I replied via email, "I must say, for a stoic young man of seemingly few words, you are a master of them when you take pen to paper. I'll treasure this card forever."
Sean was delighted to learn, in 2014, that Wild Fell was being published in French by Editions Bragelonne in Paris for the global French language market. "That's huge!" he congratulated me. "I can't believe that your book will be read around the world."
When the translator didn't flinch at the name "Sean 'Moose' Schwartz," leaving it as it was, we noted with some humour that the untranslated "Sean 'Moose' Schwartz" would be literally unpronounceable to the majority of French-speaking readers, which would make him all the more unforgettable in the long run.
As I sat down to write this elegy, I took Wild Fell down off the shelf and re-read the opening section in which the ultimately doomed Sean "Moose" Schwartz character features. He looks like Sean (certainly to the writer), he has Sean's kindness and humour, and he plays Sean's sports (except the character also played hockey—it's a Canadian ghost story, after all.) The intent was a lighthearted one, a tribute, something he could laugh about and smile about, and maybe one day show his children. But as a depiction, it only worked as long as he was here with us, alive and laughing, finding humour in it, joking with me about which famous twentysomething superstar hardbody would play him in the movie.
As I started to sift through pictures of Sean, I realized what a mistake it had been to look to words in order to remember someone I'd also made into a fictional character in a novel. There's a truth in pictures that often eludes writing, particularly (and perhaps by definition) fiction, and never was that more true than in Sean's case.
Photographs, on the other hand, capture it all, particularly that smile of his, the smile that was itself a sort of embrace.
Pictures of Sean and his sisters are an unassailable documentation of a kind of sibling love relatively few of us ever find. Pictures of Sean with children are a testament to how much he loved them, and how naturally they loved him back, and what a magnificent father he would have been. One photograph in particular, of Sean and Laurie on the back of an ATV, moves me to tears, primarily because Laurie's joy is palpable in it, and Sean is like a battery of joy. And the individual portraits of Sean say more about who he was than anyone's words, least of all mine, ever could.
Among my own photographs of him, one in particular stands out: it was taken on the day Jessica was married. In it, Sean is lifting Julian, Jessica's nephew, and swinging him around the room. Sean's face is half-covered by Julian's back. The story is in Julian's laughing face: he's being lifted and swung by a man whose love for him, and whose strength to hold him, is not in question. Julian knows he's not going to be dropped, or fall, and consequently feels free to let his utter joy soar.
If I had to distill my impression of Sean's essence down to something, limited as it is by my own experience of it, it's this: All of us could soar in his company. None of us were afraid of being dropped. The only unimaginable outcome was his absence.
If human life is a house, it's a mansion with many rooms. None of us ever enter all the rooms of someone's life. While many of those rooms are the warm, brightly-lit ones into whom we are welcomed, others are the locked rooms, rooms containing heartbreak, or fears, or demons kept safely at bay, or at least out of sight.
Of the latter type of room, we all have those. The only variance is the security of the locks we keep on the doors, and how successfully we keep our demons imprisoned on the other side.
I was welcomed into certain rooms of the mansion of Sean Schwartz's life. Others were welcomed into other rooms. A cursory reading of the powerful, heartfelt elegies by his family and his friends online in the days since his death hints at the vastness of those corridors; indeed, how twenty-eight years of deliberate living and loving was more than enough time to deeply imprint on the lives of many, many disparate people, some of whom will go through life never knowing each other, but who are nonetheless united by their love for Sean, and by feeling marked for life by that love, and the concomitant sense of terrible severing now.
In death, he's put his arms around all of us, and made us all kin—the final gift of a young man who was himself a gift.
So great is the affront to the natural order when the old bury the young that western literature is full to the brim with poetry, ballads, songs, and lamentations on themes of the untimely deaths of young men.
As a writer and an agnostic, I was more inclined to look to literature than to scripture to understand best how to express Sean's loss.
I was first drawn to "To An Athlete Dying Young" by the British Victorian poet A. E. Houseman; but the poem, though powerful and entirely apropos in so many ways, is so floridly British, romantic, and upper-class that there was nothing of Sean's gentle, profoundly American stolidity to be found there. I imagined Sean's face as I tried to explain to him what an "early-laurelled head" was. He would have been polite about it, I'm sure.
Ironically, I eventually found what I was looking for in "Death Is Nothing At All," a resolutely straightforward piece by yet another Victorian poet, Henry Scott-Holland, a 19th century priest at St. Paul's Cathedral in London.
It's this, in all it's clean, poignant truth and yearning:
Death is nothing at all. / It does not count. / I have only slipped away into the next room. / Nothing has happened.
The darkness in which we currently find ourselves notwithstanding, Sean was a light-bringer. He was a thousand candles. He brought warmth and humour and joy to the people around him as guilelessly and open-handedly as a child with fresh-picked wildflowers. Any man would have been proud to have had him as a son.
As unbearable as is the loss of that light to all of us who loved him—in particular, his mother and his sisters—I cannot shake the feeling that he would want us to imagine him close by, in the next room.
Sleep well, gentle soul. And thank you for touching my life, however briefly. Thank you for making a room for me in your house.
Sean with Julian, Streamwood, IL, 2016
The first page of the first edition of Wild Fell, 2013
Sean and his sisters, Addie and Trisha, at Jessica Braun's wedding, 2016.
Sean with Laurie Braun, 2016
