Sean Faurschou: 1977 ~ 2014

For my last post of 2014, I thought I ought to address something important.  I know this blog has seemed abandoned and forgotten, but truly this is not so.  To varying degrees, and based on the day, I know it's still here.   That fact worms away in the back of my mind sometimes.  But I just have not been paying it much attention of late.

Then this past year, something happened in my life that needed to be discussed in some relevant manner.  And I started - in fits and starts - to write down some things that I think need to be said.  I need to do this so that it will not be lost.  I need to tell a story that concerns someone who was dear to me, and who I won't see again in this life.  I need to do some quasi-eulogizing, I suppose you might say.  I need to remember my friend Sean.

The first time I met Sean that I can recall, I was in the ninth grade.  It was a fairly good year for me, ninth grade was.  Eighth grade had been so awkward and clumsy.  But by ninth, I felt like I had a better grip on things.  I even started taking better care of my personal appearance mid-way through.  There is a photo of me from picture day, early in ninth grade year, in which I look...  Well let me put it this way: I loathe that image.  To have been so grungy, buck-toothed and zit-faced is bad enough, but to have it forever memorialized?  But it was a sign of how I felt then as a person, I think.  And I can't go back and change that now.

I'm wandering off track, and that will be easy to do in these reminisces.  Suffice it to say, I turned a corner in ninth grade, and started to try to be more attune to other kids my age.  I wanted to fit in with my peers.  I wanted friends.  I hadn't really wanted friends through those weird years between sixth and eighth grade, but now was a time for change.

But Sean was not my friend at first.  My first vivid memory of him was that he started hassling me when coming out of an off-campus classroom.  I used to stand and hold the door of this room for people who were coming to that particular class.  I don't know why I did that, by the way.  Just felt like a good thing to do at the time.  But Sean was in the classroom for the class period before mine, and so he was on his way out when I was standing there.  For several days he made aggressive moves toward me as he left the class.  I didn't know what to think of it.  I hadn't been in a fight since I was a kid on the schoolyard.  I had no concept of what to do when faced with a threat like this. 

One day, it all came to a head.  Sean confronted me.  There were two onlookers at first.  One guy took my glasses and one took his.  Of course there are always guys around to be your "second" when these sorts of things happen.  And at the time, I didn't think anything would happen, to be honest.

The next thing I knew, Sean had swung a punch which connected with the side of my head, approximately at my temple.  In reflection, I think it was the right side.  I was so shocked that he hit me that I swung back in outrage more than anything else.  I went at him like a crazy person, the first few swings were probably punch-like, but in the end, I was just thrashing at him with my limbs like... well like a little kid would do if he just wanted to strike out at an unexpected attacker.  I was furious!  Who was this person to hit me?  How dare he do that?!  What had I even done to deserve it?  Then the teacher came and broke things up.  I seethed the rest of the day, I think.  The immediate aftermath is not terribly memorable, to be honest.

Well life moved on, as it does.  I didn't see Sean around too much for awhile.  Much later, I was surprised when he came up to me during yearbook signing (the last day of school of that ninth grade year) and wanted to sign my yearbook.  Why would someone who started a fight with me want to sign my yearbook, I wondered?  I don't know what I wrote in his.  Probably something like "Good Luck."  But he wrote in mine the following:  "f*** f*** f*** a duck, screw a kangaroo, bang-a-rang an Orangutan, support your local zoo" (of course I have edited the f-word part, but you get the idea). And signed it: "Psycho Sean" ("Psycho" was mis-spelled as I recall), and then added, in parentheses, "Cool Fight".

You may see that this perplexed me, but since by the end of ninth grade I was very enamored with several young ladies in the school, including one whose name was Maria and whom I had a major crush on throughout ninth grade (and then through all of High School as well, but that is another story), I was more intent on getting said young ladies to sign my yearbook than to concern myself with this weird guy who hits me one time and then signs my yearbook another.

           

The next year I was a sophomore at Clearfield High School.  In retrospect now, it was one of the best years of my life.  And a big part of that was because of Sean.

I can't say how Sean and I started hanging out together early in high school.  I can say that there was a group of people who hung out at the end of one particular hallway of the school, and somehow I just sort of glommed on to this bunch early on.  Sean and his girlfriend at the time, Becky, were among them.

I didn't trust him at first, for obvious reasons.  He was brash and arrogant and I figured he was one of those "bad kids" who was going to end up doing something stupid someday and go to jail or worse.  But over time, we got to be friendly to each other.  Then we started actually actively hanging out together, even when the others in the group weren't around so much.  I recall Sean and Becky breaking up early in the school year - I thought this was a big deal at the time, though in retrospect it was surely not - and then he started pursuing my close friend Nicole.  So the three of us became almost inseparable.  We skipped school and went to hang out at one of our houses (mine and Nicole's being close by the school).  I was the joker of the group.  Nicole was the cheerful optimist.  Sean was the bad boy.  Our nicknames were, starting with me: 'Mr. Wong' (to explain that: I'd do silly impersonations and make wild prophecies, such as "Never paint yourself pink and run out in a rainstorm" - that's a classic of mine, from that time), 'Miss Spirit' (Nicole was the impetus for our going to school athletics events as she was on the spirit squad or something like that), and 'Brother Honest' (Sean being a notorious yarn-spinner and double-talker, so the appellation was sort of back-handed by the original name-giver - I forget who did dub him that, though Sean took to it just the same).

As I have said, many of the memorable events of that year are tied up in these two people.  There were others who came and went from this nucleus, but the three of us were the core.  What we did, the other looser bunch did.

I'll try and avoid giving the reader a blow-by-blow of my life here.  For one thing, that would get tedious, and for another, I can't remember a good deal of it.  But there were many happy events.  Sean and I began lockering together late in the year.  I ditched my previous locker and joined him at his, since we were right  across the hall from each other (there is a semi-amusing story about my previous locker, but that's for another time too).  We'd skip a fair number of classes and go hang out someplace or another.  We'd go to my house and play video games on my Super Nintendo system.  Or go to Nicole's and just listen to music and sit around, or jump on her trampoline and wrestle; Sean was into WWF wrestling at the time, and though I thought it was silly, I did it because it was physical competition and I didn't want to be out-done.  We didn't go to Sean's house as a group very often, though I would go sometimes and play basketball with him there.  I have never been good at basketball, but I learned most of what I know of it from him.

We went to the State Football championship games together, and cheered loudly when Clearfield High took State that year.  I remember the snow started falling that night as the buses returned back to the school.  It snowed deeply overnight.  The next day was a rare snow day/closed school, because so much had fallen.  I think the school principle had promised the entire school the day off anyway, since the Falcons had taken State.  But it isn't a critical detail anymore.

Time passed, and Sean and I spent more and more time together.  I came to trust him.  We went camping together that Memorial day.  The days surrounding this were to be one of those key moments in my life, and so I pause here to go over the details.

Sean, myself, Sean's sister Tammy, her friend (whose name I have conveniently forgotten just now - and the irony of that will appear momentarily), and Sean's mom and step-dad all went camping to a piece of property that Sean's family owned out by Kamas, Utah.  Me and Sean spent plenty of our time there clambering about the wooded area, and riding our mountain bikes along the trails.  And for some reason, the girl who was Tammy's friend started flirting with me.  I certainly knew what flirting was of course, and it was a heady thing for a sixteen year old.  To be chased by an eighteen year old, who was just about to graduate?  That was nice, let me tell you.

Now one of the afternoons that we were up there, I went to great effort to gather firewood.  I couldn't wait to sit around the fire later that night and roast hot dogs and tell ghost stories and do campfire stuff.  But the eighteen year old I mentioned had other plans. She decided, soon as the fire was going, that she wanted to go for a walk, and she wanted me to go with her. 

I'll skip the details here and just say that this was my first "mature" lip kiss.  To clarify, I am told I was kissed goodbye on the cheek by a girl I had a crush on in second grade, but I don't remember that at all.  But I remember - Shawna!  That's the name I've forgotten!  Nothing but kissing, and only closed mouth.  I chuckle at it now, but the last time on our walk that we kissed, she tried to tongue with me, and I kept my teeth firmly locked.  I liked kissing, but hey - I didn't really know this girl.  No way was I gonna do that with her!   I'd just lip kissed for the first time, after all.  Call me old fashioned, but I thought tongue kissing should wait for a girl I knew better and really cared about.  Despite my reckless sort of charm I seemed to have at the time, I was definitely no make-out king, nor aspired to be such in my heart, if I'm honest about it.

The details around Shawna and I are not important after that, save that we quickly quarreled, as only teenagers will.  If I remember right, she decided I was "like her little brother," or something like that.  What guy wants to hear from the first girl he "officially" kissed that he is like her "little" brother?

Telling Sean about all that went on was cool though.  I got to be the big man, for a change.  Sean was always full of braggadocio, but I usually kept it to how it was.  Not to gild the lily; mind you, I was no saint.  But Sean was the tall-tale-teller, between the two of us.  And yeah, it was nice to be able to tell him what had gone on, and hear his advice (not that it was great advice, but hey, we were sixteen!).

So the camping trip ended, and life moved on.  Sean and I were getting to be closer friends each day.  But a few days after that camping trip, something happened that firmly cemented my friendship with Sean.  Something quite drastic, actually.  It was the final day of school of my sophomore year.  We skipped going to school, of course.  The day before had been yearbook day, and since there were still girls I was quite enamored with (Shawna not being one of them, as I have explained; very flash in the pan, my first kiss was), I was there that day.  But the last day of official school that year, Sean and I hung out at his house.  Then in the evening, I borrowed my mom's little white Toyota Tercel (the one I'd learned to drive in), and Sean and me went to the cheap seats movie theater over by the bowling alley on the main drag in Clearfield, and watched The Sand Lot.

Ah, The Sand Lot...  you know, bad things attend that movie for me.  I refer to it as an "unlucky" movie.  Whenever I watch it, something bad happens.  Don't ask me to recall the whole list, as it has been years since I viewed the film all the way through.  Last time I caught any of it was when I was at the plasma center a year and a bit ago, donating.  A captive audience, you might say.  I avoided watching it as much as possible, and listened to the book on tape I had with me.  Still, I think that donation didn't go smoothly.  Probably got a nasty bruise.  You know how superstitions can be.  Even if nothing goes wrong, you still believe something must have done so.

Back to my story.  Coming home from seeing The Sand Lot, we went down the main drag going south, then turned and started up Hill Field road, looping back so that I could take Sean home.  I was in no hurry.  It had been a wonderful day.  We were young and fearless and everything was so cool.  Sounds picturesque, huh?  And you just know there is something dreadful coming up, right?

Well I was a new driver, for all intents and purposes.  And this was before they changed the law so that drivers under a certain age had to be accompanied by an adult.  That is the law now, isn't it?  But that night, I was age sixteen and I had a legal license, and things were all good. 

I was at the traffic light that either leads to the right and up to the mountain road, or left and down back into Clearfield (my intended direction), or straight and into Hill Air Force Base.  The main gate.  And I was, in retrospect, in the wrong lane.  Not the turning lane, I mean.  It was twilight.  It was raining.  I was nervous.  I thought I was clear to turn.  There was a cop with someone pulled over near the actual gate entrance, and I guess I must have gotten transfixed by his flashing lights.  Either way, I didn't see the guy coming who hit us until the last second (though I swear to this day that I wouldn't have seen him and been able to avoid him anyway, as his headlights were not on until after he passed the cop - but that is debatable).

It is a weird thing, being in an accident.  I recall the glass from Sean's window flying through the car's interior.  Sean got the brunt of it in the side of the face.  The car skidded sideways and, with the passenger side front wheel almost buried under the car from the impact, it had all the maneuverability of a three legged water buffalo.  We ended up going backward across the intersection and hitting the wooden pole of a "No U-turn" sign (I think it was No U-Turn, but it has been years ago), and knocking it down.  When we came to a stop, I opened my door and fell out, laying on the wet pavement beside the car.

Things seem fuzzy now, but I was awfully glad we were both alive.  I recall Sean hollering that the guy who hit us was running.  This seemed silly to me at the moment.  I figured he must be as bad off as we were, at least.  Come to find out later, he didn't have insurance, so his attempt to drive away may be the truth for all I know.

The next while is quite blurry in my mind, and I'm rambling anyway, so I'll just tell the salient points, if I can.  Sean was hurt, but not super badly.  We had been wearing our seat belts.  His knee was banged up.  And his face looked horrible, but facial wounds - even superficial ones - bleed like all get out.  I recall it took the cops awhile to get him out of the car, since that side was crunched pretty bad.  The ambulance came.  My mom came.  She was glad I was alive.  Sean's mom and step-dad didn't arrive until we got to the hospital.  I informed the ambulance driver that I WAS going with them to the ER.  Thankfully, they humored me.

At the hospital, Sean was laid out on a table in the emergency room.  His mom showed up; I recall it quite clearly.  I was in just a touch of shock.  I recall looking at the nurse, who was petite and blonde, as she was cutting Sean's jeans off so as to examine his knee, and then remarking offhandedly that Sean always was trying to get a girl to get his pants off.  Sean blushed and gave me a half-amused, half-incredulous look.  His mom and the nurse busted up laughing.  I think the inadvertent tension release of the moment was the thing that bound the two of us after that.

The next few days were a blur.  But something was different.  Sean and I had been friends before, but now we were best friends.  And we remained that way, through thick and thin, for years to come.

To give you, gentle reader, a travelogue of our further adventures would be mind-numbing.  We did go back to camp at Sean's family's property on future Memorial Days, and had much fun.  You know, Memorial Day rarely rolls around when I don't think about our time hanging out and... well, let's put it as it is: bull-shiting together.  At home, we played a lot of video games together.  And he would bust my balls, as the saying goes, but somehow from him, I didn't mind. Usually.  We did fight on occasion.  But I couldn't stay mad at him. 

When I had to move to Logan, Utah for my Junior year of high school, while my mom attended graduate school up there, I wrote to Sean, his sister Tammy (who I had a bit of a crush on), and my friend Nicole (who I also had a short-lived crush on... but it just wasn't right, even after she and Sean had broken up... another REALLY long story).  Sean and I talked aircraft a lot.  He got into it like I did.  Of course it was me being a big-shot, as I could finally be up on a subject over him.  He knew basketball and cars and other stuff more than I.  The military was where I could excel.  And video games.  But mostly military aircraft.  It started my life-long love affair with history, and especially my fascination with the twentieth century, and with the Russians (specifically the Soviet Union, though that was defunct by then, of course).

We weren't tied at the hip, mind you.  Once we verbally quarreled and he called me a "mama's boy."  It stung a lot.  I suppose that was because it was more true than I liked to admit.  More regularly he'd complain that I disappeared like nobody he knew.  We'd be hanging out and I'd just get a wild thought and wander off, and he'd look around and I'd be gone.  This happened a lot when, in the summer after my senior year of high school, I became involved with my first serious girlfriend.  But then that too is a long story.  Suffice it to say, I ended up ditching Sean completely in favor of her.  I do recall talking to him on the phone while she was at my house one day, and something she said made him comment sarcastically that she was a "bitch."  She figured out what he'd said, and my weak response to him in her defense: "hey, she's my... friend!" - note I didn't even say girlfriend, as Sean's opinion mattered so much to me - made her SO mad!

To be honest, I regret breaking the "Bro code" and putting "ho's before bros" here.  I stopped hanging out with Sean until after she and I broke up, a year and a half later.  By then life had moved on some.  It was the beginning of our friendship's downturn.  We never really stopped being friends, but I was a mess after my first girlfriend, and things were... weird.  He was cool, but I was... not.  Plus, Sean smoked and drank, and I wasn't rebellious enough to even consider such behavior.  Now in my "old age," the idea has crossed my mind to drink alcohol from time to time (shocker of shocking revelations!), but now I am old enough to know that all those years where blind obedience to what I'd always been taught was keeping me from trying it were actually working in my favor.  Sometimes you just get lucky, I guess.  Thank the Lord for a good mother who raised me right, despite my sometime efforts to go astray.  Some important things stuck, I guess could say.

I say all that and you'd think that was a judgment call against Sean.  No.  Sean was who he was.  And his influence on me made me into some of what I am today, as a person.  My sometimes reckless side is like an echo of what I admired in him.  My taste in music has much to do with what he introduced me to.  My interests for some of life's sillier things, like the NBA back in the 1990's, or playing Super Mario Kart as competitively as I can stand to.  And there are other things, I am sure.  I suppose it is easy to forget details, when you are on the spot.  But even now, not a week goes by that I don't find myself laughing at something he and I did, or some private joke we had, or something dumb that happened.  Know what I mean?

Back to the narrative.  When I went on an LDS mission, Sean and I really drifted apart for awhile.  And then at a regrettably rebellious point mid-way in my mission, I wrote him again.  He was there and willing to write back and empathize.  I really needed someone at that time to be  do that, and he was there for me.  Not that I deserved it, based on how I'd sometimes treated him.  But he did anyway.

Then when I got home from Arizona, after my mission...  well I had changed in some important ways.  That last half of my time...  I left Arizona as dedicated to what I was doing there as I think is possible.  That sort of lifestyle and Sean were not compatible.  Not long after I got home, he came up (he was living in Salt Lake with his real dad by then) and we hung out.  But it seemed weird to me.  He did the same things we'd done before I left for Arizona, which was to go to the store and look at/buy junk and just hang out.  I'd lived two intense years of ups and downs and so much growth, physical and emotional and spiritual, and this was...  just not me anymore.

And so I did one of those things I still regret, and probably always will.  I put his phone number in a drawer and forgot about it.  This was pre-cell days, mind you.  Cell phones were not ubiquitous, and so I had to look up his number and dial the digits, ya know?  And I just stopped trying to talk to him.  He didn't call me either.  I think maybe he knew I was in a very different place from him then, and just waited for me to come around, if I wanted to.

And then I never really did.  Some years later, after I had married and settled in to a rather ho-hum sort of life (my own fault, as I stopped living and was just getting by - my wife will tell you how miserable a time it was for her if you ask, and I feel the same about it myself), I looked him up as best I could.  I had actually physically lost his phone number by then.  Moving does that, if you aren't careful.

I contacted his younger brother via MySpace, of all places, and asked for Sean's phone number.  His younger brother gave it to me.  But then I wimped out.  How could I talk to Sean, after I'd been off and gone for so long and ignored him.  Would it be cool?  Would it be anywhere near how it had been when we were the best of friends?

This all sounds so maudlin to me now.  Because I let it go.  Years went by.  Life started evolving into something better.  My wife and I bought a house.  We had a daughter.  And I started college.  And even finished it too, if my memory serves.  And then one day, out of the blue, I came home from work, and my wife said I needed to sit down.  I thought she was being overly dramatic about something.  She does that sometimes, I think.  Not that she is overly dramatic by nature.  But I figured what she had to say couldn't possibly be all that bad.

She told me that Sean had died.  I didn't believe it.  "No way," I said.  I thought: You got the wrong person.  I need proof.  She said my mom had called and she had seen his notice in the paper.  I looked it up.  And it was true.  He was younger than I am, and yet he was gone.

I didn't know then, and I still don't know now, quite how to accept the fact.  I openly regret having not gotten back in touch with him.  Sometime.  Would it have been so hard to just use the phone, once I had his number again? 

My wife regrets my failure to introduce them too, a little.  She says she always wanted to meet this person that was responsible for me getting a funny smile about from time to time.  A mischievous look of sorts, I guess.  And I'd say "Me and Sean did this one time," or "we got into trouble that way," or "that reminds me of Sean..."

I still catch myself associating things with that time of my life when we were best friends, and I say to myself in an exasperated sort of way: "I can't believe he's dead."  You know, I really can't.  He went too soon.

I went to his memorial service.  Down in Salt Lake/West Valley.  I saw photos of him that took me back.  The guy I used to hang out with was in those pictures.  It really was crazy.  And then there were photos of him from later, and life had moved on.  I spoke to Tammy, who looked nothing like I remembered her. She had a kid who was in his/her (I can't recall) late teens or early twenties!  That made me pause.  To think how young we'd all been. 

I saw Sean's mom and his step-dad.  I hugged "mom."  I always called Nicole's mother and Sean's mother "mom."  I don't think my own mother liked that, but it was sort of a devil-may-care way of saying I liked them as my friends' parents, and it just stuck. 

Sean's "Mom's" reaction to seeing me hurt a bit, though I know she didn't mean it to.  She turned to Sean's step-dad, said my name, and then said, "from the accident."  My thought was, "this is how I'm remembered?"  But in retrospect, it is no surprise that it would be a key memory.   It was a defining moment of both our lives.  And you know, Sean once told me that he'd never been more scared than when that car hit us.  For all his bragging, this surprised me.  But the guy never let me live it down.  Sean always razzed me that I had tried to kill him in that accident.  It was just his way.  Like I said, busting my balls.  He's really the only person I rarely took it personally from, sadly enough.  Yes I know, I'm far too up-tight.

So now I have outlived him.  And I'm glad to be alive; don't get me wrong.  But I miss him, just the same.  I wish I could do some things over again, but that is normal, I guess.  So this entry has been a sort of tribute.  Yes, I know you gathered that, gentle reader.  And now my tribut-ilizing is done.  I can only conclude by saying, as I used to say to him from time to time: "Man, you're on my wing, and always will be."  It's quasi-fighter pilot lingo.  You know, some things never change, no matter how you outgrow them. 

Sean, you are missed.  God bless.


Sean's obituary, via The Salt Lake Tribune