What Rotimi Taught Me

I came to understand the everyday nearness of death around Easter, just before my thirteenth birthday. My mother had gotten a call from my school. For the life of me, I can’t remember who had phoned. In the blanks of my memory, I have filled in the principal. Whoever it was doesn’t really matter. What this person said remains unforgettable. My classmate and dear friend, Rotimi Abu, had died suddenly while taking a shower.

The feeling of hearing shocking news was not then familiar. That would come through repetition. So this was the first time I had been so stunned. It didn’t at all make sense. Rotimi’s family had recovered from a horrific car accident about two years prior. Rotimi had received the worst of the injuries. Puffy scars marred the side of his face. He had broken bones, one pushing through the skin at his wrist. He had also been in some kind of coma for about two weeks. But he was better now. How could he be dead?

When we had heard about the accident, all us kids at St. Mary Star of the Sea School in Brooklyn had written him get well cards. We had all cheered him when he finally did come back to school. But his return had not perfectly smooth—ominous signs in hindsight. During his early weeks back he had suffered from headaches, which often forced him to lie with his head on his desk, eyes shut, as he waited for one of his parents to bring him home. I also recall one of our teachers gently massaging Rotimi’s neck even as he lectured, to help relieve my friend’s pain.

Mary, Star of the Sea

Decades later, the memory of how Rotimi and I became friends no longer exists. I do know we had been a couple of misfits. We didn’t exactly fit in with the more athletic and rambunctious boys in our class. We had forged a steel-plated bond through our mutual love of comic books, particularly Marvel Comics, likely because Marvel had the most misfits per capita in the industry.

We had a spot at recess where we read over our monthly hauls of comics. It was up on the metal steps that led to the church next door to our Catholic school. On fine days and freezing ones you could find us out there hunched over reading in the slanting Brooklyn sunlight. One or both of us might’ve had a pink rubber ball that we called a “Spaldeen” in our pockets to play handball with, but we almost never got around to that. The X-Men were saving a world that hated them. Spider-Man was on a rooftop stressing about life. A four-color superpowered reflection of ourselves was waiting. It was a powerful allure, that we could be heroes despite how others saw us. I even still have the copy of the first appearance of Spider-Man’s black costume, which Rotimi had bought me and I had paid him back for, since we were certain that that particular issue would someday be worth a small fortune.

Rotimi and I had also been something called “door monitors.” Our job was to hold the doors open before and after recess to make sure everyone got in and out. During those pickpocketed minutes, we had talked of the future, both his and mine. He was going to get plastic surgery when he turned sixteen to get rid of his facial scars. His doctor had told him he’d be old enough then. Rotimi was so positive about it all, just as he had been after the accident. I had said that was great but that it didn’t matter anyway because I hardly noticed his scars anymore. He had smiled at that, thinking it was some kindness, but it was the truth. He was just my friend.

Rotimi and I had a plan that someday we would write and draw comics. In a place of safety in my house, the pages for a character we created called “Captain Thunder”—a mishmash of every superhero trope then in existence—still sit yellowing. I have clear memories of the two of us huddled together on those cold metal steps in the schoolyard working that character into existence. Here was my first moment of pure creativity. All was fine and good. I had a friend who finally understood me. Rotimi and I were at the start of a great future. There would be no turning back.

And then he was gone. Not in the flesh. Not in front of me with a theatrical chance to say goodbye. But through a quiet phone call that my mother had taken on the bedroom extension after my grandmother had answered the kitchen phone.

My mother was the sort of woman who wanted to take the world’s pain from her sons as if sucking poison from a snakebite. She never wanted us hurt but she never sugarcoated life’s awful beauty either. With Rotimi, she explained it all as best she could. She said they suspected it had been caused by something undiagnosed from the accident. She assured me that Rotimi was a sweet boy who was now in heaven. Her heart broke for his parents. I heard all she said. But I couldn’t get past the idea that his plans had just stopped. There would be no end to his headaches, no plastic surgery, no working on comic books together like a modern-day Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. We would never become old friends.

Rotimi’s wake was held at Scotto’s Funeral Home, just up Court Street from our school. We had clumped down to it as a big pubescent mess of a class, some people chatting like it was a school trip. I knew Scotto’s as family legend. A great many members of my family had been waked there. It was a place of dark formal clothes and mournful faces and men smoking outside its front doors with faraway looks in their eyes. It was also where some years hence both my grandmother and mother would be waked.

Seeing Rotimi in the open casket, I knew in a flash what I was seeing was a shell, emptied of all that had made my friend who he was. There were bunches of boys at my elbows, muttering how he looked like he was sleeping. I couldn’t understand their lack of awe.

We assembled again at the church for the funeral mass the next day. The priest told us how God sometimes takes the good very young and how it often never made sense to our human minds. He said that we shouldn’t trust our grief because it was a selfish thing to want our friend with us when he was now in a place of perfect peace that was beyond all pain.

I remember neither understanding that nor crying. I remember returning to our classroom and standing beside a girl named Linda who had been crying. I patted her shoulder to comfort her as I must’ve seen someone do in a movie. Our teacher spotted this and called me a good soldier.

Rotimi had been good. The good die young. I was a good soldier. Would I die soon?

Since my friend’s death, many loved ones, both family and friends, have died. Some have died too old, from worn-out bodies and lost minds. Some have died too young, like Rotimi, with a robust future still expected to unfurl before them. I have patted many shoulders and have had mine patted in return. I still do not understand why some people live so briefly and some live seemingly too long. But I think I have come to understand death’s purpose for those still living. Death is there to remind us to make our lives matter.

Rotimi’s courageous approach to his recovery from his accident has been a talisman to me in times of personal crisis. His death so early in my life gave me a profound desire to live as fully as I could for as long as I could. Death is on my shoulder, just as it had been on my friend’s. I vowed to live passionately, with purpose and compassion. If I loved, I wanted to love as totally as I could, even in my imperfect way. If I had an opportunity, I wanted to see what came of it, despite the nagging doubts and fears that ever plague a human mind. If I could help, I wanted to help where I could, when I could. Above all, I wanted to be of use.

At the same time, Rotimi’s death forged an impatience in me. I hate wasting time. I hate tripping up on pointless endeavors. I hate arguing, especially about nonsense. I hate feeling like I haven’t helped or tried enough. Each day we’re all heartbeats closer to the last one. I often think: Have I done all I could in this day I just had? All this is because of Rotimi.

When I look back on the failings of my life, so many of them are due to the fact that I have forgotten about death. So often I have stupidly believed I could either delay something or expect happiness to come at some future point, when X happens, instead of finding it in the everyday, like I had effortlessly done during those recesses sketching with Rotimi on those old metal steps. In my life’s small and ordinary moments, I have honored my long-dead friend the most.

I had been a timid, fearful boy. Without Rotimi, without his life and death, his potential missed, his opportunities unpresented, his loves unmet, I would not have tried to live my life in full. I am certain I would not have grown a writer’s soul without Rotimi. While I have never written comics, my writing has been informed by what he and I had tried to convey, however briefly: that the misfits are not as isolated at they appear; that people have more in common that they might expect; that the world is far more wonderful than it seems; and that the dead still talk to the living through the beauty they leave behind.

Rotimi still talks to me through dreams, through our old “Captain Thunder” pages. He talks to you through my pen. And I hope he talks to my kids through me. I want Rotimi to tell them to live their lives to the hilt. That death is near. That they should be unafraid of it. And that they should use their awareness of it to live as best they can in each moment they are given.