David Norris

These are my remarks from David's memorial: Remembering David isn’t easy. Not because of the pain—it, like David, will be with me to the end of my days. Remembering David isn’t easy because he was a study in contradictions: He compartmentalized. He saw the big picture. He was never on time. He was always there when he needed to be. He flew into fits of seething rage. He performed selfless acts of kindness. He drank too much and wallowed in isolating self-pity. He gave freely of his time and energy to connect with and improve beloved communities. He struggled to harness a mind that was almost too full of thoughts and emotions to function. He wrestled an unruly brain to develop into the person he wanted to be. It's this last fact that makes it so hard to remember David, because the image of him in my mind is not merely a collage of contradictions, it’s also unfinished. In the decade that I knew him, I watched him carefully tend his mental and emotional health, developing from an angry, lost, young man into a wise, self-aware, mature man capable of giving and receiving love, contributing to a profession he adored, and advocating for marginalized peoples. From my perspective, as I remember David’s death, I will remember how wrong it was. He was supposed to have had decades more to enjoy the hard work he had poured into becoming himself, decades more to share his quirky and unique perspective on the human condition with a world that desperately needs it, decades more to update library catalogues and make sure that the metadata is in ship-shape, decades more to share joy, insight, frustration, wisdom, and friendship with me. David was one of only a handful of people in my life who truly knew me, who accepted me for who I am. He saw me at my very worst and he stayed by my side. He got me and I got him. As a fellow introvert, he respected my need for time alone. As a fellow musician, we connected by listening to music, talking about music, playing music, and going to concerts together. We both loved games and gaming. We both loved books and reading. We both loved traveling as a vehicle for growth and self-improvement. His sense of humor surpassed even my own in wicked inappropriateness, and he loved—as do I—recalling past laughs with a word, a phrase, a gesture. The reason that held us together more than any other, though, was that David, like me, lived the life of the mind. He was constantly excited and energized by ideas and learning. His respect for rational and empirical thought contributed much to the man he became, from his departing Christianity and embracing secular humanism to his abiding interest in scientific views of the cosmos and the works of writers like Neil deGrasse Tyson. In contradictory David-fashion, his mind remained inexorably fascinated by the irrational as well. He embraced Tarot cards as a metaphor for reflection. He devoured fantasy and science-fiction novels. His tastes in music ran not to the orderly and rule-bound, but to the medieval, the baroque, the abstruse contemporary. He was both amygdala and pre-frontal cortex, lizard brain and superconscious. A half-developed fugue subject ripe with potential. An unfinished prelude. Remembering David isn’t easy because it brings with it a jumble of disparate images and recollections: The reddish-brown hairs on the backs of his fingers that I could see when we sight-read Mozart duets together at the piano. Him screaming with fury when he got his boots wet on a desert hike in Big Bend National Park, shouting at the top of his lungs, “I could get swamp foot!” Joining him after a day of temp work to make a dinner of tator tots and mojitos at Psycho Suzis before heading next door to do Dr.-Who-themed yoga. Waiting with him at dusk in summer outside my house, chanting, “Baaaats….here bats…” Hearing him roll his tongue in a soft purr when he saw an attractive guy. Him holding my infant daughter, and seven years later working on spelling words with her and teaching her about emotional intelligence. And, of course, all the voices he did: old-man voice [“Back in my day…”]; young, West-Texas, lesbian-couple voice; Carol Channing voice [“Raspberries!”]; baritone singing voice; abusive Scottish voice; commanding yelling-at-the-dogs-in-Finnish voice; literally any voice from a cartoon, film, or television show he had ever seen. Remembering David isn’t difficult. I will continue to hear his many voices on a daily basis. Who he is to me has, by needs, transitioned. He is no longer contributing the data of his day-to-day existence to my life, but rather the meta-data of his profound impact on me to my days ahead. His body is absent, but his voice remains: as a glossator, a contributing author, a descant above a melody, a layered perspective that enables me to more closely approach truth. And every time I hear his voice—when I listen to Bach, when I watch Thoroughly Modern Millie, when I go camping, when I savor a strong tiki drink, when I lose a game and don’t react well, when I watch my daughter practice the piano, I will embrace the final contradiction his memory brings: that though he is gone, he is forever with me.