FOR OLIVER, MY FRIEND

by Theo Kandel

It’s been nearly a year (on August 25^th) since one of my best friends, Oliver Freiberg, passed away.

During this year I’ve had a lot of time to think on Grief, to swish its taste around in my mouth and feel it burn on the way down. If Love and Loss are two sides of a coin, then Grief is the coin flip, the moment that, while it’s spinning in the air, you can’t see heads or tails. I think when someone you love dies, that coin spins on for eternity, blending Love and Loss and Grief into something as painful as it is comforting.

It would have been Oliver’s 29th birthday on August 21st. To commemorate that, I’ve released “For Oliver,” an elegy of sorts for our friend we lost. I hesitate to even say “lost,” for Oliver was a man of purpose and path, an arrow in flight, steadfast and true. He was kind, and loyal, and funny, especially when he was the butt of a joke (which was often). He was easy to make fun of – not because he was weak, but because he was strong. We figured out early on that if you poked fun at Oliver, he wouldn’t rest until he had explained exactly why you were wrong (“I didn’t finish that Bloody Mary because it simply wasn’t good”) or (“The Jets aren’t actually bad this year, it’s just a matter of perspective”). He was Freiberg; he was Freibs; he was Ollie F; he was our friend.

“For Oliver” has all the ways I still see him, with each of his fashion idiosyncrasies: the v-neck tees and running shoes, the skinny jeans and leather sneakers, the scarf, the button down. The late nights chugging Red Bull and playing video games, the burger crew, the grilled chicken he was so good at making. I started writing the song just for me, but now it’s for everyone – his family and friends and all who knew him – and for you, strangers though you may be.

People will say that Grief diminishes over time; I do not think that is true. If its sharp, needle pain no longer stabs you with the same ferocity, then that is because it is inside you. It is not some barbarian hammering at your gates, but an old friend, a memory that walks beside your path. I have carried this Grief, absorbed into my very bones, for a year, and I will carry it for the rest of my life. That does not make it any less, but it does mean it has been diluted, swirled together with all of the other things that made Oliver who he was, and all that makes me who I am. And that’s a comforting thought, I think.

There’s a line in my song “Romanticizing Poets” that asks: “When you lose someone you love, does it make music in the end?” When I wrote that, a full year before Oliver died, I had no idea of the greater implication that it would have in my life. The answer to that question is, of course, yes. It’s the music in all things: The crack of splitting wood like we did at The Mountain School, the shouts at a soccer game, the clink when you cheers your beer with good friends. That’s when I hear the echoes of Freiberg.

There’s now a park bench dedicated to Oliver in Central Park, right off of the 85th Street and Central Park West entrance. If you find yourself there, have a seat, and remember that the measure of your Grief will always be as strong as the magnitude of your Love.

— —