Just Franz
Real stories are so much more interesting than novels. Maybe that’s why we love to follow the lives of the famous, or people’s blogs. They are real stories about real people, lives we can actually imagine.
Real things can make me feel better. Zatha and Matt visiting. Friends coming by. Playing the piano. Eric coming home from travel. Cocktail hour with my parents. Paddleboarding. A day at the beach.
But nothing makes me feel better about THAT. About Hans’s death.
Every grieving parent, however, will beg you for stories, memories, any small remembrances of their child. Besides photos we have of them, and their actual possessions, memories are precious. Please, if you have any stories or photos to share with a grieving parent, no matter how small, share them. It helps us feel a little better.
Below is a real story, written by one of Hans’s best friends in high school, Ben Forsgren. Ben was on his mission when Hans died and was unable to attend his funeral and memorial. Ben is an amazing young man, now in law school, with the honorable goal of serving victims of sex trafficking. His story makes me laugh, smile, cry, and laugh again.
What a beautiful gift you have given us, Ben! Thank you and we love you.
Just Franz
by Ben Forsgren
I was 13 years old when I was hit by a car. It was kind of embarrassing really. It was only 30 yards from my house. I had been on my way to help a friend put up moving signs, so I had a little red shovel between my left palm and the sticky, rubbery handle of my bike in the hot Carolina sun. The shovel pointed ahead of me like a javelin as I prepared to cross the road to my friend’s house. I looked left, right, left again, turned to look right again only to see the silver flash of a car as it slammed into my right knee, ripping my bike from under me and slamming my head into the hot aluminum hood. The smell of burnt rubber lingered in the air as I lay unmoving in the road, slipping in and out of consciousness.
I remember distinctly coming to with the feeling of hot asphalt pebbles pressed into my cheek. My first question was, “Who was yelling?” The yell was low and rough, like the moan of a wounded animal. It took me a minute to recognize the yelling was me, and another minute for me to stop. A crowd had formed around me. They fished my cellphone out of my pocket to call my mother and consoled the panicked teenage driver leaning against his dented car and crying.
That was the moment that crushed my own personal teenage myth of immortality. I should have died that day. I was hit at 45 mph and the impact to my helmet cracked it down the middle. Everyone who saw the accident was convinced my neck was broken, yet I had no broken bones, no permanent damages, no lasting trauma. Sometimes, the difference between life and death can be as thin as dumb luck.
***
My near-death experience that day made me a prematurely cautious person, and more admiring of the courageous. I always thought to myself, “With so much to lose, how can people take such great risks?” I wanted to be like them, but the sight of my hysterical mother the day of the bike accident was enough to deter me from risking putting her through that kind of pain again. My days as a daredevil were over before they could begin, but I still sought to spend my time with as many risk-takers as I could. Among these, the greatest was Hans Loewen.
***
Hans and I first met in sixth grade, just a year or so before my bike accident. Both of us were scrawny, bleach blond boys from the rural west living among generational southerners. I had just moved from Cheyenne, Wyoming, so my stepdad of two years could be closer to his kids and chase his dream of warm weather. Near that same time, Hans’s family had moved him from Idaho where he had spent a good portion of his rugged childhood. We were both odd fits to our new home, but we were glad to have found each other. As we grew, we became nearly indistinguishable by looks and nearly inseparable by choice. In eighth grade, I earned the title of “Franz,” a nickname I got from being Hans’s sidekick, which was appropriate. Hans was a living legend in our community. In eighth grade alone, he was at the top of the class, performing with the high school drumline, dating one of the prettiest girls in our grade, and even finished out the year by doing unicycle tricks down the stairs of the school’s auditorium stage. He was a born headliner with limitless talent and a nose for trouble. No one could best Hans, but that didn’t stop me from trying.
While Hans may have been a real-life Flash Gordon, I was determined to be more than an afterthought. For much of our friendship, our Hans and Franz routine looked more like Hans vs. Franz, with each constantly pushing the other to be better in all of our interests. School, sports, drums, girls – we competed in all of it. I was never really in Hans’s league in most of these things, but I gave him just enough chase to keep him on his toes. For me, being Franz meant being both best friend and fiercest competitor.
***
Steve Irwin, the “Crocodile Hunter,” seemed to brighten the lives of everyone within reach of cable television. He was like a real-life super hero. Daring, dashing, full of energy, adventurous, and, most importantly, immortal. No matter what the dangers were, he always ended the episode with a goofy wide smile and a signature catch-phrase drenched in his thick Australian accent. He was inspirational to me, as a kid, and I wished I could be as brave as him. I still remember watching him in my grandma’s living room as he took on sharks, pythons, lizards, alligators, and hippos. He never faltered or feared, literally laughing in the face of nature’s deadliest creatures.
My favorite memory of Steve Irwin is recorded on an old VHS tape buried somewhere in my mom’s storage. It was an episode in which The Crocodile Hunter was on an Indonesian island with a notorious Komodo dragon. Komodos did not earn their draconic title for nothing. At 8 ½ feet long and 200 pounds, a sense of smell with a two-mile radius, keen vision, razor sharp teeth, a venomous bite, and frightening capacities to sprint, swim, or climb, the Komodo Dragon takes no prisoners. As an eight-year-old lizard fanatic I knew all these facts better than the times tables, so my little eyes widened in horror as I watched The Crocodile Hunter walked right up to a Komodo to take a fishing line out of the dragon’s mouth.
Irwin succeeded in getting the hook from the Komodo but was, unsurprisingly, immediately attacked for doing so. In a tremendous show of its power, the Komodo lunged at Irwin who barely dodged in time. I remember watching breathlessly as The Crocodile Hunter ran for his life as the dragon’s thick talons kicked up dust as it closed in on him. In a last-ditch effort for his life, Irwin leapt for a small tree branch and was pulling himself up when the suddenly air-borne dragon struck at his ankle, catching him with its deadly fangs for a moment before returning to the earth. Out of danger for a second, Irwin frantically examined his ankle to find his leather boot sliced open and his sock shredded, but not a scratch on his skin. Incredibly, the deadly fang of the dragon had stopped millimeters before finding its target. The Crocodile Hunter had survived another day, nearly giving eight-year-old me a heart attack in the process.
As I got older, I often wondered who filmed Irwin’s adventures. Although they weren’t in the literal mouths of the beasts as Irwin was, they were also not far away from the same danger The Crocodile Hunter faced. I later learned that there were no special camera tricks keeping the film crew safe; instead, there were only courageous cameramen willing to risk their lives as Irwin risked his. Among these cameramen was a man named Justin Lyons, the longtime personal cameraman and best friend to Steve Irwin. Just as Irwin’s adventures and courage were constants to me as a child, Lyons was a constant to Irwin. He had been with him since the beginning and they went on every adventure together. Although Irwin was obviously the star, the show I loved so much as a kid wouldn’t have been possible without Lyons either. They were a team, hero and sidekick working together as the world watched.
***
Once, when we were about 14, Hans and I were in his backyard when he had a particularly creative idea. Hans always had creative ideas, because creativity had been bred into him. His mother is an inordinately gifted woman who excels in quick humor, his father is a certifiable genius who works as a celebrated nuclear scientist. Hans also has a brilliant sister who was, at the time, the state’s most envied competitor in academics, sports, and knock-out good looks, and is now a badass officer in the Marine Corps. There was no television in their home; instead, they passed the time inventing, exploring, talking, and reading. For normal children, this would be conducive for wholesome development. For Hans, it was a perfect storm for his insatiable mischief.
On that day in his backyard, Hans turned his attention to a cluster of three tall loblolly pine trees. With his forever-crooked smile, he looked at me and said, “Let’s build the Dragon Fort.”
The Dragon Fort was a double-whammy of Hans’s classic humor. It was a play on words of the band “Dragon Force” which had been made popular for its incredibly bad electric guitar solos on Guitar Hero a few years before, but it was also a tasteful satire of a nerd persona Hans loved to portray. For Hans, life was like a stage and he loved playing ironic roles; acting like a Napoleon Dynamite while living as a proverbial James Dean.
We started by raiding his father’s garage for spare wood, hammers, and nails, and placed a ladder as precariously as possible on the pine needle-strewn soil beneath the trees. For half the day, we hammered sideways nails through 2x4s hoping they would stick to the sappy, thick bark of the Loblollies. As it was nearing completion, I stood near the top rung of the ladder, hammering our final “cross-brace” into place while Hans knelt on the Dragon Fort’s planks to hammer in the last of the nails in the center of the platform. Suddenly, an audible crunch broke the afternoon’s still summer air. For just an instant, Hans’s blue eyes tried fruitlessly to find an anchor in mine as his hands grabbed at thin air and panic spread across his face. The fort in its entirety then fell ten feet to the earth, Hans hitting hard as he came down on top of it.
Time seemed slower for that moment as I stood on my ladder watching Hans’s body lie still on the broken wooden planks below. It seemed unnatural for Hans to be still. For him there was always a chin-up competition to be had, a new flip to be mastered on the trampoline, or a new skating trick to hash out on his half-pipe. To see him lying there, motionless and face down was unsettling, like noticing a hairline fracture in a submarine’s window.
In the next second, Hans laughed as he rolled over and pulled himself to his feet. Wasting no time, he reorganized the materials and we began again on the project. Eventually, we succeeded in making a somewhat functioning zipline from that Dragon Fort. It only carried us 15 feet, but we thought the length of the ride mattered less than what we made of it.
***
Perhaps the only other gangly foreigner that could enchant me as a child as much as The Crocodile Hunter was Sherlock Holmes. In my bright red, hardback complete collection of the Sherlock Holmes stories I found hours of captivating entertainment. Sherlock was influential for the modern hero genre in many ways, revolutionizing to the murder mystery genre, introducing the world to the art of deduction, and, most importantly, perfecting the most beloved of all heroic archetypes: the sidekick. Alongside Sherlock for every adventure was the indefatigably loyal Dr. Watson. Watson, an impressive adventurer of his own, was enamored by Sherlock’s brilliance and pursuit of justice. Together, the two of them balanced each other to become the most iconic duo in the world.
After writing dozens of adventures for Sherlock and Watson, the author Sir Arthur Conon Doyle became aware of an inevitable truth: Sherlock was dying. While in good physical health, Sherlock’s consuming need to defeat his nemesis Professor Moriarty was overpowering his will to live and soon he was going to lose the battle for his life.
On the day it happened, Sherlock and Watson were heading to confront Professor Moriarty on a mountain trail. As they ascended, a hotel clerk from where they were staying came sprinting up to them desperate to reach Watson. The clerk explained that a guest had taken seriously ill and was in urgent need of a doctor. Watson, after conferring with Sherlock, agreed to go to save the guest’s life, but promised Sherlock he would return when he could. When he reached the hotel, he found that there was no ailing guest, but that Sherlock had requested the clerk pretend there was to lure Watson back to the hotel. Before he ever left the lobby, Watson knew the worst had happened.
Later that day, at the top of a mountain trail where the head of a waterfall formed, Watson pieced together how his friend met his fate.
Upon confronting Moriarty, Sherlock had concluded that there was no outcome in which the law could succeed in stopping Moriarty’s nefarious designs and decided that justice had to be extrajudicially served. After what appeared to be a brief struggle along the wet rocks atop the waterfall, Sherlock managed to send Moriarty and himself tumbling over the fall’s edge to their shared watery grave.
As a child, I tried to imagine Watson leaning over the falls straining his eyes to see any indication of Sherlock. I imagined that he remained stalled in the same spot for some time, hoping against hope that his friend wasn’t really gone, and then turning slowly and walking down the long trail alone. For so long, Watson had identified himself with Sherlock. Although he had been preparing to move out, marry, and begin a life of his own, he found himself constantly drawn back in to be Sherlock’s Watson. Now, he could never be that again. Sherlock’s fall had killed the best part of Watson, too.
***
Hans and I were good students, but not in the sense that we were well-behaved. The two of us were regularly separated for making the other howl-laugh during reading time, classwork, or even lectures. I think that element of our relationship was one of the most binding. After all, Hans and Franz originated as an SNL comedy routine, and we did what we could to each play our part.
I think even today my humor carries the undertones of Hans’s influence from our early days together. When Hans was cross-country captain, he was notorious for giving the worst advice he could think of to throw people off guard. When we would line up for sprints, Hans would call out to the runners, “Alright guys, just remember, we don’t need any rock stars making everyone work harder here. Just take it nice and slow so Coach thinks we can’t run fast. Do not try your best, repeat, do not try your best.” He was also well-known for coaching the younger runners to lie down and crunch themselves into a ball when they were gasping for air instead of standing up and raising their arms like they should. These antics were hilarious to me, and every time I screw with people by giving bad advice or suggesting outrageous or terrible ideas to people while keeping a straight face, I think of Hans.
Perhaps Hans’s most infamous stunt took place during summer band camp on the high school football field while Hans and I were playing up together in eighth grade on the high school drumline. Hans had been joking around with such relentless tenacity that Mr. McMurray, our young, six-foot-tall drumline instructor and high school band teacher, lost control of himself and literally tackled younger Hans to the ground from behind to squash him into submission. Without missing a beat, Hans flipped McMurray onto his back, slipped him into a headlock, and pinned him. After wriggling himself free, McMurray ran away pretending to laugh the whole thing off as if it were a joke.
We knew better. Hans had finished the fight McMurray started and it was now the stuff of legend. (Video evidence of that day is still available on YouTube under the title “Hanz kicks McMurrays ass”).
Other times, Hans’s humor was not so extreme. In fact, it was often the subtleties that were the most hilarious. Once, while visiting a cemetery called Futch Creek with his mom, Hans encountered a tombstone marked only “Mother.” In a reverenced tone, Hans whispered to his mom, “Look, mom. A Mother Futcher.” Another time, Hans convinced his cross-country teammates to wear the back of their shorts as low as possible to effectively moon everyone driving on the road as they jogged alongside it. Hans was officially reprimanded by the school for that run, but even the coaches had to stifle their laughter as they dealt out Hans’s punishment that day.
***
A lesser-known story of Steve Irwin took place in 2003. An American diver named Scott Jones had been scuba diving with a friend of his in Mexico when a sea surge tragically killed his friend and stranded Scott hanging on a rock ledge for an entire night. Irwin, filming an important segment for his show nearby, had heard a report of the missing divers on the radio and promptly decided to abandon the film project to instead seek out the lost divers.
Shortly after beginning his search, Irwin managed to find a dehydrated and exhausted Jones pressed against his stony trap. Without a moment’s hesitation, Irwin leapt from his boat, swam through the waters that had killed Jones’s companion hours earlier, grabbed Jones and brought him back to safety. Back on the boat, Irwin helped Jones with his wetsuit and worked to treat his injuries. At the time, Jones had no idea who The Crocodile Hunter was, only that a kind, energetic stranger had gone out of his way to save him.
As with other super heroes, moments like this were those that most defined Irwin. It wasn’t his bravery or super-human abilities that made the world fall in love with him, but his personality. Irwin loved a good laugh and often stole the show from late-night hosts who simply couldn’t match the energy Irwin naturally exuded, but he was also kind-hearted and exhibited an authentic love for people, animals, and the earth. I was often moved by his tender pleadings with people to stop pollution as he would cut plastic six-pack rings from a turtle’s neck or find garbage in the habitat of one of his beloved crocodiles. The passion Irwin had for clean and fun living, and his frequent self-sacrificing nature to rescue people and animals, is what delighted and inspired the world.
***
Part of my overly cautious nature as a child gave me a phobia of breaking rules. I was always painfully aware of the consequences of my choices, and so I was afraid to break rules of any kind. I felt that my future hung in the balance with a robin’s-egg fragility, especially when it came to obeying people of authority. One false step and I just knew I would be rejected from college, forced to live a life of poverty, and ultimately condemned to hell for my sins. Hans was just the opposite. He was always willing to cross lines, test boundaries, and challenge paradigms. This attribute came out the most when Hans was put into positions of leadership, the most prominent being captain of the cross-country team.
The reason I told people I joined cross country in 12th grade was to prepare myself for what I hoped to be a future at the United States Air Force Academy, but I’d be lying if I said Hans had nothing to do with it. Hans had been on the team for two years at that point. Well, he had been the team for two years. As the fastest member, annual qualifier for state championships, and varsity team captain, he was the most celebrated member of the group. Because I was a senior, they made me a captain by default - JV captain. I wasn’t even the fastest JV member.
On one of the southern August days when it was so hot you couldn’t tell where your sweat stopped and the humidity began, Hans and I ran the combined Varsity and JV teams for a little while, then stopped early in the woods for a game of hacky sack instead of running our instructed five miles. For the duration of practice, a score of sweat-slicked, shirtless boys slung hacky-sacks at each other’s exposed backs, leaving welts and whooping at one another after each solid hit. We had a great time, and it was good team bonding, but it wasn’t meant to last. I remember holding the rough fabric of the Jamaican flag-themed sack when a ponytail bobbed around the corner of the bushes. The girls’ varsity captain had found us. We were caught.
When our motley crew jogged back to the track on school campus, our coach stood waiting for us. He stood legs apart, grey shirt tucked into black athletic shorts, his mouth twitching in anger with a whistle resting between his lips. The girls sat on the grass beside him.
“Captains to the side!” he barked. His words pierced us with fear.
“On my whistle start mountain climbers. Don’t even think about stopping or slowing down. Captains, you’re to remain on your feet. Watch the ones you lead suffer for your stupidity. You are prohibited from joining them.”
His shrill whistle rang out in the air and legs began sawing back while their bodies remained in plank position. For a minute, they endured well in silence. Then two minutes. Then three. Three and a half. The groans and grunts began peppering the air as the young boys felt the strain in the chests, arms, and legs. Between their gulps for air, they looked up from their quaking arms to flash us looks of resentment with their flushed faces and watery eyes. I felt helpless.
To my right, Hans stood rigid, his lips pursed, jaw set, and brows furrowed downward in an uncommonly taught expression. Although he didn’t often show it, Hans had a serious side that I knew better than most. Hans was extremely driven to be the best version of himself and to serve those he cared about. He took himself seriously about these things. In a few months, Hans would be accepted by the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis where he would swear a solemn oath to duty and honor to our country, as well as undertake a serious study of oceanography – a reflection of the passion he had for the ocean and its wildlife. I had also seen his seriousness in his devotion to his family, God, and anything he viewed as his responsibility. That day on the field, Hans knew that he was letting down those for whom he was responsible. He was seriously not going to take it.
In a single motion, he dropped beside his boys and pumped his legs with a fresh vigor. “C’mon boys, don’t quit! Dig, kick! You can do this!” In turn, each of the other captains followed suit, looking defiantly at the coach as they dropped in line next to their leader. I was the last left standing, paralyzed by the choice. I couldn’t disobey the coach’s direct orders, which surely would only make things worse. If anything, I should be the only one to follow the rules, right? For longer than I care to say, I deliberated with myself about breaking the rules, and whether I should follow my coach or Hans. Looking down to see the freshman boys struggling to keep their small frames above the ground much longer, I resolved that Hans was right. True leadership would be showing these boys that we cared more about them than the rules we were given. I dropped to the ground beside Hans.
The coach blew his whistle. He looked at us disdainfully and turned his back saying, “Go home.”
Exhausted boys collapsed to the ground, sucking air from the dirt with their faces pressed into the ground. I looked to Hans as he raised himself up, his knees never touching the ground. He went around to the younger boys, apologizing for the trouble he had caused and boosting their morale. Those were the moments that I was proud to be Franz. Admittedly, Hans had been part of the problem to begin with but he had shown that when a problem arose, he could take care of his team. His future wasn’t on the line for disobeying his coach. He made his own future. I was proud to be beside him that day.
***
150 million years is a long time to maintain a pacifistic reputation, yet that is exactly what the stingray has accomplished. Since the Jurassic Period, the stingray has held its own with dinosaurs, megalodons, alligators, and other predators, mostly just by staying out of trouble. Made almost completely of cartilage, the stingray literally doesn’t have a mean bone in its body. It spends its days gliding on water currents, waving its pancake body and looking down on the seafloor critters with its permanently smiling face. A longtime friend to divers, the stingray has been a fan favorite for literal centuries.
Of course, being friendly isn’t the same as being helpless. Located at the end of its long, slender tail lies the stingray’s barb, its one and only defense. It spans only about ten inches of the 14-foot-long body and is covered with rows of sharp flat spines, composed of vasodentin, a cartilaginous material able to easily cut through flesh. The undersides of the spines contain two longitudinal grooves that run along the length of the spine and enclose venom-secreting cells. The primary purpose of the barb is to shock and scare predators into not chasing it as it runs away. The barb is usually only ever instinctively activated when the long shadow of a shark is cast from behind the stingray. Otherwise, the floppy, frilly friend of the ocean remains a happy, ancient observer to the ocean and its inhabitants.
On September 4, 2006, Steve Irwin and his daredevil film crew were taking a weather-induced reprieve in Port Douglas, Queensland of Australia while filming Ocean’s Deadliest, a documentary featuring some of the most extreme creatures of the ocean. Irwin, never one to sit still, decided to take advantage of the opportunity to explore some of the port’s calmer waters to get some side footage for a video project on which his daughter was working. He grabbed Lyons to be his cameraman, brushed his beach-blond hair behind him, strapped on his snorkeling gear, and was off into the water with his typical cheerful enthusiasm.
Before long, Irwin and his best mate saw a stingray from a distance. Both were familiar with stingrays and knew that their typical friendly encounter was just the kind of footage they could use. For several shots, Irwin swam playfully beside and around the stingray, showing off the good heart of the ancient sea giant to his future viewers. As he was about to wrap up, he and Lyons decided on one last shot of the stingray swimming away from Irwin to end the scene. With the camera in place, Irwin took his position behind the stingray as it gently rippled the water with its frills, casting his tall shadow across its body.
Suddenly, the stingray clenched up in panic as it felt Irwin behind it. White water and sand kicked up as it whirled around to a defenseless Irwin trying too late to give his animal friend space. In an instant, the lone barb struck Irwin in the chest more than 100 times, dyeing the clear, blue water crimson as his heart was drained of its blood. Lyons managed to get Irwin back to their boat and desperately performed CPR, but it was no use. Within an hour, The Crocodile Hunter had died.
***
After high school graduation, I returned to my western roots and left North Carolina to attend college in Utah, as Hans headed off to the Naval Academy. A year later, I put even more distance between me and my high school friends by moving to São Paulo, Brazil to serve a two-year mission for the LDS church. As a missionary, I wasn’t allowed a cellphone, Facebook, Instagram, or any means of communication other than email. As young boys don’t email each other too often, this meant that I was basically on another planet to my friends. I didn’t mind. I went about my days trying to be the best missionary I could by working hard and keeping the faith. With 16-hour workdays six days a week, it was easy not to think about anything else.
One night, when I had been gone for about a year, I got a phone call from a friend of mine named Elder Booth who worked in the mission office.
“Booth!” I yelled happily into the phone. “Como vai, amigo?”
Booth attempted a chuckle and tried to match my excitement, but his voice was flat and distant.
“Forsgren,” he stuttered abruptly. “I just spoke to your mother on the phone. I’m sorry to tell you your friend Hans is dead.”
He said his name wrong. It wasn’t Hans like hands, it was Hans. Like Franz. Like the correct, sane, normal pronunciation. I wanted to tell him this, but I couldn’t speak at all. I only managed to choke out a brief “thank you” and hung up. In a dirty back alley of Sao Paulo, I looked to the night sky and shed more tears than I knew I had.
Later, I learned how it happened. Hans, after a long day of perfect kitesurfing, had been longboarding with his friends on the rough, flat beach roads near their Assateague Island campsite. He was wearing a helmet because he always did; it was the solemn promise he made his mom when he first got into extreme sports. He was holding on to the side of his friend’s Jeep to gain momentum when the Jeep’s back tire came up onto his board, sending the board from underneath Hans and propelling him into the path of the Jeep. The back tire passed completely over his head, cracking the helmet and crushing his skull under its full weight. His desperate friends performed CPR on him, granting him enough life to be taken to the hospital where he succumbed to his injuries a week later. Hans was dead.
The cause of Hans’s death was a combination of skull fractures and severe internal cranial trauma and bleeding. Hans’s liver, kidneys, eyes, bones, and skin were donated to thankful organ recipients. His mother later reported that although Hans had been declared physically dead by his doctors, he was never declared completely brain dead and, as a consequence, the doctors could not ethically use his perfectly healthy heart for organ donation. That actually seemed consistent with the man I knew. Frankly, I don’t believe that anyone could have received it anyway. It’s hard to put the heart of a lion into just any human chest.
I lost two people the day that Hans went under the wheel of that Jeep. While Hans’s was the only body buried, the part of me that had been Franz died forever with him. It seemed silly to me that I had been so adamant about competing with my best friend, when now I feel a sick guilt for it. Technically, I was the default winner. Like I had always wanted, my accomplishments could finally outshine Hans because he would have no more accomplishments, he was out of the game. I, Franz, had a chance to become number one; yet, I hated the idea that I had ever wanted to be. There could be no Franz without Hans, I had lost that part of me forever. Hans was first, he had always been first, and I had been elated to just be a part of the act. Now, I was just Ben. There was no more dynamic duo, no rivalry, no constant companionship. My best friend was gone, and the best of me had gone with him.
***
When Sherlock went off the waterfall to seal his fate with Professor Moriarty, Doyle had intended for that to be his end. Yet, dissatisfied readers hounded him with hate letter after hate letter until he gave in to popular demand and brought Sherlock miraculously back to life to continue his adventures. Yet, I don’t believe Sherlock ever truly came back. He died with a permanence that can never be undone. Watson wasn’t where he should have been to save him and he lost him forever. The latter books were nothing more than vain fantasies tolerated by an indulgent Doyle to satiate the masses. The thin memories and tributes to him could never compete with the truth of who Sherlock was, and how he had actually died.
Some time after Irwin’s death, it was Lyons who gave the interview detailing how The Crocodile Hunter had died. Mild-mannered and soft-spoken, Lyons was wearing a light blue shirt, no tie, and conservative black slacks as he appeared on an Australian talk show. His drab and quiet manner seemed to drain the very color from Irwin’s life, and I wanted to write the show’s director to demand that The Crocodile Hunter be brought back. I was not satisfied to live in a world where a great hero’s sidekick was all that was left to tell his stories. I felt robbed. Robbed of my hero and friend, robbed of future adventures, robbed of the chance to see his family grow up, robbed of the joy he had brought to my life, and robbed with finality. Nothing could ever rectify the injustice of his death, and Lyons’ continuing life was little consolation.
It could make sense to have a Sherlock without a Watson, a Crocodile Hunter without a cameraman, or Hans without a Franz; but it never makes sense the other way around. That’s why the world wept and raged when Watson’s wet shoes took their first step to safety on the spot where Sherlock perished, when Lyons arrived safely back to the boat as Irwin’s punctured heart beat for the last time, and when one nearly indistinguishable blond boy sprawled out on a hot, southern road got to walk away while another never did. The imbalance leaves us wounded and lopsided, so we try to fill the gap with tributes to their memories hopeful that in some way our devoted solidarity will prolong their already extinguished lives.
Yet, the truth remains stubbornly in front of us: no amount of Foundations, 5K memorial runs, or letters to the director can ever correct it.
Our heroes are gone, carried on only through stories told by those unworthy to have stories of their own.
