Mark's Spot
I first knew Mark Tawa a lifetime ago. As with most of the people I know and have become close with in this world, it started with sports.
As a kid, I was very involved in my church teenage youth group. At some point in the early-to-mid-90s, either the youth group or the church elders landed on the idea of forming a basketball league between the churches as a way to encourage fellowship. There were eight churches spread across eastern Mass. and Pawtucket, and this was a way for everyone to get together on a more frequent basis.
Very quickly, it was established that the two best teams were my church, in Worcester, and Mark's church, in Dedham. I played on my team, but I wasn't integral to the process. I lived in that Payton Pritchard-Bruce Brown type of super sub role, and even that is probably covering the lens of history with a great deal of sepia tone. Mark and his older brother Derek were the stars of the show for Dedham. We hated them, in particular because we really only saw them at the basketball games, and not at any other functions. Mark, as the younger, less physically imposing brother who also had a bit of a mouth on him, was hated the most. And even though this was all in the name of fellowship, it eventually got competitive enough that we brought on a kid who didn't even go to our church as a ringer just to beat the Dedham kids. It didn't work.
Fast forward 15-20 years and Mark now lived across the street from me. Except for a long while, we didn't realize our shared history. Because we only knew each other through those random Sunday afternoons where we cleared out the chairs of the church auditorium after Coffee Hour to play basketball (one of my favorite jobs was creating the out of bounds and foul lines with masking tape), we never learned each other's last names. So there was nothing for either of us to latch onto when we re-met as adults.
That all changed thanks to a bowl of hummus. My mother had made a big bowl of it and brought it to a party for one of the kids' birthdays, and Mark was going in on it. So naturally, my mother started up her favorite game of 20 questions, and quickly learned that Mark was a fellow Arab and part of our church, and the lightbulb went off. By that point, we had become fast friends. Being neighbors certainly helped, as did having kids who were/are in the same grade in school. We would nerd out on sports – the Celtics in particular – and Marvel movies. For a long while, we saw just about every new Marvel movie together, and when my son got up to speed on them, we brought him too. Often, it was just the three of us.
With the Celtics being so good the last decade, we also watched a lot of Celtics games together. That was what we had done a year ago Saturday, which turned out to be the last time I saw him. It actually almost didn't happen. With the team facing heightened expectations for the sixth straight season after their unexpected run to the Conference Finals in 2017, every game had become nerve wracking (they still are, frankly). Mark's response to that increasingly had been to DVR the playoff games, wait and see what the final score was, and then watch it. Or sometimes he wouldn't check the score, but would still wait and watch after it had ended, just so he could zoom through it. It cut down on the stress. I didn't blame him, but with the C's facing their first potential elimination game of the playoffs in Philly for Game 6, I cajoled him over to watch the game live, as my nerves couldn't handle waiting for it to end so we could watch on DVR. We hadn't watched a playoff game together yet, and I was worried they would end before we could. We had to endure three quarters of poor shooting from Jayson Tatum (he would shoot 4-for-8 in the fourth) and Doris Burke's continuously over-the-top praise of Joel Embiid, but in the end, Tatum shined, and we parted ways two happy Celtics fans. It was the last time I would see Mark alive.
Three days later, I watched Game 7 with some of my high school friends, and texted Mark after, knowing he was going to wait to watch. He texted back a half hour later that he had a "nasty virus" and had been asleep most of the game. But he had finished watching it, and so I honestly didn't think anything of him being sick. Two days later, he was gone. It was heartbreaking. A year later – he passed away precisely a year ago today – it is still heartbreaking. I think about him nearly every day. My loss is miniscule compared to that of his family, but I feel it nonetheless. I wonder what he would have thought about certain things – again, mostly sports, but not always. Last year, we hosted a really big event at my bookstore. It was a daunting challenge, and I needed some help with a not-so-glamorous job – sitting in a parking lot, basically. Mark was there to help, no questions asked. I needed six volunteers for it, and had to work to find the other five, but not with Mark.
What hurts most when I think of him now, beyond the fact that I won't get to share things with him, or that he won't get to see his kids grow up, or get to grow old with his wife, is that I'm already starting to forget what he believed about little things. While it's impossible to forget his hatred for how LeBron James played – he would have had a field day with LeBron's tantrum during the first round – I can't be sure what his thoughts would have been about stuff like all the threes the Celtics take, or anything else. I want to believe he would have agreed with me, because we usually saw eye to eye, but I also know that is hubris talking. And when I can't be certain, it hurts double – first for not being sure of what my friend would have thought, and then second when it sets in all over again that I never will.
What I certainly will remember is that no matter the situation, Mark always had a great story. Not a good story, a great story. I've known very few people who told a story as well as Mark, and his ability to captivate people with a story – even and especially people he didn't or barely knew – was something he relished. Not just the story itself, but picking the right story, knowing when to tell it long or tell it short, and how to draw people into it. Others saw and loved this ability too, and I think it was a not small part of why he had been promoted so many times at work. You could always feel Mark's generous spirit in those stories, even when he was bragging about something. It was a fine line to walk, but he always walked it, and because of that generous, gregarious spirit, I never met a person who didn't like him. That was abundantly clear at his wake. So many people showed up to it that people had to park up and down the block, on side streets and parking lots near the funeral home. The police had to show up to direct traffic, and many people told me they waited in line for three hours to pay their respects. Three hours!
People weren't ready to say goodbye to him. I'm still not, even in this piece. There are so many stories I want to tell, like about his love for having new things. Once, he gave me a perfectly functional snowblower because he wanted to get a new one, and giving me his gave him an excuse to get a new one. I don't think his wife really bought that story, but that's what he went with. Or about the time we were installing the basketball hoop at my house, and even though it was the exact same one we had installed at his house (I had gotten a deal on it because he knew I wanted to buy one and he had made a Google alert for sales) we put the backboard on wrong...twice. It was too hot that day.
One of the ways I pay Mark respect is that this season I've sat right where he sat on my couch the last time I saw him for each and every Celtics game. I've attended three games in person this season. For the other 94 games (five preseason, 82 regular season, 10 playoffs, minus three), I've sat right in that spot. In Mark's spot. Initially, I told myself I would sit there until the C's won the NBA Finals, and that they would win it this year for him. But no matter what happens in this season or any other season, it's just where I sit now. Perhaps if I continue to do so, I'll always be able to hold on to a little piece of his memory.