On loss years in the making
I wasn’t surprised. Anyone with a pulse and a general familiarity of opioids wouldn’t be, and I am more familiar than most who still breath. It wasn’t a phone call, it was a message on a social media site. I am not sure its inventor at the time of its creation knew that such tragic information would be passed along through it. Now it is just as reasonable as any means of connivance. Just one among a number of possible avenues that I could have heard that he died. He is dead. A man that I spent countless hours with is dead. A man with whom I haven’t had a substantive conversation in nearly four years is dead.
That is the rub. It wasn’t distance or time that separated us. It was behavior, it was reaction, it was a choice. I chose to let that vine die, or more correctly we both did. The improprieties sure didn’t help. Vices stacked and virtue waned. Now they seem so small with him not being able to right them. It all seems so small. How could they not when every part of him demanded largeness, drama, remembrance of the highest order. He now, the in rearview mirror, seems so fucking small.
I am not particularly good with dealing with loss. It runs in the family, or culture, or adopted culture, or from misguided forces of the blood of Christ and original sin. This loss in specific is hard. It is close. It is guilty and wretched and plagued by ghosts and memories of a person who ceased to exist at some point between world ending catastrophes. From idol, to peer, to pitiable. In the span of a age or in the blink of an eye. I can’t tell anymore. I will miss him. I will miss the him that looms so large in my mind and the him that part of me wished he could be.
This Saturday I will be putting on slacks and collard shirt. Nothing too formal. Then just a forty-five minute car ride away I will have to confront the finality of it all. That he has died. That whatever mechanisms that kept his brain firing and his body ambulating will have forever ceased. I take no comfort in it, and I very much doubt I will find comfort in the home of his mother. It is obligation that draws me there. Duty to a version of a person that hasn’t existed in almost a decade. I don’t know where solace or comfort can be found, I only know where it cannot.
