It’s three years after something bad happened. Someone left this plane, this earth, and they won’t return. It feels like stubbornness, like they’re off somewhere thinking of how to return but changing their mind, knowing it’s against the rules. Funny, he was both a rebel and a stickler for rules, my friend. In games, he was dogmatic, autocratic, plus a few other “ics” in the mix. He wanted things his way—that was the annoying, and ultimately tragic governing principle. Today, I say goodbye to him again, it being an anniversary. I recall the good parts of his self, and only allude to the bad, following the tacit rules of grief. My shoulds enter the fray, influenced by what others say and write, their forlorn and sentimentalist tributes. He was a good this, a great that. We miss him. We are grateful for the time we had together, etc. He had a range of qualities, from good to bad, plus a vast in-between that renders the binary choices less palatable. I feel some pressure to represent him fully, and yet to hold back, to speak around the truth, and in doing so, effect some manner of taking care.
In a way, we’re following his lead. He led in this way, entering into the fray of most relationships, daggering in with his knifey wit, his manic rage. His truth. This was only sometimes, though the instances were memorable—indeed, they were traumatic, the way melt-downs usually are. Mostly, he was alternately aloof and jovial, and in this way protective of others while signaling the presence of an inveterate problem. He wouldn’t change, he often exuded. On occasion, he’d offer a promissory opposite: exhibiting a new self, cleaned up, polished, even wholesome. He could quote scripture, subscribe to conventional belief systems, be regularly friendly, consumerist, even mainstream in his tastes, his politics; an average good citizen. Only he wasn’t average. It was difficult masking the mild disappointment I might feel at these times—the disorienting reluctance to accept the loss of the miscreant genius in whose hijinks (largely un-violent) I lived vicariously. To watch him grow up was to let some part of my own childhood go. Recess is over. Time to go back to work. It’s like the malaise you feel when an exciting villain or clown gets subdued for the good of society. And there is no turning back. But there was a turning back, because in time his un-wholesome self would return, and in that return there would be a relief, plus a guilty pleasure that would vie with obligation. Yes, we must do something about this problem…someday.
That someday never really came. A change came eventually, in the form of a passing, which started in a park on the outskirts of a city whose reputation is almost synonymous with the derelicted down and out. That was a place to collapse in and not wake up—to be picked up off the ground by stoical if diligent caregivers, anonymous to my dying friend. It would be hours before loved ones would gather and feel what he was already not feeling due a loss of consciousness, the horror of his last moments. If he could have spoken he might have told us to get lost, not wanting to be seen as he was then: bloated, pumped with chemicals that were meant to keep his kidneys going and thus keep him alive. He’d have whispered past the tube that was in his mouth that he didn’t want to be seen that way; that he wished he could be alone, for our benefit as well as his, because this ending was not worth watching. Get away, he might have said, his words slurring, his eyes glazing over, becoming dull. The lively clown, the sometimes villain, sometimes hero and more often something in between that friends and family adored, would not have wanted the final scene he was granted; the witnessing that he would have preferred to not have. Remember me differently, he would have pleaded. Think of me as I’ve been more often than not, more than three years ago.
Graeme Daniels Psychewriter 