The mortality blog

You know, death always hits me weird…

I would admit that nobody really close to me has ever died. Oh, sure…the grandparents, maybe an assorted aunt or uncle, blah blah blah. But a parent? A sibling? An ex-girlfriend that could suck like a Hoover and was actually pretty cool to be around to boot? Never happened. Never lost any particularly close friends, either. So I guess you could say that I really don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about (which seems to be a pretty commonly held sentiment about yours truly anyway). But I just don’t think it affects me the same way that it does most people.

I got the chance again today to find out. I was awakened this morning by a phone call informing me that one of my old friends had died—last night actually, in a motorcycle accident (I’ve known at least two people that have died on those fucking things, as well as one guy who died on a three-wheeler and another guy who died on a quad). My relationship with him, actually, would probably fall somewhere in between acquaintance and friend, though much more towards the friend side of the equation. Though I’d known him for 25 or 30 years, I hadn’t seen him in 3 or 4 years—we just traded the occasional comment on each other’s Facebook page. But obviously, it still sucks…and I will miss him. Big time. And he was much, much closer to a couple of my best friends than he was to me.

The first thing that hits me is guilt, in a way. I suppose some of it could be a form of so-called “survivor’s guilt”—you know, “why do I get to live on and he doesn’t?” Though this is supposed to mainly (if not exclusively) strike people who have been through intense shit together—like, say, hostage situations or military service in times of war or even just automobile accidents—where one survives and one doesn’t, I think it happens a lot more often than that. Put it this way: if a computer, or maybe Mr. Spock (the actual Leonard Nimoy might do in a pinch), sat down and read a summary of our lives—just how together our lives were, what we’d accomplished thus far, number of lives affected, possible future existence, all that shit—and had to pick one of us to go, most definitely it’d be me. This is not some bullshit “it should have been ME!” statement, nor do I wish to change places with him…it just makes you ponder shit, get all existentialist and whatnot. Was it “his time” in God’s eyes, or was the whole thing just a freak accident?

There’s another kind of guilt that comes with it, too. I’m not a “weeper”—never have been. This has always made me feel terrible, like maybe I lack a soul or something. I can always tell how difficult it is for the person passing the news along, how they try in vain to sugarcoat it or something in the fear that I won’t be able to handle it and will snap like a bungee cord made in China, immediately requiring a straitjacket and a sedative to contain my grief. I feel like an absolute asshole when they finally break the news and I simply go “huh!” in a detached, “Imagine that!” sort of way. The same sort of reaction that most people have when you tell them that the average sea turtle swims 500 miles a year or some other boring factoid. I can’t even begin to count how many times I’ve been at a funeral and nearly blew a blood vessel or shit my Fruit of the Looms just trying to force a few goddamned tears out of my ducts. But it almost never happens. Instead, I just stand there looking like I’m about halfway between bored and pissed, like some poor dude in the mall who can’t get his wife to move her ass and finish shopping so he can get home and watch the big game or something.

But it does hit me…it becomes this ever-present black cloud, this thing that nags at the back of your mind at all times. Kinda like the feeling you get when you’re afraid you’re going to get some bad test results back from the doctor. And it’s always there. Oh, it goes away eventually, of course…but it takes several days. Tomorrow morning may well be the worst of it…that would be my guess. That first morning when you really have to remind yourself that you really have awakened already and it’s not all just weird shit from last night’s dream. But for the next few days at least, I’m continually going to find myself snapping out of some trance where I realize that I’ve been staring into space for 10 fucking minutes and just…pondering. And remembering.

The final little bout with guilt that I have to endure comes from my own cynical, hardheaded assholishness (fuck you, it’s a word because I SAID so)…whenever I hear a news report like the one they did on my buddy, I just instantly write the victim off as a probable piece of shit, anyway. I analyze the situation, think “Hmmm…eleven’o’clock at night, motorcycle, speeding…well, you play with matches, you get burned, don’t you? 'Bye-bye, dumbshit. Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on your way into whatever afterlife you’ve earned.” But every once in a while, a little reminder—occasionally a very harsh reminder at that—comes my way to let me know that I have no fucking right at all to be such a judgmental prick, and also to remind me that many other lives are affected and not just the stiff in the morgue’s.

I have no idea what’s up with a funeral just yet. I mean, that’s pretty obvious, seeing as how the whole affair just happened 24 hours ago. I simply mean, I don’t know if he’s to be buried in the city he’s living in now, or if he wanted to come back to this place, or if he’s to be cremated, or what. If he’s to be buried there, then I’ll most likely miss the funeral. But if it’s to happen HERE, then I’ll most definitely go.

Rich, it was real, brother. RIP…