Mourning my friend

I suppose there is something ironic or at least telling of my lack of commitment to this journal that for the past two days I have been two busy absorbing myself in my work and wallowing in grief too much to record anything. A combination of things have kept me from writing. Obviously, the loss of a friend is huge, but I think as we get older, the more sensitive we get to death and the idea of it.

When I was a child, I would not say I was fearless about death. It would be more accurate to say that I was completely oblivious of it. Grandparents and great-aunts and uncles passed away, but they were too distant for it to be real.

In my late teen years, someone I went to school with died of a heart defect in the middle of the term in his sleep. I did not know the boy well, but we shared a couple classes and had spoken to each other on several occasions. I liked him well enough. He was handsome enough to be popular and modest enough to treat anybody with respect -- a very rare combination in the teenage world. The point is, we were not close, but I appreciated him all the same. And then one day he did not come to school because he was gone. He died in his sleep. His death did more to make the concept of death real to me than anything in my life up to that point. A few dead relatives, countless dead on my television, and a religious upbringing based on preparing myself for the afterlife (and therefore death) -- none of it made the concept as real to me as the day Tom Jackson did not make it into school.

However, the sting of death faded and lost it’s edge. The great enlightenment that comes with young adulthood and the worldly insensitivity that comes with complete absorption into a new career made chasing success trump everything and left no time for pondering such etherial concepts as death and the meaning of life.

Now, Eugene is the first of my contemporaries to fall. I suppose that’s odd, considering that most people have a friend that died of an early heart attack or knows somebody that died in a traffic accident or has at least some other experience with close death through the middle of their lives. Not me, though. My parents are still alive and well I know of people my age that have died, but even the ones I went to school with I never really knew. Eugene is the first to go in this part of my life, and I think the dim circumstances surrounding the event -- the ‘not knowing’ -- have made it all the harder for me to accept.

I say that, though I am sure it is completely a “greener grass” scenario. Like when you lose a pet you love as a child -- you hold on to the thought that somebody kidnapped your beloved companion long after you know better. You say you wish you knew what happened, while at the same time, some part of you knows that is just so much talk. The mystery of it is anesthetizing. Rover wandering off into the woods until he collapses from the cancer eating his insides is harder to accept than the thought that he got caught up in a new found occupation of touring the country saving Timmys from wells.

I’m rambling. The short version (and the conclusion you probably already came to) is that I needed a couple days to process what happened and no amount of writing it out was going to make that coping time go easier or heal better.

As for real life, it looks like I need to be in Baltimore tomorrow. Three dead kids were discovered yesterday in a boat adrift in the Chesepeake Bay. A fourth was apparently found alive -- he was most likely the attacker -- but he was so completely inhuman and unable to communicate with investigators that it goes beyond being some kind of psychological dissociation. They say it is more like the human parts of his mind are completely dead and he has regressed to a violent animal level. The Baltimore police have called in the CDC to investigate the possibility of some kind of infection being involved; some kind of rabies. I hope it is rabies.