You keep thinking, should i remain thankful and optimistic, so as to not draw God’s attention, or will it only make my situation worse, because of the underlying hypocrisy, when really i feel great anger fear. I do feel it is unfair. I realise that to say something is unfair presupposes the existence of fairness, when no such thing has ever been hinted at or promised. The Lord works in mysterious ways, or it is all obscure inexplicable randomness, the outcome is identical. And my cousin Eddie is still dead, shot by burglars for no apparent reason save he woke up and confronted them. He was a year younger than me. Three weeks ago, my Uncle Marvin, not Eddie’s father, but my other uncle on my mother’s side, passed away. He was in his early sixties.
You keep forcing yourself to answer the phone, knowing that there is no reason for things to keep going this way, but feeling in your gut that hey, things are on a roll, why stop now. Who’s next?
You consider buying a house and stuffing all your relatives and loved ones inside and throwing away the key, just to make sure everyone is under control and out of harm’s way. You consider slipping away and retiring to some remote place, never caring for anyone again.
You try to act appropriately. You try to make the calls you need to make, but there are only so many you can handle in a day. After the second or third you say to yourself, tomorrow. The worst was telling my mother her brother’s youngest son had been killed. It wasn’t the news itself that hurt or frightened me, but knowing full well how my mother would react. I spent ten minutes just staring at the phone, her number already entered, finger hovering over the CALL button. She was at a Mexican restaurant with a friend, about to go see a movie. The worst was calling his oldest brother, not knowing in the slightest what to say, sitting by the phone planning a sentence, and when that failed, planning at least an opening series of words that in some compact way could possibly convey shock and sadness and comfort. The truth being that it is irrelevant what you say or how you say it, and to some it is imperative that you say something, and to others it is irrelevant that you ever call or send a card. And the truth is all the gestures and rituals and sentiment and cards and talking and thinking and thinking and thinking do not in any manner come close to adding up to anything that can bring the deceased closer to being undeceased. And still it seems important to be together and share and do what is required of you, or what you require of yourself, or what might be required, and generally try, though you can not ease his parent’s pain, you cannot help his girlfriend who was with him at the time.
You think to yourself inappropriate thoughts, what it might have felt like being shot, what she might have seen, what did she say to him, how it happened, where was that instant when the before became the after for ever and ever. How long before she can stop asking what would have been had she not woken him up to check.
You think there is no reason to have children, to emotionally invest in 27 years, when every year there is more there, and every year the person is more a part of you, when it is unbearable to lose a newborn, and then if an adult what? How exactly do you quantify loss. What is acceptable on a scale of death? A two, or a four point five? Because of course we’re all dying and pretty much past the point of considering anyone eternal and we understand this fact, but on our own terms. And those terms are specific to you of course. I find death acceptable in the old or the very ill, for obvious reasons. And i can also manage to somehow deal with death if it is accidental, when the person is perhaps grown, retired, a grandparent, a semi-full life behind them. But i can’t seem to accept death when it strikes like this, because, i suppose, it brings back to the fore the ideas vehiculated by every single e-mail you have received from the Dalaï Lama and his myriad chain e-mail senders, i.e. that every day could be your last, that every day could be your best friend’s last, and your significant other’s last, and your son’s or daughter’s or your brother’s or your coworker’s or and every time you set foot in the street you are augmenting the chances of not coming home, sitting on the subway, someone may detonate, stab you, you may trip and fall down stairs, scaffolding can fall and kill you, you can choke on a donut, you can forget to keep breathing in your sleep, you can contract a ridiculous disease from a poorly cooked burger, that guy that just coughed on you maybe gave you the flu and you will develop pneumonia and though you are healthy and young for no reason at all this time around your heart will simply stop. Or it will be a pleasant summer evening, you go to bed and at 2:45 am your girlfriend will see someone in the back of the apartment and wake you and you will go to check it out and you will be shot and you will die, leaving a mother, a father, two brothers, and so on and so forth and if applying the theory of six degrees everyone in the world to mourn you, and hopefully you are in a beautiful place of peace, and those left behind will simply live out their days with the equivalent of an arm or an eye or their heart missing, in a gap that may scar but will not, ever, be filled.
I only met Eddie six or seven times in my life. When we were kids in Florida, when i was twelve and went to visit his family in Pennsylvania, when my Grandmother died, when his older brother got married. But he was one of seven cousins, and so that’s one seventh gone then isn’t it?. The thing is there are constants in life. An order to the world. If you’re there and he’s always been there, then it stands to reason that he will be there as long as you, by your side be he near or far, because that is the lay of the land, the way things are, are supposed to be.
I am not a hateful person, i am not an angry person, i am not a cynical person, i am not an ungrateful person. I try to avoid slipping into the ease of flippant remarks and self-pity, and quixotic anger. There is no one out there, or there is someone out there, and either way the rules are clear and you try to be accepting of them.
And there is definitely no anger at the idiot who shot him, because he is the idiot product of an idiot society of idiot warmongers and NRA members and homophobes and xenophobes and blackhaters and jewhaters and whitehaters and fearful and unprincipled and beyond help or redemption, in hell from the start, and so what good will it do. An eye for an eye is the dumbest thing i’ve ever heard of.
I don’t want that. I want them to be safely asleep while some poor idiots steal what little valuables they may have had in the apartment and slip out into the night. And then it would be ok to simply go on feeling blessed that no such thing has ever happened to me or mine, at least in the last sixty years, and therefore there would be much to be thankful for. But now it is otherwise and it is waiting, and waiting, guilty but knowing that with time, feeling that i have paid my penance, expressed my grief and given comfort where i felt it needed to be given, but then being infinitely practical and knowing that there is no filling that void, with comfort or otherwise, i will feel guilty but relieved that that is behind me now, because once the shock is passed, and the fear is under control, then it will be out of my hands, and once i’ve tried and seen there is nothing i can do, i can crawl back to the rock i live under and put my blinders back on, and forget temporarily that we are all dead, and the only thing unknown is the chronology of it all.
And every time i laugh i feel unduly privileged. And taste something sweet. And stare at M and she at me.
I love you Eddie.
