There is no neat way to wrap this up within myself, and I begin to suspect that I never will.The young man to the left should have been seventeen in a few weeks. What was arranged in the casket last Friday was a poorly-done parody. Even in black and white, this image--sort of a blonde Daniel Radcliffe--is more reminiscent. This, more than the actual corpse, tolls the slow churchbell in my brain: "You will never see him again."
Understand that I cannot and will not pretend to mourn the personality that was a the cliched "perfect storm": The product of abuse and neglect and selfishness from some quarters and overindulgence and the warmed-over mistakes (of the previous generation) from others. During the downward spiral, I, like his grandfather (my father), shrugged at the waste and more or less washed my hands of him until such time as Real Life bitch-slapped some sense into the stubborn skull. "Some people just have to hit rock bottom," Dad and I parroted to each other.
Yet the memories, good and bad, appear in motley crowds at the oddest times: A baby's first cry heard through the maternity room door. Frog-marching a post-toddler to the bathroom to wash precocious profanity from his mouth. The nephew cheering his uncle in a tournament (and booing the same uncle's opponents). Introducing my padawan carnival ride junkie to The Zipper and dodging the hail of the change he forgot in his pockets. Ruthless, take-no-prisoners dogfights between two equally hot (and short) tempers.
Now I--ever so dimly--understand why fundamentalists (of any creed) automatically uncork the "moralizing" bottle to get themselves through times like these. There is nothing at all for the living in a death this unexpected, this random. Not unless we can shoehorn it into connect-the-dots notions of cause and effect, Manichean landscapes of Right and Wrong. Being deficient in that reflex (and a slow learner besides), I have come to expect to pay dearly for any truly valuable wisdom/insight/knowledge that I gain. I assume that others learn more readily than I. Yet there is no recompense for this loss to the ones that I love. They suffer, and I have so few tools with which to lessen that suffering.
"Oh, baby, what were you thinking?" I whispered to the remnants of my nephew during the visitation. I don't expect an answer now--or ever, for that matter--any more than I did then.
