The ones who make it beautiful...
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Some good friends of mine recently lost a good friend of theirs.
They lost him to a tragic accident......a sort of cosmic fuck-up that places somebody in the wrong place at the wrong time. One minute you're living and breathing and healthy and loved and on your way home, and the next you're gone. It's the kind of thing that rattles the foundation of even those who possess the deepest faith. And it's the kind of thing that makes the rest of us even more cynical.
We're forever asking WHY. When bad things happen to bad people we can justify it as some sort of divine tit-for-tat. But when a good man is taken, you can rub your knees raw without getting an answer. You'll forever be picking up the pieces, and each piece will break your heart anew. A good man reaches out and touches people exponentially. All the smiles and all the grace and all the raised glasses over all the years and you realize that you're one of the ones he touched, and because of that you're one of the ones who shines just a bit brighter because you knew him. You may not have even been aware, because a good man is often taken for granted. The shitty ones get the headlines. The good ones are holding their wives close at night and quietly tucking their kids into bed and when they hear that you might be in some trouble will call and say "do you need anything?"
What do you do when you learn that he's gone?
You shake and tremble and cry and rage then you shut down. Find a dark corner or a darker bar and wonder where you fit in a world that is capable of such random cruelty. You reach for words of comfort for wives and mothers and kids and no matter how many times you rehearse it in your head it always sounds inadequate. But the words, however jumbled and stuttered, are appreciated. Each kind word fills in a tiny hole in the heart.
Life is voids. A void not filled becomes a ghost. The more loved ones we lose, the more haunted we become.
But there are different kinds of ghosts. There's the scary Amityville kind that send swarms of flies to your room and shout "get out!" when you're on the toilet, and there are the kinds that shove lovely memories and smiles into your head at the exact time you need them...and only if you're haunted by these kinds can you carry on without feeling irretrievably broken.
***
We've all lost so much over the last 2 years. This pandemic robbed us of a human touch for months on end, and when we ventured back outside we were all gun-shy.....with our eyes darting to and fro looking for a reason to flee to the safety of our four walls again. Those we lost we could not even mourn properly. To grieve in 2020 was to risk being grieved over. So we didn't hug. We didn't cling to each other. We were, Zoom notwithstanding, completely alone. We pretended that we weren't lonely because that's what lonely people do.
But slowly, ever so slowly, the pandemic started losing its grip. We started to hug each other again. No more elbow bumps. Even the fist-bump started going out of style. We're no longer sharing drinks or singalongs over Facetime. We could buy each other rounds again, and we toasted everything that we used to take for granted that we never will again.
We toasted each other. We toasted friendships.
To use Warren Zevon's words, we "enjoyed every sandwich".
And then the call comes that shatters all of our windows. And all that pent-up goodness escapes out of them in an instant.
It's like letting all the balloons float into the sky at a party, only to be asked later to track them all down.
I don't think we ever really heal. Instead, we harden. The wound is always there, but it scabs over in time. During dark nights of the soul we might pick at it, and it might open up again. But it will harden again, too.
The world is a cruel, unfair place. It's filled with ignorance and apathy and madness and too many people who provide absolutely no value.
But it also contains souls who diminish us when they’re gone. Even if we didn’t know them. The divine spark was there.
They are the ones who carry their own light with them. They're the ones that pull us out of the shadows, and make the pictures beautiful.
In a bit..
--tf