Waiting on a Lifetime

This is, I suppose, what I get for having cut myself off from old friends for so long.

I discovered today that I am an uncle. And have been for the past five years.

It's a strange feeling, made all the stranger by the circumstances surrounding my finding this out. Time is a funny thing for me, forever both constant and inconstant, always moving forward but finding strange ways to trap me in the past. But age, it seems, has a way of forcing the soul to let go of things that the psyche will not. It's not a mellowing, as some might put it but, perhaps, just an unwillingness to continue fighting old battles, long ago lost.

For whatever reason, as suddenly as I cut off contact, I've started to reconnect with old friends of mine, friends from my childhood. From a time that was simultaneously, paradoxically, both the best and the worst part of my life, for a variety of reasons.

I had lunch this afternoon with a man who, through those years and into my early adulthood, was more of a brother to me than the one I was born with. Some might find that to be a harsh judgment of the oldest son my parents produced, but there were, and are, reasons for that.

This man was, and is, my friend. Nothing will ever change that and, to this day, I would lay down my life for him. But it was a strange experience seeing him again; I looked at the man he had become in my absence, and yet I could still see faint images of the boy he was. Like seeing a ghost, forever young, or peering into a looking glass darkly.

But for that moment in time, I could see him as we once were, riding our bikes along the lakefront and down the streets of Chicago's Near North Side, and finding ways to, shall we say, creatively occupy our time without involving the Chicago Police Department - and mostly succeeding in that.

And as we talked, one thing became painful obvious in its clarity: I never should have left. Something of which my friend pointedly reminded me of. When he asked me, inevitably, I suppose, why, I had no answer to give.

We all ask ourselves that question, that "Why?", and it takes a certain level of introspection to come up with an answer, a level of introspection that I suspect most of us just don't have. I'm certainly not certain that I do. What answer could I possibly give him, what answer could he possibly understand?

I went to a very dark place in those twenty years since the last time I saw him, a place of nightmares and shattered hopes, populated by the lost and forgotten. How does one explain to someone who's never seen it the brutality that we are capable of inflicting on each other? Yes, I've left that part of my life behind me, and yet in many ways, I've never left it. Call it a case of questionable judgment or collateral damage, if you will, but the things I've seen can never be unseen, there is some damge done to the soul that can never be undone.

So, I guess, there is just no answer for that particular question. I had to live in a place where people held there own lives to be meaningless and, in the process, my own life became meaningless. Such is the way of the world, I suppose.

I never should have left. I would, perhaps, have been a better man if I had not. But that's another battle from a war long past, a moment in time gone beyond all hope of recall. Things can never be the same, nor should they be. All I can do now is be the friend that I should have been, and be the uncle that I should have been. Perhaps then my friends and my family can finally forgive me, and I can finally stop waiting on a lifetime.

Quo Vadis?

What does Memorial Day mean to you? Aside from being a long weekend, a break from work, an excuse to fire up the barbeque? That's not an idle question. Does Memorial Day mean anything to you, other than marking the start of Summer?

The pain of loss is always a constant companion, sometimes sharp, sometimes fading into a kind of background ache that over the years has, perhaps perversely, become a comforting warmth. To carry that pain is a part of the bargain going in, but something that, while you may appreciate it intellectually, you are never really prepared for. Emotional scars are the worst scars, for the physical may heal but the wounds dealt to the soul never do. A smell, a turn of phrase, a fragment of a song, and the memories come flooding back in a rush, an elephant kneeling on your chest in all his crushing weight.

I can never smell jet fuel again without being transported back to another time and place, without seeing one future closed off and another opened. Faces of the living and dead alike fade into an indistinct haze, yet there are moments in time perserved in startling clarity, as fresh and as urgent in the mind as the day they happened. Echoes of a past as immutable as the stone beneath our feet, you are left to wither and age while there are those who shall be forever young, forever cut off from your future and theirs. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, and who can say who got the better end of that deal?

At some point you learn that the "peace" everyone else takes for granted is an illusion, a lie we tell ourselves to hide the fact that it is bought with blood. Orwell said it best, that we sleep peacefully in our beds at night because rough men stand ready to do violence on our behalf. And, never having fired a shot in anger, there are those who pass from this world to whatever comes next, if anything comes next other than the cold silence of the grave. Moments caught in time, where "No fair!" doesn't count and the saddest words in the world are "Why me?"

The hardest thing I've ever had to do is look into a widow's eyes and see reflected there the same question that torments me in the small hours of the night: why him and not you? Years pass and that question never loses its edge, an exquisitely sharp knife that strikes straight into the heart. There's that elephant again, demanding that, at the very least, you bear witness to what you are and to what those who are gone are not.

Someone once told me that it's not necessary to lose your soul in that job, but that a certain amount of violence will be done to it. And to some, it is only a job, while to others its something more, a calling verging on a religious faith. There are as many reasons for joining up as there are those who have joined, but there is one tradition that everyone shares: dying young. That, too, is an inescapable fact of life, the most vital of lotteries determined by the most random of chances. The winners get to go home and live with the questions and the guilt, and the losers, well, they get a white marble marker and a holiday.

There are those of us who don't need an arbitrary day on the calendar to remember; we remember every day, even as we carry on. There is an obligation we carry, to live the lives that they can not. But on this day in particular, that pain of loss is more urgent, more demanding, more accusatory. Large or small, everything you do matters, and the flip side of that obligation is to make the sacrifices of the past and present, both yours and theirs, worth the price.

So, what does Memorial Day mean to you?

Sins of the Past

Time is a funny thing. So real to us that it dictates the tempo of our lives, yet so ethereal that it can slip away between your fingers like grains of sand at the beach. Both it and we have no meaning, no context for us before we are born, it has none after we are gone, and we can never get enough of it while we are.

I found out today that someone from my past, someone that, at the time and in my own, poor way I cared about, died. I don't know what killed her, or anything else except that at the time it happened I was so wrapped up in myself that I didn't even notice her passing.

I don't know, maybe that's a good thing given my track record, maybe it's not. I've had friend die in the cold, bitter mountains and arid deserts of far-off lands, but there's a distance to that, both physical and emotional, that buffers the blow. But this one . . . this one strikes somewhat closer to home, literally and figuratively. There's that one small part of my soul that examines what I am, and doesn't like what it finds.

The sins of our past, our sins of commission and omission, always come back to haunt us, ghosts as ethereal and as real as the time we grapple with. We can seek refuge from them in our friends, in the arms of our lovers, in whomever we please, but that is only an illusion. We can't redeem ourselves from ourselves.

She died, and I had no idea she died. Just another ghost to stand in silent accusation, to show no mercy in my fevered dreams. The man who said that it was better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all was a dreamer, and a fool. Is it really? For if one never loves, than one never has to feel the exquisite pain of loss, that sharp knife that cuts so cruelly. Yet if one never loves, then one can never really call themselves human, and loss is a part of the bargain. You pays your money, and you takes your chances.

Would it have been better to have never known, to have gone on deluding myself that she was living a happy life somewhere? I truly can't answer that. All I know is that it feels like another part of my life has been chipped away, that I should have paid more attention before it was lost beyond recall.

Ultimately, we can't hide from the sins of our past. No matter how many times we stand before those ghosts and plea mea culpa, there is no judgment that will satisfy them and wash away the guilt. The evil we do under the Sun comes back to inhabit our nights, and all that we do is all that we will ever do.