(2)

I was walking around town the other day when I spotted a fellow who used to work at the factory with me coming down the street.  As we drew closer he nodded and I nodded and then we both smiled; I was just preparing myself to say hello and exchange the usual banal pleasantries with him when he suddenly looked me straight in the eye and said:  "Nobody gets out of here alive.  You do know that, don't you?"  And without another word he walked on.  "Well, that's true enough," I thought, and rather enjoyed his originality in greeting me this way so unexpectedly.

The next day I was again walking around downtown when I ran into the mother of an old schoolfriend of mine.  Her son and I had been quite close at one time; then he'd gone off to the city to try for a career as an actor, and as the years had passed we'd gradually fallen out of touch.  I'd often wondered what had happened to him though, and took this opportunity to ask his mother how he was getting along.  To my surprise she abruptly turned away from me, and when at last she turned back again her face had taken on a haggard aspect.  Her son, she muttered stiffly, had died over a year ago – hadn't I heard?  I hastened to assure her that I most certainly had not; no one had said a word to me about it, nor had I seen any notice of his passing in the local paper.  Her face softened a little then; sighing heavily, she said that she supposed it wasn't such a surprise:  her son had been living away from home for quite a long time, and the funeral was a private affair, with only the immediate family in attendance.  "But – what happened?" I couldn't help but blurt out, for my friend was, of course, only my age, still a young man.  She hesitated a moment, then, in a low voice, said:  "He committed suicide."  But this only made the news seem even more incredible to me.  "But why?" I cried, and then added, rather stupidly, "Last I heard he was doing okay."  Of course, I hadn't heard from him in years, and didn't really know how he'd been doing at all – but still . . .

His mother didn't tell me any of the details of what had led him to take his own life.  Perhaps she simply didn't want to say; then again, perhaps she herself did not know the reason:  he may not have confided in her.  All she could give me was a vague sense of things having gone wrong, of hopes being dashed, dreams failing to come true – that sort of thing.  I continued to express my sense of shock and sorrow, even of incredulity:  his death was for me no major loss, but it was an unexpected one.  For his mother, of course, it was a devastation.  Tragedy had haunted that family for years.  The father had died slowly of a degenerative disease; one son had had a mental breakdown from which he'd never fully recovered; now the other son was lost forever.

I told his mother of my habit of walking in the cemetery and asked if she could give me directions to his gravesite so that I might go there sometime and pay my respects.  This seemed to touch her, and she told me just where I might find him.  And then she made a request of me:  she wondered whether I might not, from time to time over the course of the summer, stop at his grave and give some little attention to the flowers she'd planted there.  And this of course I said I would gladly do.

I went this morning for the first time to visit my friend's grave.  Though it's not in a part of the cemetery I frequent often, I've probably passed within a short distance of it many times since he was buried there.  But the gravestone itself is small and plain, and of course I'd never thought to be on the lookout for anyone I knew.  Yet there it was, right where his mother had said it would be.  I stood a long time before it, pondering the mystery of death, not as an abstract thing this time but as an actual presence, with a shape and form I knew.  I couldn't quite fathom it, the fact that the body of someone I had once known so well lay so close to me, yet was locked away underground, forever.  This was a dismal enough prospect to contemplate, yet I must admit that I found myself filled with a curious sense of excitement too.  For whatever it is that happens to us after we die was no longer a mystery to him, who had already crossed that great divide.  Whatever happens to us, he now knew.  He had already experienced it; was, I assumed, experiencing it still.  And – how strange it was! – I felt oddly jealous at the thought.  But also a little comforted:  for now someone I know is there.  That made me feel a bit safer somehow.

Then I remembered how he had died – the fact that he'd willfully taken his own life.  I've heard some say that suicide is the most selfish of acts, that it's an act of great anger and defiance – or of cowardice; I've also heard it said that it stands as the greatest act of self-assertion, of choice, of freedom even, that a person can make.  But I myself do not think it is any of these things.  I have always felt that suicide has something of the inevitable about it, as surely as any fatal disease.  It must be, I think, rather like getting lost in a kind of desert.  You wake up one day to find that you have somehow wandered out into a sandy terrain, and, once there, how easy it must be to lose your bearings.  You search about for a refuge and find none; try to turn yourself round and go back the way you came – but all traces of your footsteps are gone.  There's nothing to do but travel on.  As day wears into dreary day, each one more oppressive than the day before, you find all signs of life dwindling away around you.  You grow tired, weak, and thirsty; but after awhile you seem to lose all memory of what it was you thirsted for.  Forgetfulness, you soon realize, is the only relief you're ever going to find.  Vultures begin to circle overhead, spiraling round and round in the hot sky; finally one day you find that you cannot take another step:  you fall, you drop.  The spiraling vultures swoop down upon you.  It may be that an oasis lies just over the horizon – who can say?  It's all just a matter of chance anyway.  But for you the desert has become eternal.  You fall, you drop; the spiraling vultures swoop down upon you.  This, I thought, must have been how it was for my friend.

The flowers planted on his grave were of those common varieties such as are planted on many of the graves at the cemetery.  A clump of red geraniums stood in the center, a few marigolds and petunias to either side.  I pinched off some of the blossoms that had withered, pulled out a few blades of encroaching grass.  Then, searching a nearby trash barrel, I found an old plastic pot and a small plastic bag.  Lining the pot with the bag so as to block up the drainage holes, I took it to one of the water spigots that are to be found here and there along the winding cemetery roads, filled it, and watered the flowers.  I had to do this four or five times, for there was nothing shading the gravesite and the soil around the flowers looked quite dry.  But at last I was satisfied.  I had done all that I could.  Wiping beads of sweat from my forehead I gazed up at the shiny blue sky, holding my hand up against the hard glare of the sun to shade my eyes; for the day, I found, was turning hot . . .

SOMETIMES SOMETHING WILL OPEN