(3)

One day not long ago I was walking around town when I spotted a fellow I used to work with at the factory coming towards me down the street.  As we drew closer he nodded and I nodded and then we both smiled; I was just preparing to say hello and exchange the usual banal pleasantries with him when suddenly he stopped, 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, startled by his words but rather enjoying his originality in greeting me this way.

The following day I was again walking around downtown when I ran into the mother of an old schoolfriend of mine.  Her son and I had once been quite close, though by this point we'd been out of touch for some time.  After graduating from high school, he'd gone off to the city to try for a career as an actor, and though we'd corresponded regularly at first, that correspondence had eventually dwindled, then ceased altogether.  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 in the afternoon sunlight.  Her son, she told me stiffly, had died over a year ago – hadn't I heard?  I hastened to assure her that I most certainly had not; no one I knew 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 blurting 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."  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 share with 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:  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 at this time 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; the eldest son had had a mental breakdown from which he'd never fully recovered; and 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.  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.  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 must have passed within a short distance of it many times since he'd been 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, endowed with a shape and a form with which I was familiar.  Still, 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.  Also a little comforted too:  for now someone I knew was there.  This 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, an act of great anger and defiance – or, as some believe, 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.  I myself do not think it is any of these things.  I've always felt that suicide has something of the inevitable about it, that the course it follows must seem as sure and unrelenting to those caught in its grip as that of any terminal 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 have disappeared.  There's nothing to do but travel on.  As day wears into dreary day, each hour more oppressive than the one that came 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 . . .

The flowers planted on my friend's 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 stunted marigolds and faded-looking 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, routed out 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 make four or five such trips, 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.  Gazing up at the shimmering blue sky, shielding my eyes against the hard glare of the sun, I wiped away the beads of sweat that were forming on my forehead and beginning to dribble down my face.  The day was turning hot . . .

SOMETIMES SOMETHING WILL OPEN