Dead Ex

Life’s finger has been on the rewind button as of late.  I can press pause, but if I press again the scenery just continues in reverse.  At first the views are fleeting.  Words, significant or otherwise, blurt out midst the blur.  But as the days progress the past develops nuance, and I start recalling myself in that room---or on that roadside, standing so close to him that our foreheads almost touch.  It’s my silent plea for comfort, and he growls: “Don’t you know where we’re at?!”

No, not exactly.  Twenty-two years later I still don’t know where we’re at.  I only know you’re dead now, because that’s the only way you could slip into my car at sixty miles an hour.  It’s the only way you could tell me you’re sorry because pride, shame and physical distance came between us.  Some of the best times of your life, you said.  I’ll have to accept that as a gift, because I’ve come to believe the only way I can grow is to believe in what others can’t see.

It took me a month to look up your name, because knowing more is sometimes less.  You can only go so far on this planet, and then there are fees to pay or issues of privacy that block the way.  There you are---on some obscure interface called My Life.  But I’ll never know about Your Life after we parted, because a pop up insisted I become a member first.  Still, for a brief moment, I saw your face.  You looked back at me, older yet still the same---the same confidant gaze, like a movie star.  Your hair was now white---and not the expensive white we processed into your drab, graying brown.  You looked pink and healthy---and very much your Scottish ancestry. The only difference was your brows, which had gone brushy, like my husband’s.  Oh, the irony. 

And yes, you are dead.  Here’s the little en memoriam type remembrance printed in the San Francisco Chronicle---the paper you used to walk to the corner store to buy on Sunday morning, along with another pack of Marlboros.   The date surprises me.  You died years ago---well, two years ago, last October.  Your dropping in on me wasn’t exactly a courtesy call while on your way out like some people experience.  It takes me awhile to figure a startling correlation: you died within a few weeks of my friend’s suicide.

I start reading---and grow slightly incredulous, because this is not the man I lived with:

We mourn the loss of our dear friend, Rob Radabaugh. Rob was known and loved by colleagues and friends over several decades at UCSF, Genentech, Neurex, Elan, Medarex, and Avigen. Those of us who loved him were the recipients of his tremendous kindness and unstinting loyalty that extended over the years to many of us. Rob was warm and funny. He was smart and charming. He could be goofy and laugh at himself too. He was quick to spot pretense or hypocrisy, and was adept at lampooning it. He lived out the words of that old verse, "Life is mostly froth and bubble, but two things stand like stone: kindness in another's trouble; courage in your own." Rest in peace, dear friend.

I wonder who wrote this.  A woman friend, I suspect---not a man you laid with.  She could see all this in you, and send you home when it faltered.  Because as I read it again, I can recall you being warm and funny---and certainly charming.  You charmed my whole family.  And then you turned it off when things stopped going your way.  That horrible Thanksgiving when I said I couldn’t go on, you wouldn’t even speak to my mother as you got behind the wheel to take us away.  I cried for a hundred miles, and you showed no kindness for another’s trouble.  You had already seen in me the PTSD you saw back in ‘Nam, but you never spoke of it.  You never said: ‘Dan, let’s get you some help.’  We were both so afraid of our pasts.

I rest on that written phrase courage in your own trouble.  Did you stop drinking?  Did you face the memory of your abusive, alcoholic father head on?  Did you find a way from rage to a state of grace over that doctor that botched the operation that killed your mother?  Your career tangent suggests you did, and yet that’s a lot of companies in less than twenty years.  It’s a leap between wanting to be a drama professor to being a patent holding medical research librarian, but I am not surprised you took a scion from your past to grow a new future.  I hope it was a clean start, and that your friend was writing from truth as well as from her grief.

I’m thinking of your sister now, even though I can’t recall her name.  We met only once, you know.  I was nervous and she was kind.  I wonder if I found her that she’d speak to me---that I could learn how you died, and thus learn why my body aches so.

And I wonder if she found among your possessions that Polaroid of the time your cat decided to park on my naked lap.  I hope so.  I hope of all the things I left you and the money you took, it was the one thing you kept.

Author's note:

This was written a while ago, and Dead Ex's name was changed to protect the innocent.

In the interiem there has been several adventures with Dead Ex that I'll be exploring in the future.