Mere children, trained killers, boys mustering out in Mid-Advent; hardened and invincible. His voice, amid the murmuring rhubarb of 400-to-a-barrack at Ft. Sill, Oklahoma, a clarion call. I swam through the babble introducing myself as a citizen from his home town; clear to me given his lack of an accent. We became friends in that moment until he took his life leaving no note. I’ve suffered his loss ever since. Now reconciled the pain remains.
I did not remember him until recalling my similar intentions. The topic arose from my “Spinning Wheel of Fortune;“ collecting/collected quotes; a prayer wheel in reverse: morning ‘meditation.’
Love, as verb, meant we entered a sacred space of friendship. His choice to end life is, on this plain, the last right he, or any of us, can exercise. I simply wish I’d had to opportunity to let Jim know I’d allow him to die in my arms accepting his choice.
I stood on a bridge railing, over the Inter Coastal Waterway, one Christmas Eve night. I was stayed by three distinct personalities: Jesus, J. S. Bach and Fritz Eichenberg. There were absent others recalled as witnesses, voiceless then, but having touched me equally nonetheless. Stanley Elkin is one. I was able to express my gratitude face-to-face later on.
I confess my dying son’s concerns were outside the equation. It was only later, when at the point of farther despair, separated from my family, I called ‘home.‘ He answered and asked, “Will I ever see you again?” My selfishness was crushed, crumpled and spindled as if I’d been a fly swatted. There began my return to the life I had attempted to abandon and the journey to Now.
At the last day he embraced me, voiced his love, then laid down to drown in his own blood, dying from Leukemia. I had intuited the moment at his diagnosis six years earlier and had fled in terror of it. My cowardliness: leaving work late on the day of his death intuited. He waited.
120403 07:13
Time has reconfigured the night I returned to the Paradox and lay listening to fish nibbling her hull. Jim & Patti slept oblivious my sojourn with infinity. Ours was a trio of fetid revenge, one against the other; each male longing for the other never to return. Looking back I sense we individually and collectively sought rebirth in the southward warmer climate, fleeing from encroaching winter and consequence the previous dalliance: two women one man . . . no, more nearly a boy with two mothers. Now focused through the lens of forty years distance.
Only now remembered, the previous ‘death’ by heroin laced marijuana. Were they there, we three? My host aboard Ishmael a purported friend via familiarity with my abandoned. Did I, or she, do the leave taking, fleeing one another? For their amusement I crawled in circle beneath a gigantic paw foot oak table crying against the prospect of being crucified again and again. . . . I’ve wrestled with the imagery of that ideation until I became more fully aware the execution of criminals. A vastly more torturous, long suffering, death than that depicted in the Bible for Jesus.
And what if it is an illusion that death ends suffering? Resurrection and reincarnation being roughly equivalent; my sense being that as a Christian we are each ‘called’ to be the, or at the very least, part of the resurrection. To fully know and inhabit one’s life is to enter into the suffering and know the numinous as present in all life. In some sense to become co-creators with the nascent kindness and compassion indwelling in all existence without exception or boundary finding and giving peace/love to others.
Happily I survived, an implement forged between the indifferent anvil, my father, and the hammer blows struck by the smith, my mother. To be the wealth I am now, to myself, would to be willing to do it again thrice fold. I exaggerate since even then in infancy/childhood I survived through instinct, as I did in the five times drowning, I let go seeing the nodal point when rage become insanity. My parents long ago forgiven as myself for remaining as ever loving them.
Would that I were nearly a gnats worth one might infer from the course I’m lead. We’re no different you & i, same, same, all the same, one-and-all of us alive. Happily I am a fool regarding the ‘how’ but wisdom courts me in the “why.” Truth is sacred to me. And while I’ve read the wisdom books in toto or partially, I remain enamored of the words spoken by those who like the river stones I adore are worn by time and not the press of weight like carbon made diamonds.
Our lives are music, rending or sweet, sounding now in the silence following our song. I sense the relationship we have with Creation is: we are Aeolian Harps knowing not who strums our hearts . . . until then reflected the dark mirror surprised.
Before closing I was led to the following . . . I am nowhere near all that clever to find these alone . . . http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/f/friedrichn101616.html
“He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.”
“To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.”
“That which does not kill us makes us stronger.”
“When you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.”
--Friedrich Nietzsche
“There is no refuge from confession but suicide; and suicide is confession.”
--Daniel Webster
“ . . It is possible that a man may refuse to love anything on earth; he will prove this refusal and he will carry it out by suicide. If he lives, the reason is that, whatever he may say, there still remains in him some attachment to existence; his life will be commensurate with this attachment; it will justify itself to the extent that it genuinely justifies the world. .”
--Simone de Beauvoir
“Man does not simply exist, but always decides what his existence will be, what he will become in the next moment.”
--Viktor Frankl
. . . 120404 01:27 I awoke aware that I was remiss in this: I’d not mentioned the person who saved me from suicide. And I think her ‘last’ word on the subject bears remembering. “It is amazing what unconditional love can do/heal.”
