Grace

When I first met you, you were so much larger than life that the term rockstar would have been an insult. You were my hero and guru. Somewhere along the line, our roles got reversed and I was never sure of how to approach the subject.

Twenty-four years we knew one another. In that time you watched me grow into the person I am now. I saw you be diminished slowly, like sandstone whittled away by desert winds. Your death, whilst it elicited an emotional reaction from me, was, in the end, not shocking. Sadly, I saw it coming.

After I learned of your death and its cause, one question still remained; when did you lose your grace? I am not one to leave such a mystery unsolved. I began to dissect. It is my nature to do so. Were I to give it a date in clumsy timekeeping of Man it would be June twenty-first, two-thousand seven. That was the day you told me you were getting divorced.

She was your high school sweetheart. The one who got away. When you told me you found her again, that you were going to marry her, your smile threatened to swallow the rest of your head. When the end came to your love story, it broke you.

That is when you gave up...

First you lost the home your father left you. Once the divorce was done you were sentenced to a one-bedroom apartment with barely a couple coins to rub together. Somewhere in there, you decided to stop taking your insulin. To say your health suffered because of it is as blindingly obvious as the direction of the rising sun. Your body began to betray you, soon making it that you could not earn a livelihood.

There were the amputations. First, a finger. Then, a toe. Your foot. A leg. They were going to take the other leg when you had your septic stumble and all fall down. It was as if that deity you so zealously believed in, to the point of being born again-because the first time didn't work out so great?-was taking you a piece at a time.

I watched you move from one toxic situation to another. When you moved down to Arizona, I though you might get things turned around, but you fell into your pattern pretty quickly. Almost like habit. You once told me you saw yourself as a knight, owing to your time in law enforcement and security work. Did you really think you were going to save any of those cats you fell in with?

"The fact you have fallen is interesting. The time you remain down is important."

You said that to me once. I was going through my divorce, sitting in coffeehouses scribbling bad poetry to a backbeat of Nine Inch Nails. I was in pain, certainly, but I got up. That was when I decided nothing would break me. That is when I decided not to bare my jugular to anyone.

No matter how many times I said that to you, you never got up. You never even tried. I am not a saint or a superhero, but you showed you cannot save someone who had no desire to be saved. You lost your grace.

The last time I spoke to you was shortly after the leg amputation. Whilst you glibly said you were glad you did not have access to a firearm, you sounded relatively cheerful. That was the thing; no matter the drama or tale of woe, you knew there was no one to blame for it than yourself. You may have been beyond grace, but you knew how you got there.

You left rehab in anger, without medications of any kind. Without crutches. You stopped talking to everyone; your  sister, your favorite cousin, even me, supposedly one of your best friends. The mental image of you crawling on your hands and knees in a manure lagoon is seared into my mind's eye. I would rather remember that picture of you when you got your Harley, your smile threatening to swallow the rest of your head, or any other moment in the twenty-four years we knew one another, but that's what I keep seeing.

Your sister told me, like an animal, you chose to die alone. That you gave up. I know that. We just have different idea of when you gave up.

And, oh, how she raged. After the two of you buried your father, that was supposed to be it. She didn't want to be the last one. Part way through, she stopped herself and apologized to me for unloading.

"No, you need to do this. You may need do it a few more times before you truly work through this," I said, not out of empathy, but honesty.

Once, when relating a bit of trauma, you said your life should serve as a cautionary tale to others. You may have gotten your wish. There was this one last lesson for you to teach me; never lose your grace. Never, ever, give up. Once you do, although it might take years, it's lights out, and it will be lonely, and cold, and disgraceful. You must keep raging.

Keep raging...



You loved to quote this jam when we would speak;

"No one told you when to run
you missed the starting gun..."