An unnaturally sober entry
You don't write a eulogy for someone you never knew, but this isn't a eulogy.
He died three months ago, long before I'd even applied for the web development job, before it was even conceptualized. But I found out about him only today, at work. While transferring his career advice interview from words to web, I took it upon myself to scout out a photograph to go alongside his case study feature, only to discover that he'd died.
I dislike the way people sidle around death, and the spineless tonguing of the issue with phrases like
he passed away
he didn't make it
he expired
he went in his sleep
he's with God
he's at peace now
I especially dislike "expired". Milk expires. People die.
Returning from tangent: I mean to say that I hope never to experience that foggy, filmy welling up of tears while at work again. But in the wake of reading that eulogy, in that minute sliver of time between present passing to past, I was inundated by the weight of memory three months too late.
The worst, I think, was that juxtaposition of his own words against someone else's words of his death. His careers interview was so genial, so unwittingly happy; that eulogy was somber as old rust. And the interval between the two: three months for others to acclimatize; three minutes for me. Like deep sea diving. Apparently, you can ascend too quickly and suffer nitrogen narcosis, but you can never descend too quickly - unless you're dragged down. I was dragged down, in three minutes. No wonder I'm uneasy, and inundated.
Not to mention how he died. Dare I bring up the maudlin cliches re. fragility/impermanence of life?
No, because - surprisingly enough - it didn't do that to me. See, I'm constantly struck by how slender the interval we can call "present" is, passing as it does into "past" in less than a blink of an eye, or the conjugation of a tense. What bothers me most, I suppose - and this is the reason why this entry isn't a eulogy - is not that he died young, and he died for nothing but being victim to a senseless crime, and life is fragile and transient, etc. ad nauseum. It's simply this: he died, and no matter how I conjugate the tenses,
I don't know him
I didn't know him
I'll never know him.
Funny then, how something that would normally be a reminder of impermanence of life can, at such times and in such minds, speak to me only of incorrigible permanence.
For this, and various reasons, I've avoided using his name.
Oh, whatever. If I could feel this kind of unease for every single person who lived and died without my knowledge, I think my head would break. Thank goodness humans are predisposed to be oblivious.