What an odd thing it was. I logged into Facebook to try to post a link to my language survey and just happened to look down and notice that something was different about a friend’s avatar. The picture had changed; I looked at it long enough for text to catch my eye. The comments were suddenly in the third person and past tense rather than first person and present tense. “I will always remember G as…” And “I remember how we first met…”
I went back to read from the beginning, trying to get a handle on how he ended up dead by his own hand.
He had recently been diagnosed with Multiple Myeloma and given at most a decade. Those years would be spent in and out of remission via rounds of chemo and other not so fun stuff. His spine had already been damaged and he was on very heavy-duty pain meds. He would have been pondering how he was going to cope financially since his regular manner of livelihood had been declared off limits by the doctors–no lifting over ten lbs for the rest of your days. He was also being told to find a new apartment on a ground floor. How would he afford that? Or manage the search? Or the logistics of the move itself? As someone who shares a sharp aversion to asking for help, I can only imagine how stressful these prospects must have been for him, a shy and highly self-sufficient person.
As for income, there are government programs, but how must that have felt…to be facing having to fill out applications while undergoing treatment for cancer? All this was topped off by another diagnosis of diabetes and the accompanying worries over how to find the money to buy the insulin and all that. Again, there are programs that help pay for meds if you qualify, but that entails jumping through a lot of bureaucratic hoops. It’s neither a quick or easy process.
Then there was the post about the upcoming visit from his estranged father. Was his father estranged from him because he was Gay? That I don’t know. I just know he asked friends not to come by for visits to the hospital the day his father was coming from up north. He hinted at hope for patching up this relationship. The next post indicates that there was no mending of the relationship, even when the father was told the diagnosis and that this cancer is incurable.
I might have made the same choice, faced with all of that.
I spent the morning thinking about him, going back over in my mind the few things we had ever done together. We once took in a play and dinner. He taught me how to eat Injera as we discussed the Gay version of Othello we’d just seen.
Many months later a mutual friend told me that his impression of our evening together was that I had had to flee from him right after the meal, so overwhelming had his negativity been. I couldn’t exactly contradict my friend. I couldn’t say, “Oh, no, he thinks that? I must set the record straight.” It was mostly true. Well, he could be dark, cynical. Also I had been intimidated by his intellect. I’d felt he was wrapping himself in a protective cloak of jargon, talking in a way intended to keep me emotionally at bay.
I saw him as a lonely man, but was not willing after that evening to reach out again in friendship. Neither of us had cars, so we crossed paths around town, especially coming and going from the indie cinema, both of us film buffs. He sat alone; I sat alone. Seeing movies by himself was, as he put it recently on his Facebook page, one of his “guilty pleasures.” I understood that and gave him his space. He understood that about me and gave me mine. Occasionally we exchanged emails about events around town we thought the other would want to know about.
I knew he struggled with bouts of depression. I knew he lamented his difficulty finding a partner. It’s hard enough for highly intelligent geeky straight people to hook up.
When he went away to grad school, he asked me and my ex to take his house plants. Our apartment was brimming with healthy plants, so I guess he knew his babies would be well cared for with us. One of them was this amazing trailing plant–I don’t even know the name of it–that will go from cutting to filling a window in no time. When my ex and I split, my ex begged me not to take the house plants. Not only did the beautiful jungle of Norfolk Island Pine, spider plants heavy with babies and philodendrons make the apartment cheery, but my ex wanted them because of how women reacted to them. I let him keep them all, except for a cutting of G’s trailing plant.
When I moved from Waterloo, I again gave away all my house plants. Linda took my giant African Violet, a Freecycle member came for the pots of red and pink geraniums. But I had to keep a cutting from that beautiful trailing plant of G’s. It rode with me in the cab of the U-Haul truck in a pop can and has since grown into a beautiful waterfall of a plant that lives on a little table by the window in Sylvain’s den.
It’s nice to have this living reminder of G and our small friendship, for whatever it was worth.
