Sorrow

One cruelty of death, among many, is that it is inevitable and yet always surprising. Especially when it takes someone too violently and too soon. Even when it's someone you never expected to see again, it's a bitter and miserable thing.

We were never close, and had been in touch only a little since I left the playpen of evil for happier work. It would be generous to describe our lives as touching on the periphery. I only know a little bit what his friends, bandmates, and family have lost -- I don't know at all what they are feeling. How they figure out how to go on with lives that changed forever in an instant.

Maybe that's why I feel so selfish and so terribly sad all at once. Because what have I lost? The pleasant illusion that another's life is scooting along happily out of sight and mind, maybe. Or memories of a happy, decent, dorky kid that are now occluded by imagined collisions of steel and skin and pavement, pain and fear and ultimately -- erasure. (In the lunch room, he read the Sun Times and I read the Tribune. That's how I found out, this Sunday morning: one paragraph in the Metro section.)

Goodbye, Chris. I wish you could know how sorry I am. You had so much less of life than you deserved.

Update: Chris's friends and family have set up a nice page here, with plenty of photos and remembrances. If you can measure a man by his friends, I'm pretty sure Chris was 11 or 12 feet tall.

Filed under: life