By Andrew R. Duckworth
I know you’re not here. I know no one is. It’s empty, it’s lonely, only the sound of traffic a few blocks away. No voices ring out here. Yours doesn’t, but yet it does, in memory, and, on occasion, when I pour through old voice messages that still preserve a disembodied voice that leaves me both comforted and startled- comforted in that I haven’t forgotten what your voice sounds like, startled in that I’m not so sure we are supposed to hear your voice now. It belonged to you and it left with you, and it is with you still across a chasm I can’t yet cross. I don’t know what I’m supposed to feel here. There was some hunger to come here, some instinctual need, as if by being here I might find you again. But I find your name and the dates. You’ve gone elsewhere, no longer bound by physical constraints. Here I am, at the spot where you lay, where you once lay, where I never imagined you would be, as no one does until they must. It beats the hell out of a hospital bed in a bland room with a small table and a fake plant and a TV where someone got the memo that Die Hard is, in fact, a Christmas film. I wasn’t with you at the end. I left to go back to my job, I left to not see those final struggles. But I didn’t want to see the bravest man I knew face the one thing no one can stop. How do I have a chance to keep going after that? I still have the option of thinking you are just off on an endless vacation, one where you’re having so much fun there’s no bother of checking in. I still remember when we would go to amusement parks, we parked the car, and you were a step ahead of all of us, practically a joyful march to the entrance like a kid about to have the time of his life. Maybe that’s where you are. I can still make myself believe such silly things, even when Masses have been said for your repose, even when I went to your funeral Mass, even when I saw you with your eyes closed, like a wax figure, thinner than I had ever seen you. Some say the world is ending soon, but deep down I know a lot of my world already ended and I’m here standing above your name, still struggling to make sense of it all. Still struggling to make sense of it three years after.
