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I don’t know if I believe in ghosts. I do believe in memories that haunt like ghosts, that feel so strong and tangible that they manifest as ghosts, but are still no more than memory and mourning and love. How else to describe the haunting that happens every year around this time, when the world tilts toward outward happiness and on the surface all is sunny disposition? It was in May that a childhood friend died of a self-inflicted gunshot, and he comes to mind, without fail, each and every spring season that bleeds so beautifully into summer.

WOULD YOU KNOW MY NAME
IF I SAW YOU IN HEAVEN?
WOULD IT BE THE SAME
IF I SAW YOU IN HEAVEN?

I MUST BE STRONG
AND CARRY ON
‘CAUSE I KNOW I DON’T BELONG
HERE IN HEAVEN

It’s like they say in ‘Stand By Me’, and I’m loosely paraphrasing: you never really have the friendships you have when you’re a kid. If you’re lucky and the world helps conspire in your favor, you may hang onto a friend like that. Suzie is one such friend; our families were so intertwined there was no way out from each other’s orbit. My friends Ann and Missy are also from a time long before we were adults. We grew up together. And from the stale hallways of McNulty school, Jeff was a friend I had in grade school and then drifted further and further away until we barely knew one another in high school. By the time he decided to turn a gun on himself and end the pain, he already felt like a lost friend.

WOULD YOU HOLD MY HAND
IF I SAW YOU IN HEAVEN?
WOULD YOU HELP ME STAND
IF I SAW YOU IN HEAVEN?
I’LL FIND MY WAY
THROUGH NIGHT AND DAY
‘CAUSE I KNOW I JUST CAN’T STAY
HERE IN HEAVEN

In addition to this ballad I previously posted, there was another song that personified that dark almost-summer of 1992 – ‘Tears in Heaven’ by Eric Clapton. Written for his young son, who had fallen to his death from a skyscraper, it personified loss like no other song before or since. It played inescapably on the radio, and every time it came on, which was often, I turned the station or shut it off. Sometimes I would simply walk out of the room. Unable to process what happened, and unable to process that kind of grief, I shut down. It was survival. It was protection. It was what I had to do to get through another day. Another night. And I had to do it alone.

TIME CAN BRING YOU DOWN
TIME CAN BEND YOUR KNEES
TIME CAN BREAK YOUR HEART
HAVE YOU BEGGING PLEASE, BEGGING PLEASE

BEYOND THE DOOR
THERE’S PEACE I’M SURE
AND I KNOW THERE’LL BE NO MORE
TEARS IN HEAVEN

The school year ended, and I spent most of the time in and around the house. In so many ways, it felt like my childhood had finally, and definitively, ended – and I mourned that as much as I mourned Jeff’s death. In a sense, they were one and the same. I didn’t get to have one without the other, so I suppose I’ll never know for sure. That summer, they went hand in hand. 

This song kept surfacing, no matter how much I tried to escape it. The world doesn’t always let you get away with running from your sorrow. That doesn’t mean I listened. For all these years, I refused to listen. It brought me right back to that time, and there was enough madness and sadness in the world that I didn’t feel it was necessary to resurrect what had happened so long ago. Once again, I was wrong, so when the song came on a few days ago, I paused and listened to it. I went back and played it again. I dove into that ocean of sorrow, all the way down to where I had buried so many feelings and conflicted thoughts. I dove into my anger and rage, into the unfathomable waste and regret of what he had done, into the depths of seeing what it had done to his parents, to his family, to his friends.

WOULD YOU KNOW MY NAME
IF I SAW YOU IN HEAVEN?
WOULD YOU BE THE SAME
IF I SAW YOU IN HEAVEN?

I MUST BE STRONG
AND CARRY ON
‘CAUSE I KNOW I DON’T BELONG
HERE IN HEAVEN

There was so much sadness still there, so much raw hurt, such tragedy. And still, there was the same incomprehensible lack of understanding in how it came to happen, what steps and decisions and thoughts led him into that dark corner. How frightened he must have felt. How hopeless it must have seemed. How lonely it must have been. How could this star athlete, the most popular guy from McNulty Elementary School, have found himself in such a tragic space? And how could all the recent memories of my own choices and ghosts ~ the pills and plastic bags and rubber bands, the plastic hoses leading from the exhaust pipes of cars, the failures and attempts and failures again ~ make any other sense than in the gnawing thought that it should have been me, it should have been me, it should have been me. 

It took years for that to go away, and sometimes it does still haunt my heart. Maybe it should have been me. Maybe that’s how it should have played out. Maybe that originally made the most sense in the universe. Who had the most promise? Who would do the best things for the betterment of the world? It’s hard to think that I have come ahead in that tricky game of what-if. But the one thing I have learned is that we each had a choice, and we each made those choices in the best manner we knew. For whatever fluke or change of destiny, I’m still here, and even if Jeff chose not to be, I can choose to remember him, to try to make it mean something. In that small way, he’s still here too.