Have You Seen That Vigilante Man?

I try to find reasons to understand. And I watch the embers rise up and away from me in a funerary practice I just won’t ever understand. The death of something dead and its baptism into a world of further refined death.

He died, finally.

And it hurt me.

It was a passage into some greater death. And in that, he joined the greater life.

This is not some Disney inspired, Phil Collins narrated take. It is true. A majority mind-bogglingly vast of all life is no longer individually alive. But it has joined in the nonindividuated morass of greater life. It’s a powerful and teeming force on this planet and probably others. A force that changes the very scape of the planet, visible from lightyears away (in our case).

And in that greater heaven, we all live forever. It’s a moving and holy passion.

By virtue of who I am and the lives I have lived, death was never far away from me. I have visited it upon others. I have seen it in the same intimate way you know the smells and moles of your chosen love. Death is a fucking bummer, primarily, but only to the living. To the passed on and perfected, it is a mountain building event.

But I only saw the death of the young. I saw the death of a generation of friends. I saw the death of other men my age and children and women, but all young and in their prime. And so there was rage. There was a growling and disgusting and forever morphing anger about the injustice/immorality/etc.

And I was wrong. If you can possibly say anything is a deserved trait of the living, it is their eventual death. They do, afterall, feed off of other dead things. They got it coming.

But he was old. I should not have felt that rage crop up. I should not have felt the same anger at everything in the whole goddamn world the way I felt over the deaths of my 20 something friends for policies none of us understood.

He was 94. He deserved to die. It was over and he was happy to go to his believed in after-life.

I don’t know how it works. I know I had a friend there for me. Many friends, but one great friend and love who listened to me and listened to all my circuitous emotional dross.

Like you are now.

And in that moment, when I was destructing into something like that old and ancient rage that makes genocide seem almost reasonable, I gave more than I planned. And it wasn’t so bad.

It wasn’t the end of me. The way I always thought it would be.

And now my life is peaceful. I balk at the peaceful ease and the lack of murderous anger I feel. There is something about me that died when I met her and another part that languished and one that held fast until it could no longer.

It is interesting to me that only a close death could show me all the parts of me that were no longer alive.

But that’s the way it always works, here in the temporal fallacy of the living.