DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

The email came a few days ago — a co-worker from a job I scarcely remember died last month in Mexico on vacation. Heart attack. He was 46.

I found a picture, and remembered him. His name was Gordon. He and I shared a total of three conversations in the year I worked at that company, fully ten years ago. He was a nice guy, well-liked as I recall. I was young and in a hurry and didn’t make much time for socializing with co-workers, so I never got to know him. He was a decade older than me — then, it felt like a lot.

The email invited me to a memorial service. I knew immediately that I would go, even though out loud I expressed ambivalence — a reflex, I guess, a habitual re-running of the old program. I knew I’d go, but I couldn’t say why. I might see a few familiar faces. But even those familiar faces wouldn’t be too familiar; I had not kept in close contact with anyone. It seemed likely I’d join a crowd of strangers to honor the life of a man I knew nothing about.

But maybe I’d have an opportunity to connect with some of those people, to take the time to do what I was too busy to do ten years back.

I don’t know many people who have died… a high-school classmate, a few of my parents’ friends, my grandparents. That’s it. Nobody close. I don’t know what I’ll feel about death, when it finally takes someone I care about. Maybe that’s why I wanted to go to the memorial, to feel loss, even secondhand.

I found Gordon’s obituary online. It contained a sentence that hit me like a fist to the ribs: “He wanted to write a book someday.” He wanted to write a book, but instead he had a heart attack. At the service, I picked up a copy of the book outline Gordon had been writing. His friends had typed up and printed his notes as a tribute. This is as close as his book will ever get to being published.

Gordon had rheumatoid arthritis. His book was to be an autobiography of sorts, the story of his life as seen through the lens of a disease he’d survived for 35 years. The copy reads like poetry, and is all the more tragic for it. Fragments of memories, fragments of sentences, non-sequiturs. His notes were private meanderings, never intended to be read by others, but now they are all that is left. I have glimpsed into a dead man’s mind, and I feel the loss. This is what might have been.

In a section called “The Natural Years,” he wrote, “Everyone’s got a cure. Vegetarianism and head squeezing.” Under “Fusions and Fun,” he wrote, “The neck, numbness, and spontaneous fusion. None of the classic threatening signs. Another enigma.” Another section is unwritten but for its ominous title, presumably enough of a reminder that additional words were unnecessary: “The Colon Episode.”

They hint at a life I never knew, at a person I miss not because he was a friend but because he was just too young to die.