A Wedding and a Funeral

I'm exhausted from the weekend. It's been a rollercoaster of events over the last 48 hours attending Tim's memorial services followed by a whole day wedding on Saturday.

It's already Sunday evening and I really on woke up 2 hours ago. The wedding wasn't first on my mind, even though my body ached from standing all day. I woke up missing Tim and wondering what would have, could have been different. It just isn't right, burying a friend at the age of 27. He would have turned 28 in about 8 days.

Part of the eulogy talked about how people didn't know how to deal with his bipolar disorder, how despite the disorder, Tim was determined to lead a full and complete life. And in many ways I know he did, but I also wish I'd expressed my own fears and worry about his disorder. I'm guilty of always wearing the professional therapist hat whenever Tim and I discussed it. I felt like I was at work talking with my clients. All that professional information but really no real support as a friend at all. I was afraid of fighting with him, of becoming the nag, or the one to hold him back. All this while I was afraid for him, of him and never told him about it. And yet I want to claim that we were intimate friends. What a joke.

I walk to work ocassionally from the corner of Divis and Fulton.  That's my route whenever I stay over at e's place.  I still remember that morning clear as a whistle.  Got coffee from Cafe Abir, sat down cos it was still way too early to go to work and was debating whether or not to get a copy of the Times.  Checked the cell phone for messages and there was one.  I don't think I was more shocked than I was confused about the information cos it said that Tim had commited suicide, which I knew could never be true.  But it also said he had jumped of a building, which I knew was entirely possible.  In his manic state, he always had a thing for heights.  I called Tim's cell phone, which of course was not on; called my good friend K, called T, who had left the voicemail, called my boss Tom.  Eventually I made my way up on Fulton hill to work. 

I didn't fall apart, and it was almost too hard to cry.  All it was, was just a nagging sensation and a sense of breathlessness. How could this be? And then it was this sense that I had failed him.  Did he know, when he fell?  Did it hurt?  Was he scared?  How could I not have been there to hold his hand in that moment of fear? 

How ironic that in our last phone conversation, he called to say goodbye before he left for China.  He said his goodbyes, I haven't.  And I don't want to.  At the memorial service on Friday, I was supposed to say goodbye I guess, but I didn't.  That nagging sense of loss and guilt and emptiness was there, and I want to keep it there.  I'm not ready to say goodbye. 

Satre defined the knowledge of existence as knowing the other.  You know you exist because you can sense the other watching you.  Would it be cheesy if I said I felt Tim's presence?  And that if I said goodbye, and let go of all those feelings of sadness, guilt, emptiness, memories, I fear that a part of my existence would be ripped out? 

Where does God fit in in all this?  I don't know.  But I read this great quote from John Muir this morning which sounds almost like Tim talking, reminding me gently that there is a greater reason for all this- for this existence, his existence and a life well lived. 

  By forces seemingly antagonistic and destructive Nature accomplishes her beneficent designs - now a flood of fire, now a flood of ice, now a flood of water; and again in the fullness of time an outburst of organic life....
This grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never all dried at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal sunset, eternal dawn and gloaming, on seas and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls. - John Muir