Death. The word had been on my mind and on my lips for days, weeks. An old friend had wasted away slowly. A newer friend committed suicide. And just a few days ago, the body of Peter, the eldest son from a family I’d come to regard as “perfect” was found in a cranberry bog in Eagle River, Wisconsin, a victim of his own hand.
And now I was driving to a memorial for another friend. On the way over to this memorial, a mosquito in my truck insisted on whining in my ear about the transitory nature of existence. It bounced off my windshield a few times, then buzzed in my ear again about the futility of it all. I tried smashing it, but then thought better of it. It just wanted to live, right? Just like me. It couldn’t help the fact it was a mosquito. That’s what it was supposed to be. So, I tried to free it from my truck. But it resisted my attempts to shoo it out the window. The vacuum I created by opening both windows full throttle and driving 40 MPH just made it stubborn. It took refuge in the Place of Eternal Inaccessibility—that cranny where the dashboard meets the windshield. As my fingers swept over the dash, I discovered more death: the glassy reflection of a yellow jacket’s corpse in my windshield. I couldn’t dislodge that either. I hate having corpses in my truck, man. I was at my meeting now. The hell with the mosquito.
At the memorial, as people spoke about losing wives and mothers, about angels lifting the souls of departed dads from hospital beds, my idea of death changed. The night before I’d learned about that last suicide, I’d been feeling purposeless and empty. One of those existential moments. The next morning, when I found out Peter offed himself in the bog, I realized that today was God’s gift to me, and what I did with it was my gift back to God. So, I got busy and lived full out. I made my life about other people instead of about me. My life had purpose if I said it did. I had as many reasons as I gave myself for that day.
And the dead man over whose memory we gathered today, who’d overdosed on Tylenol, of all things? At his service, his girlfriend stood up and told us how Phil would always leave crumpled up paper towels lying around everywhere, without even using them. It drove her nuts. A couple mornings after he died, she was in the condo they shared, crying over his death. And she looked on the kitchen counter, and there was a paper towel lying there, unused. She could swear she didn’t put it there. She wiped her tears with it.
And another friend of mine, Eric, who died of lung cancer in his shitty little room at the Y? Before he died, he promised to let me know everything was alright by playing a practical joke on me. Instead, all I got was a nightmare about his ghost. Yet after his death, I found myself taking pleasure in saying some of the same prayers he loved. Praying had always been a chore for me before. But it hasn’t been since he died. It’s almost like he bequeathed to me his willingness to talk to God.
What I realized at that memorial was that death itself had meaning. It gave meaning to life. It was as if an old gray corpse of a tree stood alongside a living one and made it all the greener. All that death gave me gratitude for all the things I had, all the things I didn’t have, and for all the things I didn’t want that had been taken away.
Suicides don’t sacrifice their lives so that I can live more abundantly. And I’m pretty sure God didn’t put a bottle of Tylenol or a cigarette in anybody’s mouth just so I could see that my own, irrevocable, indistinguishable but extinguishable life meant something after all. Yet that was the effect of those deaths. That was the meaning of death. It amplified the meaning of life in me and through me.
Just then, a sun shower bejeweled the honey locusts above us, which let sunset diamonds drip onto the greenest grass ever made. Before all these people had died around me, the world looked more and more like a black-and-white rerun. Now, the sky blued a hue deeper than it had yesterday. I walked out to my truck. Ivory storm clouds scudded by low and fast.
I hopped in my truck. That mosquito bounced off the driver’s window now, hopping to get out. I rolled down the window, and in a moment, it was free.
© 2022 by Michael C. Just
Mike’s novel, The Dirt: The Journey of a Mystic Cowboy, is available in softcover or eBook formats through Amazon.
You can purchase the book through this website. Or go straight to amazon at https://www.amazon.com/s?k=the+dirt+journey+of+a+mystic+cowboy&crid=1S40Q4BXSUWJ6&sprefix=the+dirt%3A+journey+of+a+m%2Caps%2C180&ref=nb_sb_ss_i_1_23
Mike’s other titles, including The Crippy, The Mind Altar, and Canyon Calls, are available through this website or through Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B002
Four of his short stories have recently been published online:
Lies, Ltd. has been published by The Mystery Tribune @ Lies, Ltd.: Literary Short Fiction by Michael C. Just (mysterytribune.com)
The Obligate Carnivore has been published by the Scarlet Leaf Review @ Category: MICHAEL JUST – SCARLET LEAF REVIEW
I See You, Too has been published by the 96th of October @ I See You, Too – 96th of October
Offload, a short story about a man who can heal any disease, is now live and can be read at The Worlds Within at Offload – The Worlds Within