Hiraeth

"Hiraeth" is a Welsh word for which there is no direct English translation. The online Welsh-English dictionary of the University of Wales, likens it to homesickness tinged with grief or sadness over the lost or departed. The older I get, the less I need an English translation.

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I've started this about fifteen times over the last two or three months, and just can't... 

I've talked before about old co-workers, old friends, old enemies who have died, paid them a bit of tribute and moved on.  Not this time. This time it's "M".  "M" was my best friend. Ever. An entirely different category. For the longest time, I couldn't get a grip on it, couldn't make myself write it, or in fact write anything.  I began to wonder if I should write it at all, or if this level of grief is just too private.

I find that once again, my old friends the Stoics have at least part of the answer. The Stoics aren't always right, but they are often enough to make them worth the reading. 

Stoics divide the world — life, really — into two spheres: Things we can do something about, and things that we cannot. Their concept of a pure/virtuous life is one led wholly to be cognizant of and constantly involved in our own minds, actions, and reactions related to "Courage," "Justice," "Temperance," and "Wisdom," while simultaneously utterly disregarding anything not under our control, i.e., the rest of the world, others' actions, weather, sickness, pain, and…death. 

Epictetus, a crippled Roman slave who knew a thing or two about loss and became one of the leading lights of Roman Stoicism, put it this way: 

Never say of anything, "I have lost it"; but, "I have returned it."

Is your child dead? It is returned. Is your wife dead? She is returned. Is your estate taken away? Well, and is not that likewise returned?

"But he who took it away is a bad man." What difference is it to you who the giver assigns to take it back? While he gives it to you to possess, take care of it; but don't view it as your own, just as travelers view a hotel.

“The Internet Classics Archive | The Enchiridion by Epictetus,” Chapter 11, http://classics.mit.edu/Epictetus/epicench.html.

Now, this ascribes the concept of something "given" for a time and then returned to "the giver," but most Stoics were and are pretty flexible on the concept. It is much less related to a conscious agency than the operation of the universe in general. The point is that people and things come to you and are taken from you, whether by a capricious god, or the actions of another, or the deterministic physics of a quantum universe evolving through time. In any case, it is not in your control and all you can do is appreciate and enjoy while you have them, and understand that they're all probably temporary (or that you are) and there's nothing you can do about it. It is a waste of time and energy and life to wish or demand otherwise.  This is hammered home later:

If you wish your children, and your wife, and your friends to live for ever, you are stupid; for you wish to be in control of things which you cannot, you wish for things that belong to others to be your own.
(Ibid, Chapter 14)

I ain't there, not yet. This was a man who literally (and I know what that word  means) saved my life at least twice, and was my mentor during some of the most dangerous times of my life. We were partners, we drank and fought together, covered each other, had each other's backs during shitstorms you cannot begin to imagine; we did things so breathtaking that even now I can't believe either of us lived through any of it. 

That shotgun blast nearly thirty years ago cut him down and brought his life crashing, and left him partially paralyzed and in permanent pain from that moment till forever. It was a life-changing event for me, too, albeit on a less physical level. Seeing him there with the docs telling me that they didn't know whether he'd live or die suddenly spiked my veins with the ice-crystals of the sure and perfect knowledge of our mortality, which neither of us had really considered before, and wouldn't have believed if we had. 

Till the end, he believed the cancer was related to the shot pellets that they couldn't remove and that migrated to his lungs.  

I sat on a backless cement bench in front of City Hall on the town square in Archer City. They'd filmed "The Last Picture Show" there because it modeled every small, dying Texas town ever, and it hasn't changed a lick since. I'd been out on my bike when he called. I always immediately returned his calls especially since the diagnosis, even when I was out and about riding. As I sat on that cement slab dialing his number, I'd just as well have been the last man standing in that little town -- no traffic, no people on that hot day. 

"Hey! Whacha doin'?" he answered, and as a lazy south breeze puffed blowtorched dust down the street, we talked.

He told me that it was time to update me, because he knew he'd had it, and wouldn't see me again, and he missed me and our bullshit together. He said he was still keeping a brave face on for his wife and kids. But we had no secrets between us, and neither of us would sugarcoat our truths with the other about what was next. We never had, and this was no time to start.

I sat there on that blistering movie-set street, my bike softly complaining as it cooled, and we talked. We told shared war stories to each other -- the pain meds made him foggy, but reminders of our times brought him back into long stretches of sharp focus. He talked about the guy who shot him. "That sorry little motherfucker killed me after all," he said, laughing. 

He told me he was afraid for a long time, but wasn't anymore.  He was ready.  He too soon ran out of energy and had to hang up, but he told me he loved me and I him. Words we'd never said before, that tacit life-to-life brotherhood thicker than blood. We knew it, of course, but it was a time to be sure it wasn't overlooked. "You be careful," he said. "See ya' next time around."

I never talked to him again.

So, where do I go with this?  There isn't anywhere.  It's just life, and there's nothing to be done about it. The "little motherfucker" had a couple of murders on him along with shooting "M," so he'll never see daylight again.  It's over. Time to heed Seneca's advice to Lucillus:

I would not have you sorrow more than is fitting. That you should not mourn at all I shall hardly dare to insist; and yet I know that it is the better way. But what man will ever be so blessed with that ideal steadfastness of soul, unless he has already risen far above the reach of Fortune? Even such a man will be stung by an event like this, but it will be only a sting. We, however, may be forgiven for bursting into tears, if only our tears have not flowed to excess, and if we have checked them by our own efforts. Let not the eyes be dry when we have lost a friend, nor let them overflow. We may weep, but we must not wail.

"What," you say, "am I to forget my friend?" It is surely a short-lived memory that you vouchsafe to him, if it is to endure only as long as your grief; presently that brow of yours will be smoothed out in laughter by some circumstance, however casual. It is to a time no more distant than this that I put off the soothing of every regret, the quieting of even the bitterest grief.

As soon as you cease to observe yourself, the picture of sorrow which you have contemplated will fade away; at present you are keeping watch over your own suffering. But even while you keep watch it slips away from you, and the sharper it is, the more speedily it comes to an end.

… it cannot but be that the names of those whom we have loved and lost come back to us with a sort of sting; but there is a pleasure even in this sting.

"The remembrance of lost friends is pleasant in the same way that certain fruits have an agreeably acid taste, or as in extremely old wines it is their very bitterness that pleases us. Indeed, after a certain lapse of time, every thought that gave pain is quenched, and the pleasure comes to us unalloyed."

In Our Next Episode: Something else. I had my bike leathers out while writing this -- something about them, I think.  

Goodbye, "M". It was a helluva ride, and I'm going to miss you.