Tuesday, September 07, 2004

It's the 7th again

Today is three months.

It's about 10 in the morning now. It was somewhere around this time three months ago that Jody was leaving us. I guess it was also around the time his dad, Jim, was talking with me on ICQ. He had to break off to attend to something, but just before he left, he said he'd hoped to get a chance to talk with me about Jody (which even at the time gave me slight pause), but would get back to it later. Then, of course, I came back from a meeting around noon to the messages from him that told me how the world had split for us. There was the morning with Jody in it. The afternoon and the rest of history without.

Later on when I asked him, he told me that he'd been intending to prepare me for what was coming. I guess it was clear to him, and the people around Jody, that he really wasn't going to get better, and that time was running out for him. Jim told me he thought weeks or a couple of months, at the time, never realizing the moment was actually upon us. Jody's mom was in transit to go and see him when it happened. Last fall they gave him two years, but he got six months. Isn't it supposed to work the other way around?

Sometimes I can't believe it's only been three months. It feels like years now. I don't know why. When someone's an almost daily presence, sharing something special with you, even when it's just conversation, you get so plugged into it that life without that makes you almost believe you never had it in the first place. It's almost like I imagined Jody. Like he was one of the sweet, perfect imaginary friends of my childhood. Timber warned us not to idealize Jody, and he's right... Jody was a human being and he had his flaws too. But they weren't many and they weren't the kind that cause other people real grief. Not all of us can make that claim. So if he was a flawed human being, he was certainly one of the better ones I've ever known. Maybe the best. That's probably why I'm so hung up on losing him. Sure, there's the aspect that I'm only in my 30s yet and haven't really lost many people close to me (yet). But Jody was so young and so kind... all the things that should have made him untouchable in a universe with any justice or sense about it. Why is he gone when people who plot to blow up buildings still walk the Earth and get to eat and sleep without pain, and watch their children and spend time with their friends?

Why do we have a world like this? Would it be so bad if the world made sense, if the way justice and fairness is encoded into our brains were actually the way of things? Or if not, why not at least give us the perception to make sense of things as they are? One or the other. This middle ground of neither isn't much evidence of Your love, God.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

You didn't imagine him
Of course he is real. Real photons bounced from the sun off of him and into my camera. But he did seem to exist on a slightly different plane from the rest of us; he was here, just in his own reality. Now, he's still real - he just got promoted to a much higher plane of existence. He was too good a soul for this world. God needed him elsewhere, for a higher purpose.
But the 7th of any month will continue to live in infamy.