TRANSCRIPT
Some months ago, I discovered that an old childhood friend of mine died. He died a few years ago, from what I read, from what I found by talking to other people. I think he died homeless. He died homeless in California, thousands of miles from where we grew up. And it brought up all sorts of feelings in me because he was a good person. He was a good friend. He wasn’t one of my closest friends, but he was a good friend. He was a couple of years older than me, and I knew him, was friends with him for a good 15 years up into my early 20s.
He had a hard life. He came from a difficult family situation, and when he was about eight years old, he had a real tragedy that hit him. He was actually hit by a truck riding a bicycle. All my friends and I, we all rode bicycles as kids, and he was riding along the side of a highway. A truck swerved, I think over the line a little bit, and he was riding too close to the edge of the highway because often we needed to ride along the highway to get to the more interesting places that us boys wanted to go and visit off in the forest and things. He got hit, and he broke quite a few bones. I think he broke his pelvis. He broke his legs, both of them. I think one or both of his arms were broken, and he walked with a slight limp after that.
I think he might have also had some brain trauma, though I don’t think anybody talked about that back in the 70s. Well, he was a little bit different after that, but I wonder if in a way it made him even a better person, maybe even too good of a person. The most profound memory I have of him is being off in the forest with him and a bunch of other boys, and there were mosquitoes around us. I remember him saying, he said, “I refuse to kill them.” We were all slapping the mosquitoes and killing them because they were biting us, and he was like, “No, they have as much right to be as we do.”
It was the first time I’d ever heard this concept, and I watched him let the mosquitoes land on him, bite him, drink his blood, and when they’re all bloated with blood, unhinge their proboscis and fly away. I just remember feeling very confused by this and just looking at him like, “Who is this guy?” In a mix of like horror and kind of admiration, like he’s a sort of god in a way. There’s something about this that’s like he’s so selfless.
In hindsight, when I thought about it later, decades later, when he was still alive, but many decades later, I thought, you know, I wonder if it related to him having to spend months in a hospital bed. Broken, his body was literally broken. He had a few brothers and sisters. His parents were hard-working people. I think they divorced at some point, and I don’t know how many visitors he got in the hospital. I never went. Nobody ever brought me to visit him in the hospital, but I remember visiting him after he got home and seeing him in bed. He could walk a bit then. He was going to some sort of physical therapy, but he was still pretty hurt.
I think he became extremely empathic of the rights of others in a way, but maybe he lost himself in that too because that was the dread part of me of watching him let the mosquitoes feed off of him. It was like, what about his right to defend himself, his right to defend his boundaries? It was almost like he didn’t care about himself, and that was what it was for me. It wasn’t that I enjoyed killing mosquitoes or the other things that bit me. I remember there would be ticks on me, and we’d have to pick them off and kill them, or trying to kill the horse flies that would bite us, things like that.
To me, it was like it wasn’t the killing I enjoyed; it was the protecting myself that I enjoyed and avoiding the, well, the unpleasant sides of being bitten and attacked. Well, I watched his life unfold, and it was a tough life that he had, but in some ways, a good life. I mean, he became a follower of the Grateful Dead. He became a deadhead. He became a pothead too, and I remember my only time I ever went to a Grateful Dead show—how many? 200,000 people there in 1992. He brought me. There were a lot of drugs there, and he was really into pot. He was really into doing acid. He offered me LSD. I didn’t want to do it. I was too scared. I think I had enough sense that there was a lot going on inside me. I was afraid I might go crazy, and maybe I would have, so I didn’t do it.
He’s like, “Nah, you can just take a half a dose.” I was like, “I don’t want any dose.” “A quarter dose.” I was like, “No.” But when I think about it now, I think he was probably trying to escape himself, escape some pain, escape that trauma of what he’d been through, probably the trauma of the wounds he went through by being in the hospital and being so harmed, but maybe also the wounds of his family.
I don’t remember his parents as being particularly kind or caring people. I think, like most of my friends’ parents, they were completely uninterested in their children or me for that matter. It was almost like the job of a parent: give your kids enough food, make sure they go to school, make sure they’re wearing clothes and shoes, and that’s pretty much it. I think at some level he just had a lot of pain inside him, and I was on a different path. I was on a path to connect with my feelings, to know myself, to, well, use less drugs. I did smoke some pot for a while, but use less, drink less alcohol, and eventually do none. Know myself, know what my history was, go through all my feelings, explore and analyze the family system that I came from, analyze my pain, analyze my traumas, resolve them, grieve, grow.
I think I saw him maybe one time after that Grateful Dead show, and well, again, he was smoking pot and partying and kind of not really there, and still a good soul. Never a mean word came out of his mouth, never a harsh thing, never a cruel thing, but lost. I later heard he got caught transporting some fairly large quantity of marijuana, you know, quite a bit of it. I don’t know, many, many pounds—10, 20, 30 pounds, I don’t know—doing that for money because I don’t think he really ended up getting much of an education. He ended up doing some jail time, and we lost touch.
And well, now I found out he died. Died lost, homeless. I think of an infection in a park somewhere. And all those feelings that came up, and well, one of the first feelings, I mean aside from just sadness and grief about the tragedy of life, the loss of a friend, the pain that I felt of knowing this person who also was very creative. He was wonderful. He drew creative drawings, magical drawings about monsters and animals and good and bad and beautiful things. And for a while, I had a notebook of beautiful drawings that he had created. I don’t know what happened to it. I lost it, and so many things along the way.
But I felt sad. I felt the—I also felt some guilt, like could I have done something to help him? Could I have done something to guide him onto a better path, to be a better ear for him? It was a sharp feeling of guilt that I felt. But then when I thought about it, I was like, I don’t think so. I don’t think the path I was on was something he was interested in. I remember trying to convince him to kill the mosquitoes all those years and decades before when he was only, what, 10, 11 years old? And just remember coming up against a brick wall. His way was what he was going to do. This was the track he was on, and I didn’t know why he was on that track exactly, but I knew it was so powerful and so…
I: I don’t think I ever tried to convince him to do anything ever again. He was a couple of years older than me, so in a way, he was sort of a guide more for me than I was for him. So my guilt faded away. I really don’t think I could have done anything. Maybe I could have reached out to him more, but I don’t even know how I would have found him. I don’t think I could have so easily at all.
Well, I think how it’s settled in me over the months since I heard about his death and learned about it and explored a little bit more about what happened. I think what I’m left with more is just the tragedy of life for so many people. That so many people never get out from drowning. They’re like drowning in life. They don’t get a chance for whatever reason. Life doesn’t give them the chance, or they don’t find the chance, or maybe have the strength within themselves to overcome the horrible things that happened to them. They don’t get dealt a good enough hand in the card game of life, as it were. And to me, it is a tragedy. It’s a tragedy of so many of the painful and horrible things that happen to people.
Did he have children? I kind of hope not. I certainly hope not. It’s quite possible that he did. I mean, he was in his mid-40s, I believe, when he died. Maybe he’s got children. Maybe he’s got grandchildren out there. He’d be in his 50s now. Did he pass along his mess? If he did have children, probably. They probably would think of him as a good dad, but a negligent father, a negligent man. Because I think he was negligent of himself, negligent of his growth process.
And again, I just think of the tragedy of life for so many people that they cannot dig their way out and, well, find their way to learn how to love themselves. Grab onto the rope that helps them pull themselves out and make sense of the horror from which they have come. Grieve the tragedies that they suffered. I think it’s very common. Lives like his are very common. I think lives like his are much, much more common than the lives of people who do figure it out, who do get on the path of growth and healing.
I think to really have the good fortune and the strength to be able to figure out how to begin healing, how to stay on the healing path, how to protect oneself from all the arrows and stones that come from the world that doesn’t want people to heal. To break away from the family system that doesn’t like people that call it out. Doesn’t like the children of the family system who grow up to call out the family system, to break away from it, to become stronger than it, to analyze it correctly, to make sense of it.
I wonder, my friend, my friend who died a few years ago, homeless somewhere, lost, traumatized, unconscious, dissociated, probably still taking drugs. Did he ever break away from his family system? I don’t think so. I think, yes, he was far away from his actual physical family system, far away from the geography of where we grew up. But on an emotional level, I think he was still, to use the words of Alice Miller, a prisoner of childhood. And that’s how he died.
And I think the best thing I can do for him, not the guilt to save him because he’s already lost and gone. The best thing I can do for him is to use his life as an example here, to share about him as a testament for maybe what not to do and a reminder of the value of growing, the value of healing, the value of rising above the traumas from which we came and making sense of this and becoming stronger and better people who don’t die lost and sad and homeless and dissociated in a random park somewhere in some random city far, far from home.
Instead, to have a home inside ourselves, a home of a true self that knows us, that loves us, that fights for us, that fights for us to make good decisions for ourselves so that we can grieve and grow and become useful to others.