Hey Pixiewing, thanks for sharing. That pain must be raw still….
I know how it felt when we’d lost Dad, but to some extent I don’t think that’s as wrenching as losing a great friend so young. Our lives were tumbled all around, but at least he’d lived a life – even if only existing for chunks of it, and lived with the choices he made. And we’d lived our lives with him, we had him for a long time.
You expect to lose your parents eventually, it hurts but you know it’ll happen sometime – but you only expect your friends to move across town!
The loss of youth, exuberance and potential is tragic no matter the circumstance. We celebrate their being for the short time we have them and mourn the absence of what could have been for the time we won’t.
What I didn’t mention in my initial post about Dad, was that while home I caught up with an old flatmate and quizzed him where our old wildcat rebel flatmate was these days as I’d lost touch about 8 months before with him.
I’d just sat down, spent a couple of minutes going over what’d happened with dad and to change the topic asked about Robbo. Like your experience in class, the look on his face and the tone in his words….”oh no, no-one told you….”. My mate Robbo was cycling home when he was cleaned up by a drunk driver. I was 12,000 miles away and never heard….
What a week I was having. The room literally spun. Rob would have been nearly 37. He was a latent genius, a boffin in his garage designing and building stuff to make the world a better place. He climbed mountains during the day, mountain biked down others at night, jumped off cliffs and crashed hand gliders for fun.
In some ways it was a miracle he’d got that far. But he was inspirational and as much as I was in shock with Dad, I was absolutely gutted over Rob.
Moreso that we’d lost him that way…such a waste of talent. If he’d zapped himself on some powerlines in his hanglider, we’d have had a laugh and a beer at his wake about him going out doing what he loved. Not smashed up by a drunk….
Rob was a guy I looked up to with massive respect. He lived like I could only dream of during those days. Like you I had many fears about the consequences, I also worried about what other people would think and all sorts of other stuff that only served to limit what I believed I could do or thought I should do.
This story gets a little more worse before it’s over though. Rob had a younger brother Matt – another latent genius and like Rob, loved the outdoors. He climbed mountains and jumped off cliffs too, but his passion was kayaking.
About 6 years earlier, Matt bashed his head after getting trashed a bit through some rapids in a river he’d paddled hundreds of times before. When they got to him downstream a while later he’d already drowned. Matt was another who was an inspiration to me while he was alive…a truly super guy.
With 2 outstanding sons like these guys I can only imagine what their parents went through.
I carry with me daily the memory of 2 inspirational friends who in their premature absence still guide me up and onwards to higher achievements.
There’s that old Michael Jordan saying – “be like Mike”...I can be like Rob & Matt, or at least more like them if not completly like them!!
I can sit and work out what were the highest values in their lives…the ones that instinctively drove them to the actions they took. I think freedom, adventure and adreneline were pretty high on their list. Their action wasn’t random…it was guided by their values. By looking at the situations we faced together I can look at how they responded, work out what values their actions represent, look at my actions and work out what my values are – the stuff good and bad, that instinctively makes me act.
I can cherry pick the best of their values, try to understand how to copy them myself and work on getting rid of the worst of mine!!
All this is not to belittle Dad though, he started this whole thread and guides me in other ways…
But with Rob and Matt, so many times I’ll find myself stuck on some point…some tiny, just little ruts, others more like the Grand Canyon. When that happens I give myself a mental slap round the ears and remind myself what their immediate response would have been to the same situation. Which of their values can I work to adopt and bring my life closer to the fullness of theirs…
I maybe don’t attack it with the same carefree abandonment they would have, but I take action down the route they would have nonetheless. In smaller, more carefully considered steps perhaps….but it’s action and it’s a sea change compared to how I lived prior to losing these guys. You might wonder how the hell I ended up hanging out with them….Ha…they had little choice, we were poor students and sharing a flat…
They say the good die young – and I’m not quite sure what connotations that has for me these days!!
But if it’s got any substance to it, it can only be to celebrate how much they lived while here for such short times and to inspire and catapault us into action, making our own lives more meangingful through the loss of theirs. If I can get to a ripe old age and look back, I’ll be a very happy man if my life in the intervening years has been anywhere near as full as my 2 old friends lived in their short times here.
It sounds like you have made strong progress out of some dark places. I hope your beautiful friend Elizabeth will inspire you to the same places my lost brothers take me.
I don’t try and live exactly as they would have, but I certainly try and model the best, most positive values that guided what they would do. I respect how they would act, that I am different, and break stuff down into chunks that are more manageable for me to act on.
Like you, it is hard work, but it does work and things change bit by bit, inperceptably perhaps, but one day you’ll wake up and wonder where that girl went that used to do those things that you don’t do anymore. Like me now, you’ll wonder how you ever lived any different….
