Friday, March 2, 2007, and Saturday, March 3, 2007.
And Monday, March 5, 2007.
And an October morning last year.
And every March 2 and March 3.
And occasional other days -- not that anyone can plan them.
Today, three years ago is today.
Walk with me, won't you? For my hand is cold and needs warmth.
Half an hour before I got married, now four and a half hours shy of three years ago today, I was in no condition to do anything with anyone.
And one October morning last year, when I was driving the wife to the airport so we could fly to Pennsylvania for a wedding, it dawned on me as dawn was breaking that change the name and the location and it was like Blake was getting married.
But he wasn't. He'd been dead for about two and a half years. March 2, 2007.
And as my wife tried to sleep in her seat, I focused on not letting the tears get in the way of the driving.
I was driving up a hill, beyond which was more light, along with the sun.
Near the top of the hill, I noticed something in the road.
Had to swerve hard to avoid a flat.
Probably wouldn't have had to swerve as hard had there been adequate light, but in swerving, I removed from the wife any ability to sleep.
And she noticed what was wrong.
And then I told her about the thing in the middle of the lane.
I had my few minutes of quiet contemplation and fighting needing to pull over and just sob loudly, and then the rest of the trip went by without another thought of him. But one was enough.
And then there was the half an hour before I got married.
I'd known about Blake's death for all of 23 and a half hours at that point. And it had hit several times the day before and once or twice that day already, but there I was, sitting with the now-wife's uncle (who was about to marry us) and my brother (my best man), in the chairs we'd been told we'd be sitting in until we just up and walked up to the area where I was going to finally get rid of my onerous last name (anyone confused yet?), and it hit me again.
He was dead, and I was about to get married. Twenty-four hours and maybe 10, maybe 15 minutes from then, he'd be no more alive, and I'd be married.
How incredibly fucking selfish. How do you get married when someone's JUST FUCKING DIED?
But you don't postpone weddings when someone other than the bride or groom dies. And people had come(, Ray) to watch us get married.
So we got married. And half the people on my side were basically from our side -- student media at the college I was still attending and from which she had graduated not nine months before.
Student media, where I'd met Blake. Where we'd met Blake.
The people who'd fixed Blake's work and suggested things to him and fought with him and laughed with him -- so many of them gathered a painful day and minutes later, and to an atom we were determined to just have a day to relax before two days passed and Blake's memorial service gave us a place to rip our hearts out, curse the God who'd done this to us and ask Him to let us be with Blake again one day.
(Sometimes the atheist in me -- which is to say, all of me -- puts aside things like consistency in favor of gaming Pascal's Wager. Don't tell, hmm?)
And every year since that one, every March 3 has been preceded, because of our wonderfully consistent calendar (though I wonder when it will falter), by March 2.
And every March 2 and every March 3, I remember Blake, who had a chronic illness but who shouldn't have died.
Every time I see an advertisement about ulcerative colitis or encounter someone talking about it, I think about Blake and Bobby Hill. I think about how I sometimes couldn't stand Blake, how I thought he was being pigheaded.
And I think about how he likely felt the same.
I think about how we established early on that politics and religion weren't going to be points of agreement, so we retreated happily to sports and TV.
And every time my mother and I struggle to remember when her father died and when my grandmother died, I think back with painful clarity on how I'll never forget the day Blake died.
There is, lost in that great debate on heaven and religion and all things unprovable, something very simple and quite wonderfully immovable that we in our infinite mental failings so often overlook:
I cannot get Blake back -- not as he was. His mother cannot, his then-girlfriend cannot. Humanity cannot. He's dead.
But neither can I get back the person I was three years ago. That person also is dead.
Can I remember the person I was three, seven, 11 years ago? Absolutely. I remember the me I was when I was 6, and that self influences my decisions as much as anything else does (especially during temper tantrums). And so can I remember Blake as he was even as I'd like to have that person back from the past.
But death is not what separates us from the past.
The past is what separates us from the past.
And as long as we try to make whole that which necessarily will only ever again be part of what it was, we look at that part -- from which we can appreciate but not recreate the past -- and fault it for what it could never be while it sits there waiting for us to take advantage of what beauty and truth are there.