The last time I saw Frank alive was election night six years ago. Out of concern for the privacy of his children I'm not using his real name or the names of his family members. Frank and I had just waged political war with recalcitrant town commissioners over police misuse of tasers. The battle had begun following an incident in which cops used a taser on Frank's father during a traffic stop. The dash-cam latered showed a classic case of how BOTH cops and citizens should not act during traffic stops. Out of respect for my friend's family, I won't link to identifying accounts of the whole matter.
I had spent the preceeding weeks helping a challenger to the commision president in an election. The challenger was sympathtic to our position that the public had the right to review the police department's secret taser policy. He was also a Democrat. In our stauncly Republican town, the race was to be closer than normal owing to the growing revulsion for Republican curruption in 2005. I used my skills in direct marketing to mail customized, data driven messages to select households. The next morning I learned that we had won by a slim margin. I called Frank to tell him the good news only to learn that he had died in the night. He was 39 years old.
This diary is not about grief. It is about the grace required to accept that we are stronger when we can rely on one another. And it is about the need to accept that much of what we might like to control is simply beyond control. This diary was written nearly six years ago but today seemed like a good time to share it with others.
What a peculiar time last night was. It unfolded peacefully with a solitary walk through some wooded paths in Allegheny County's South Park. My friend Orion, no longer on his tilted perch in the east where I saw him from this same sanctuary nearly four months ago, now stood erect in the south, his assigned place in February's firmament. On my last visit the air was warm and rich with the heavy, calming fragrance of autumn's leaves in their scheduled return to the earth, their colorful beauty by day outdone by their remarkable ability to trigger a cascade of memories from something so delicate as a scent. Not so last night. The memories flowed from somewhere else; the cold air of winter holds a different magic. The stars flashed and flickered through the swaying, barren tree tops, their light born ages ago and sent on a lonely journey that ended with a final, turbulent passage through the crisp air and into my eyes, into my heart. This stream of ancient emissaries, tiny particles of light, made the transformation from the physical world into something inexplicable and wondrous: a gentle rush of memories on a lonely winter's night. At one point on my path the trees were lit with fleeting, distant lights from cars that meandered along the winding roads of the park. What complex shapes! A few grand old sycamores with their smooth, lightly colored bark made a perfect canvas for this projection of light and shadow.
After my walk I drove back to my neighborhood and stopped in to see Nick and Isabela Mancini in their pizza shop. More than three months had passed since that awful day when Frank died. Their son, my friend, was so much more than his addiction. An intimidating and imposing character to some, he was at his core a gentle man in search of relief from the demons that clawed relentlessly at his soul. The ecosystem of his life was full of amazing, good people who in the end could not protect him from himself or the predators and scavengers who were never far from his daily experience.
Time has many clocks with many faces. Frank's sister measured time in Wednesdays. How many Wednesdays had passed since that awful Wednesday when her brother died? I still cannot fathom the dark bottom of that ocean of pain that smothers his parents, his wife and his three children.
Nick and Isabela were alone. They moved with a heavy, mechanical sadness that seemed to exaggerate their years. The dawn of a long planned retirement had vanished, leaving an endless string of dreary days full of grief and toil. They had just finished preparing food for the next day and were nearly done cleaning up. I deliberately asked how they were handling their emotions. They always seemed to take comfort from such an invitation to talk. What always followed was painful but full of rewards hard to explain. I was feeling a little guilty for having visited them less and less in recent weeks as I explored the landscape of my own painful, changing life. Isabela told me that Nick had begun taking his Paxil in a dangerous way that was making him very irritable, moody and nearly impossible to live with. After the usual expressions of grief the two began a slow escalation of harsh words for each other that collimated in a torrent of attacks upon each other with the most violent, vile, cutting words that I think I have ever witnessed. Imagine a world class Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolfe sort of nastiness. Poisonous fucking shit. Isabela shouted into Nick's face that he killed Frank with his behavior, with his insistence that Frank work so long and hard in the pizza shop, day after day, month after month, year after year. Nick shouted back that she killed Frank by falling for his lies. This brutality for each other was something new, another level of shattered, isolated, broken hearts.
They were shouting primitive screams at each other for so long that their voices grew weak and raspy. He called her "a worthless piece of shit". They wanted and needed me to hear what they had to say to each other. I knew this because they spoke in English when they could have reverted to the privacy of Italian as they so often did. I was thinking that I should just leave but I knew they were in crisis and that if I didn't help they were in for an uncertain future of festering, gangrenous, evil emotions headed for God only knows where and for God only knows how long. I grabbed both of them and pulled them to me. I had my left arm gently around Isabela's neck, the way a kid would pull a best friend close to his side in a moment of tenderness. I had Nick in my right arm. I pulled all of us together so that our faces were within inches. Then I began to speak. I was almost shouting. I raised my voice as I had seldom raised my voice to anyone. I yelled that these feelings were poison. I pleaded that it didn't matter where this poison came from but that it had to be let go. That it didn't matter whether these feelings were true or imagined or just an outlet for lies driven by anger's need to cause hurt. I screamed that I knew they loved each other as much as anyone could, more than they loved anyone else except for their two children, one of whom was now dead. Then I let go of them and left them standing face to face as I asked, "Why have I never seen the two of you hug each other? Not once during those awful hours on that awful day of Frank's death. Not once during the funeral. Not once in all the private moments in your house or in the back room of the pizza shop in the days and weeks and months that followed the funeral. The two of you must have hugged hundreds of people in these past months. But not one hug for each other. Why?"
They stood there stunned, as though time itself had stopped. Faces frozen. Emotions frozen. Mannequins. Silent. Still. Their universe had stopped. Some internal time piece had ceased ticking in both of them. Then slowly, ever so slowly, they began to show emotion. But the slowness just amplified the sense that something even more intense was about to unfold. Tears welled up in Nick's eyes. Then Isabela's. They stared into each others watery eyes and finally collapsed into each others arms. Tears continued to flow. At this point I began to cry quietly, but without the emotion that ones face inevitably betrays. My tears reached my lips. I tasted an ocean of brackish pain. I was in some detached state where part of me reacted as I would expect, with tears. Strangely though, my face was relaxed and devoid of the muscular contortions of such emotion. Part of me was Isabela and part of me was Nick and I was channeling and riding this violent, brutal, soul devouring, life killing, primal, raging rapids of human emotion in nothing more than a fragile kayak of hope. Crashing into and careening off of huge rocks, both seen and unseen. The hidden rocks were known only by the telltale waters that bubbled and swelled over and around them. I was spinning round and round, dropping into a vortex in this river of awesome power only to be sucked along the bottom and bounced off rocks of all sizes mercifully worn smooth by the same force that dragged me on. Then I found myself being propelled upwards through the water and into the air above the river's turbulent surface in another suspension of time, hanging there in timeless, breathless silence. Then wham, crashing back down into the torrent of madness. Nick and Isabela heaved and wept and wailed. I cannot say for how long. This river keeps its own time.
All this reminded me of my trip down the Youghegheny River this past summer and my near death experience. It reminded me of my growing submission to my impending death as I was pinned by the raw, untamed force of the river, upside down in my kayak, under water, against a huge bolder. Growing exhausted from my struggle and with my breath dwindling I began to sense a glimmer of peace on some level of awareness that seemed new to me, despite a losing battle with sheer animal terror. Then my guide plucked me from ultimate surrender by grabbing my paddle which I was still barely holding up in obedience to the inertia of a fading, last, desperate hope that someone would make their way to that boulder with enough time to pull me out or to flip me upright.
I made Nick promise to take his Paxil daily without varying the dose. I got Isabela to accept that Nick's escalating ill temper in recent days was likely the result of his dangerous attempt to self medicate. As we left the pizza shop Isabela let Nick cross the street to their car without her. She grabbed both of my arms and said she thought that she was going crazy and that she couldn't take it anymore. I kissed her cheek, shrugged off her grip and held her face in my hands with my thumbs wiping aside tears as I looked into her eyes and said, "You know how much he loves you. Ignore those cruel words. He doesn't mean it on any of the levels that really matter. And I know you don't really blame him for Frank's death either." We kissed again and again. She squeezed me harder than she ever squeezed me before. Then she smiled a complicated smile, a smile contorted by so many other emotions that it was impossible to decipher. Then this impenetrable smile quickly relaxed into an angelic serenity that seemed to dissolve all the pain she had tasted and swallowed and inhaled on her tumultuous ride on this river so full of darkness on this particular night. She kissed me again and turned away.
I stood motionless except to turn my head as I watched her cross the street. Nick had already started the car. She got in and settled herself. She struggled with her seat belt and then turned to Nick and said something short, maybe three or four syllables. I wanted to believe that she said, "I love you", but the brevity of her words and a truth in my heart was the only evidence to suggest this was the case. The lights of the street made it possible to see that they were calmly staring at each other in silence. Another timeless moment passed and left me shivering in the cold air of night and shaking in the surreal wetness of the ever frigid waters of that relentless river. As they drove off I was acutely aware of a drama that twists and spins and disappears with a crash below understanding and beyond the threshold of intolerable pain and into the unspeakable realm of resignation, a realm that all too often makes death a welcomed, honored, visitor. I was shivering on many levels but I was thankful and comforted by the knowledge that sometimes, sometimes when most needed, a hand will reach out and pull us upright to safety and send us on our way down this river that is so powerful, so unforgiving and yet so indescribably beautiful.
The pain never ends. But neither does the joy. Both are multiplied by the unknown lives of billions of fellow travelers. This braid of life, this exotic garden of mysterious, tangled threads dances and sways as it animates the breath of life that sighs from deep within every cell of every living creature. It projects onto our own being an epic story of the entwined complexity of our collective hearts, the entangled richness of love for life, of love for all that fills us with joy and wonder, and most of all, of love for each other. Whether cold and terrified and within a final exhausted breath of resignation in one of the countless traps on this river of life, or whether recovering on its companion banks while basking in the healing, glowing warmth of the sun, we are under its spell. With little more than a whisper of comfort from our hopes and prayers and with merely a hint of control, we surrender to its force. For in the end we have little choice but to let it take us wherever it must.