The day after my father’s funeral I was sitting on some cliffs by my apartment watching the sun go down over the ocean. About a hundred feet to my left was Jonathan, the British guy who was subletting the apartment next door to mine. As I sat there crying and watching the sun disappear I couldn’t help thinking how strange it was, he and I both sitting there on that cliff watching the same sun going down over the same ocean, but when it came to what we were actually experiencing, we might as well have been on different planets.
After the sunset, our paths converged as we headed back to the building. Avoiding him seemed rude somehow, so I just walked along with him and said “I’m sorry I can’t be too sociable right now. I just lost my father.” Then he stopped and stared at me with possibly the strangest expression I’d ever seen. I thought to myself, “You heard me: my father just died. Stop staring at me like that.”
“That’s funny…” he said quietly, “I just found out my father died too.”
Then it was my turn to stare like an idiot. It was a very long, weird moment.
“I’m sorry.” I said finally.
“Likewise.”
My father was one of those people who never went to see a doctor. When he finally did they found out he had cancer-of-everything and then four days later he was dead: septic infection from all the operations they'd tried to save him.
When I asked Jonathan about his father, his face twisted up a little and he said, “It's kind of hard to say really... He… umm… He took his own life.”
I said “Oh Jesus…” and for the first time in days I stopped feeling sorry for myself.
As it turned out we'd been watching the sun go down from different planets after all, but his was a lot darker and colder than mine would ever be.
He'd gotten a call from his mother just a few hours before. In the middle of the night his father went down to the garage, started the car and went to sleep. He was one of those men that Pink Floyd and T.S. Eliot used to write about: a British civil servant locked into a grey, meaningless job and - apparently - life, who one night decided to quietly end it. Nobody would ever know for sure - he didn't leave a note.
We became pretty good friends after that, Jonathan and I. Not the cheeriest pair you’d ever meet, but good friends nonetheless.
Jonathan was halfway through working his way around the world and had to decide whether to keep on traveling or fly back to England for his Dad’s funeral. Since he had a couple of brothers and sisters who were there for his mother, he finally decided to stay on the road: probably the first of many decisions he’d go on to make by guessing what his father would’ve done and then doing the opposite.
A couple weeks later I drove him down to the Mexican border and he started traveling south. Two months after that I got a letter and a photo of him from Colombia. After taking busses and trains through Mexico and Central America, he started walking across the Darien Gap, the jungle between Panama and Columbia through which there are no roads. At one point he got lost entirely, became incredibly sick and was rescued by Indians who took care of him and gave him a canoe ride south to a trail that led to Colombia.
Here's the picture he sent from the border: