The wound that never heals

I guess it's been building for a couple of days, but circumstances conspired this morning to bring the ache for him to a head.  I saw a headline that a man had leaped to his death from the roof of the Saratoga Mountain Winery, in the middle of a show by the Swell Season.  It was no doubt shocking and painful for everyone there, not to mention the man's friend who was in the audience, and his family that has to live with the aftermath of not only the death of their loved one, but a very public suicide and the attendant news coverage that goes with it.  But my sadness for them was trumped by sadness that was a little more selfish.

 

A saw many shows there with his pals, and the combination of death and the venue brought A front and center, and I did something I haven't done in awhile.  Every now and again, I google him, partly to see if his family has put anything new out there about him...an in memoriam ad or something, and (as that hasn't happened since his obituary), just to see if he's still there.  Mostly, I find listings for his business, and the amazing, sometimes frustrating, preservative powers of the internet comfort me.  The world hasn't forgotten him, or at least, the internet hasn't, and as long as his name continues to show up on a search, there is proof beyond the broken-hearted souls who remember and miss him that he really was here.  Not that anyone goes looking for him but me.  It's not exactly a sane thing to do, but still I do it once in awhile, still attempting to gather what threads there are of him that I do not have and hold them close to me because, what else do I have?

 

I did find a different listing than had come up before--one for some voter info website that had him listed at an address he hadn't lived at for a year and a half when he died.  It had him listed as a Democrat, and while of course that would be the case, I don't know that we ever discussed what we were registered as, politically, though we discussed politics and the state of the nation all the time.

 

At the same time, it hurts to know that the information the web has him is so tragically out-of-date, a glimmer, a shade, of what was, so far from what is. 

 

Other thing that has conspired against me is the random e-mail from one of my father's cousin's who found me on the web; this cousin, by my math, was born a year after A, but the cousin is still here.  It makes me wonder yet again about the mortal lottery that takes some and leaves others.

 

I miss him.  I miss him.  I miss him.