ON THE PASSING OF A FRIEND

How long it has been! Summer is screaming downhill and we're gaily running with her. My roses have had their first bloom, and the mock orange is fading away already. I've had plenty of time at home, and have so deeply enjoyed seeding flowers, planting more vegetables than usual, and listening to the turtle doves that settled here in April.

We took a leisurely week-long camping trip meandering around the Big Hole, over to Virginia City, then back to the Big Hole River. We were just unloading the van when we received a phone call that my x-husband, Steve, was in Intensive Care in Seattle. The hospital wasn't expecting him to live.

My daughter was very distraught, as the hospital was wanting her to make a decision about life support. I found myself numb and distant, saying I had already grieved for him years ago, but numbness is a symptom in itself, and later my responses were more genuine. Steve and I began living together when I was pregnant and he parented my daughter gently and consistently, even though he wasn't her birth father. He was a quiet spoken man, reluctant to socialize. After a dozen or so years it was apparent he was probably depressed, and definitely addicted to marijuana, and to the couch in front of the television. I was supporting us with food service work; he wasn't looking for work. When my sarcasm reared its ugly head in our relationship, I found a little house, and my daughter and I moved out. It was amiable. Steve and I saw an attorney for the divorce together. We went out for dinner that evening, and subsequently when he found work in Seattle, I visited him.

But somewhere along the line his thinking shifted, and I received a letter from him not to contact him any more. He continued his relationship with Autumn up until a few years ago, when he stopped responding to her letters and phone calls. This withdrawal was hard on both of us. It is perhaps a passive aggressive move; but in his case it protected him from deep feelings of love and attachment, which he wasn't willing to experience.

He shifted from marijuana to alcohol and chewing tobacco, and isolated for over a decade. His best friend and landlord continued a relationship, checked on him and invited him to shoot pool or go fishing without success. It was he who found Steve nearly in a coma in his basement apartment just last week.

Steve passed on before we could get there. When we did arrive, we were greeted with the dregs of a life that had spiraled in on itself. My own grieving arose in the wake of packing boxes for Goodwill and sending food to the food bank. The contrast between the impeccably clean and methodical man I had loved, and the filth and bullet holes that marked his apartment, left me gasping and bewildered. He still had pictures of my daughter and her daughters. He still had a pony tail of mine. He cared, but the depth of his depression and addiction had engulfed his personality years ago.

My daughter and I mourned the possibility of resolution that we had clung to, that we would somehow one day be re-united with him in a meaningful way. We remembered his devotion to Kempo martial arts, his love of cooking, his wry sense of humor, his gentle smile and twinkling eyes when teasing was in the air. He loved her in spite of isolating, and left her everything he had, except for a sports car that he willed to his friend/landlord.

So we are closing a door on an era, on 13 years of living as a functioning family, along with my son who lived with us during the summers. And on the hope of reconciliation in this lifetime. We will spread the ashes of a kind man who lost control of his life. He loved the mountains and creeks, and that's where his remains will return to. And, if we're lucky, there may be a reunion in a distant realm without alcohol, without chewing tobacco, without blame and shame, a loving place where compassion reigns.