This is one of those posts I wrote knowing I couldn’t dare rewrite it or reread it, not even for grammar. It had to just spill out, probably absent context and subtlety. I hate pulling my punches.

Sometimes I can’t be a speaker for the dead. People and families sometimes need to hold their secrets close, even after the cause of needing to do so has withered. This is never more true when self-harm or addiction are among the demons in people’s lives. I’ve lived through countless versions of this story. 

Someone I was very close to when I was very young passed away. I had fallen completely out of contact with him. As he grew up, it’s probably a good thing. His life was a mess by any standard. 

For those who have been connected to either addiction or criminality by way of another person, you understand the implicit risk of trying to stay close. Bystanders, even innocent ones, always end up paying the price. It’s confusing for the person with the addiction. They don’t understand how they attract bad things. You cannot stand by the fire without being scorched by it. 

Coincidentally, the last time I saw him was truly a wild coincidence. It’s been over 30 years. He lived in another part of the state and I lived in Springdale. Several coincidences aligned. Not only was I driving down the street I normally wouldn’t at that time, but I also happened to turn my head and look down the length of a long parking lot adjacent to a rehab center. I recognized his mom first, followed by him. At the time, their awkwardness and discomfort didn’t really register for me. I gave them my contact information and told them I lived less than a quarter of a mile away and to reach out if they needed anything. Looking back, I realize that I was in the presence of ghosts already. 

This rehab stint was one of many in his life. The odds of me driving by and looking that direction to see him are almost impossible. I do wonder what might have become of it if he or his mother had reached out to me. 

My earliest memory in life, one that my mom attempted to angrily tell me was impossible for me to remember, was one of his mother and my dad. Over the years, I reconstructed all of their lives combining research and resented questions. My memory held against my mom’s denial. 

He had a violent and addicted life, one completely different than the one I shared with him when we were both very young. But lord, do I have stories. He was destined to be a hellraiser. I have a lot of memories that make me laugh when I think about him. 

It’s strange when you mourn the version of a person who hadn’t existed in decades. 

The truth is I didn’t know him at all anymore. He became a stranger to me almost 50 years ago. He became a name, a memory, and a connection to a life that I was dragged away from unwillingly. 

Not that it’s important to this story, but I had to move to Northwest Arkansas because of my dad. It took me almost 50 years to find out the deep, dark secret that forced him to leave a place he swore he never would. 

My dad and the man from my childhood who passed were connected in another tragic way, one I’ve written about in other stories but don’t want to connect here. It’s one of my foundation stories, one that screams that truth is definitely stranger than fiction. 

I didn’t hear about his death until about 3 weeks after it happened. He died alone unless you count the substance he couldn’t escape from. He faced yet another return to prison. Whether the two events are connected is conjecture. But I do know that after a certain age, you are either forced to change or the universe takes over and cripples you. Often, you’ve burned so many bridges and people that your circle has become a flat line. Inevitably, you become one too. 

Though I am sometimes heartless in ways some people don’t know about or understand, I do mourn him. Much in the same way I mourn my brother who shared names with him. They also shared middle names with an extra letter thrown in just because we were Southern. 

The person who told me of his passing also mentioned once again how grateful she was to have pulled out of the life that took him. Coincidentally, he died at about the same age that the person informing me of his death reached when she finally stepped away from that life. 

I guess I mourn what could have been and what should have been. 

By way of confession, I was among those who knew the inevitability of his end. 

I’ll still have my childhood memories and stories where he was prominently featured. 

The other part of his life? 

That biography belongs to a stranger I did not know. 

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