When I was a kid, there were still (and only) home-phones. I’m not old, but I’m old enough to have had the good fortune to experience many now-dead things that required deliberateness and patience… though we didn’t know or appreciate that at the time.
 
The simple act of hand-dialing a number, the tolerance of… a busy signal. The fact that if you missed a call, you may not know until either someone told you, or they called back. Clear to see why optimal communication required evolution, but valuable to recall some of the virtues the inefficiency helped develop.
 
Sometimes, though, one edge of the knife is sharper and more malicious than the other… As is the case with the most important phone call I have ever missed.
 
I was goofing around with the neighbors; Stirring up dust, breaking something so we could figure out how to fix it, or building something so we could figure out how to break it. It was past dusk on a warm spring night, and time to go home.
 
I had missed a call. The handwritten recap said “Chris: 8:40pm, no message”. Then, it was not thought of twice to return a call the next day, unless a specific directive was given otherwise. And just after 9pm… The time had not yet come when a phone call for any reason at any hour was common fare. In school the next day we were sure to catch up on anything he wanted to tell me on the phone.
 
Such was the world, before it became a technological macrocosm of careless instantaneousness and largely unnecessary immediacy.
 
Chris was absent from school the next day. Odd, but not alarming… Until, it was.
 
As it occurred in a pre-device-based-Newspeak world, true voice-based interaction began to circulate that something had happened to Chris. Although I have notes from the time surrounding these events, all they said about this day was “No one knew the truth yet”, followed by “Heard from Meghan. Chris is dead.”
 
The girl that shared the news with me was not someone that would have moved in my orbit, ordinarily; Chris and I were quite close, and she knew that. She was also a friend of his, and as it did with all of us, shock and grief blurred any notion of adolescent caste system or social-order hierarchy.
 
As depicted in any movie on-or-relating-to the topic, small groups huddled together in stairways, girls walked arm-in-arm, crying down the hallways… Boys looked solemn, but tried not to look “weak”.
 
Details were surfacing, but the blur still outweighed the clear. We learned at the very end of the day that Chris had hanged himself in his bedroom the night before. I learned the next day that he had not died immediately, but that his parents had found him, taken him to the hospital, and then lost him. Once examined and investigated, it appeared to have been more a plea for attention than an actual attempt, and that it had simply (and not simply) gone as wrong as any cry for help could have.
 
In the same distasteful manner as followed several other situations I stumbled into as a youth and young adult, I was a different person after that day, and not in a good way.
 
Chris was the charismatic ladies’ man, with the gorgeous older sister and the cool car. His car was the first place I ever heard Black Sabbath, and his stories were the first I heard of… a lot of things. This was my also first look into the vicious unpredictability of the human mind, as- on paper- what happened made no sense to anyone that had ever met him; Especially the friend he had called on the phone, not long before it occurred.
 
I attended the wake, and at that time, had not yet been exposed to such sadness and widespread grief. I had been to funerals for people I knew and cared for, but a kid, taken in that way… In a community where such a thing was, at the very least, uncommon…
 
It was nearly debilitating, and combined with the fact that many in attendance were no more than casual school acquaintances and wouldn’t have had anything to do with me outside of these heightened circumstances, it felt even more isolating and volatile. Since isolation and volatility were already concepts I had made unintentional friends with, I chose not to attend the funeral.
 
Though I’ve lost many friends since, and far too many in far too similar a manner, I have not attended another funeral. I pay respects in my way; I attempt to pay respect with my entire life. I know the weight and gravity such things hold over me, and also how easily they can all join together and drag me under.
 
The fact that we had been made to endure a loss such as this together manufactured a fleeting sense of class camaraderie in the weeks following, however all pieces of the situation drove me to feel otherwise. Certainly a bad habit that I’ve held on to since, but circumstantial unity was never a notion that stuck with me; I isolated and removed myself even more from “conventional” life, and the paths it set me on and doors opened by doing so are certainly the only un-scarring take-aways from such a sad and overwhelming event.
 
I liken the psychological aftermath of such a thing to the storied BB lodged in the knuckle; Everything still mostly functional, but routinely painful, and truly unforgettable.
 
All aspects of what transpired were sharp and mean in ways I was unprepared for, and also as confusing and troublesome as they were avoidable; By me (maybe).
 
We’ll never know. But rest assured, I’ll always wonder.