I am not dead. I am not nearly dead. Nor did I go to Emergency after all. I am actually feeling better. On Friday night I was asking for mercy and if not mercy, death, another kind of mercy. I suppose I’m not feeling particularly well, either. Which will serve, I hope, as enough of an apology for the morbidity that follows. Meanwhile, I will serve this unwholesome thinking with some ice cream.

The first was early. Perhaps even before I understood what it meant. Grade four or five perhaps. In our class we had a student named Tim and a student named Dave. Dave was a tiny pale quiet boy who had deep-set eyes and his skin was so white sometimes it looked nearly blue. Dave had a brother named Tim. Tim was in a wheelchair. They weren’t twins though they were both in my grade. I never really thought to think about that. We always understood – as if implicitly, I don’t ever remember being told – that we should be kind to Tim and Dave. Tim was often absent but when he was in school he was always, in much contrast to his sullen brother, very cheerful. I remember his smile most of all. One afternoon, it must have been early autumn or late spring because it was warm and sunny, our class was taken to the library on a non-library day. We sat at the main library table which was a long table that angled up at the middle seam. And our teacher explained to us quietly that we should be especially nice to Dave because Tim has passed away. I don’t remember the speech, but that was my first encounter with death. I never knew what was wrong Tim, or Dave for that matter, who never seemed particularly healthy either. Dave disappeared from our school a few months later.

Leslie was just a year younger than I was. Thin and pale, he always had a washed out sort of appearance as if he were constantly over-exposed but he was friendly and very kind. We were not exactly friends but he was in my study group in grade 12 English and I liked him. I had a bad habit of showing up just before classes started and missing morning announcements and also missing that dreaded hallway crawling all the students did before classes started. On this particular day, I was even later than my normal habit, so late and so hurried that not only did I miss the morning announcements, I didn’t notice that the school’s flag was at half-mast. When I got into my English class, my teacher asked me if I felt like doing my book report The book was H.G. Wells’ War of the World which had bored me into a headache. My teacher asked me in such an odd way but when I cheerfully said, “sure,” he must have understood and he took me aside and told me that Leslie had died the day before in a car accident. Leslie was 16. For years afterwards I would think that I would see him. I reckon he just had one of those faces.

My father’s secretary had two adopted sons, Jason and Jon. I don’t suppose I knew they were adopted until I was much older. They lived a few miles away so we didn’t see them often but we grew up together and I had known both Jason and Jon since I was a very little kid. We used to go to swimming classes together. One summer, Jon stole some of my comic books and sold them on the side of the road, but, friends, eventually we got past it. We used to go exploring in the woods together. We would make up gigantic stories about the things we pretended to have discovered. In my first year of university I got a call from my mother. Jon had been drinking and driving. He had slammed his car into a tree and been catapulted out of the car through the windshield and into that tree and died instantly. That one was weird because, while we had been best friends when we were kids, I hadn’t seen him, by then, in four or five years.

Jason, another Jason, was in my grade through elementary and secondary school. In grade 5, he was the only one who came to my birthday party. He gave me a card with a picture of a whale on it that said, “Have a whale of a birthday.” We went to Pizza Delight with my family. By grade 6, he had electric signal lights on the back of his bike. I liked them and so I bought the same ones. One day he said he wanted to try my bike. When he returned my bike, hours later, the signal lights had been removed. He never did return them. By then, he was becoming a jock, much better at sports than I would ever be. By high school his circle of friends had moved way beyond mine so that by grade 11 we didn’t even say hello in the hallways anymore. After my first year of university I was told that he had had a motorcycle accident in Florida and died. Again, it’s so weird when somebody you used to be friends with a long time ago dies.

It was no secret that Joel was a bad ass. Even by grade 8, he was clearly a delinquent. He and his lackeys were always threatening to beat me up. I was skinny and bookish and probably a know-it-all too with an unshakable reputation as a goody-two-shoes. But he also had a charm that made teachers smile a lot. He had a way of flashing his teeth and his glinting eyes that caused authority figures to indulge him. There was one occasion where he had said something cruel to me, as was his habit, and instead of flinching or cowering or running away or avoiding him, as was my habit, I went out of my way to be nice to him. Perhaps I asked him how he was, or something, I don’t exactly remember the specifics. And from that day on he stopped threatening to beat the living snot out of me. It was also the summer after my first year of University that I learned he had been stabbed to death outside of our small town’s local tavern.

SS