I’m very sorry if you understand this
Some college friends and I went to say goodbye to our old friend who isn’t going to make it and as we stood there crying and hugging each other on the sidewalk outside of the hospital one of them said we were all talking earlier and we still think Luke will be the first one to go.
Got my ass there.
I always just took it as a given that I would be the first one to die among our group of friends so this news seemed like a betrayal of an unspoken contract we had all agreed to.
This will be seventh friend of mine to die in the past fifteen months. All thirty five to fifty something year old men. Young men you could say. I know fifty-ish isn't young for almost anything but it is young for being dead. I said something like this before when the grim tally was only six and before that when it was only five and so on. I just had to stop for a moment and count them out on my fingers to make sure I had remembered them all. A process that made me feel childish and ancient at once. Some were people I had known in real life for twenty or thirty years and some were mostly friends on the computer but that is nevertheless seven freshly dug holes in the world. Literally and figuratively.
Some of them died by their own sad choice and some of them – as in the case of my old friend in question here – were taken by ridiculous hateful chance. Not feeling well out of nowhere. Putting off going to the hospital for a few days for reasons I don't think I need to explain to anyone. Fucking pneumonia. Shutting parts of his body down one by one until there wasn't much left to be saved anymore.
That's what they tell you anyway. These doctors.
A friend and I went into the room where he is attached to the machines and shook his father and brother's hands. They said they would leave to give us a moment and so we spoke to him in a new gentle voice we had never used together before and his head moved at the sound. Likewise when we held pictures from the old days on our phones in front of his wide open eyes. We joked later on that if he could hear us announcing who had come to see him he must've thought Jesus Christ these two? I must be really fucked.
I thought of this story too about watching my father die in similar circumstances.
I do not recommend the experience on the whole. Taking someone off of life support. I don’t think I will ever get over it. Watching him die so slowly like that while still being very much alive in the counterbalance the entire time.
I’m very sorry if you understand this.
Wondering if he was conscious somewhere down in there screaming to be set free.
They told me that he was not. That he wasn’t there anymore. Ok man then is he out back? Where the fuck did you put him? Who is that right there that I am looking at?
They had set up some of his hockey trophies on the windowsill and I thought that seemed appropriate because to his parents this man is still a child and will always be their child. Not to his own children no. That is a different arrangement. Three bright and lovely teenagers. Good athletes from what I see regularly on Facebook. He still played hockey – pushing fifty is actually old for playing hockey I'll grant you that one – so I know that must have meant a lot to him. The oldest going off to college this year for the first time. Like so many of our other friends' children. About the same age now as we were when we all met him and his wife – albeit a year or two behind me at school. Thrown together by chance of campus proximity. Still here with each other one way or another thirty years later. One friend told me later she remembered him bringing his future wife to a party in one of our rooms for the first time and teasing him that he was going to marry her. He blushed and said I think I might.
A dozen or so of us have been texting a lot again the past couple months since our friend has been sick in the way you do when this happens. It brings the living together. Death. One of its most peculiar tricks. We've been sharing old stories. Making each other laugh. Remembering ways in which our friend specifically made us all laugh. He had the kind of laugh that you coveted. That made you feel like a million fucking dollars if you could get it out. Not that he was stingy with it. The opposite in fact.
You have to laugh through shit like this. I don't know why that is. I didn't invent this fact I inherited it like we all did. You have to laugh because it's a cruel fucking joke. The entire thing start to finish.
When you aren't crying that is. It's a strange thing I've often felt. When an old friend dies. That I don't cry until a second old friend calls to ask if I've heard. A kind of triangle has to be formed. There's a geometry to it.
I had to leave the hospital room before too long. I stood in front of the automatic doors to the ICU unable to figure out how to get them to work. There were signs with instructions for this very simple and common practice but they were illegible to me. Eventually some nurses had to yell out. To talk me through the steps of how to use a door. I thought who set this up? Who the fuck set this all up?
Outside in the hallway we bumped into his mother and sister and scrolled through our phones again showing them photos from when we first knew Michael Flynn – who of course we never called anything else but Flynnie. This is Massachusetts after all. Pictures newly taken of old pictures since phones barely existed yet then. They laughed and wanted to know more. Where was this? When was this haha. Then we started getting into the ones of us taking part in a game we used to play where we would lob baseballs and increasingly heavy objects at each other's testicles until someone quit and I said haha maybe they don't need to see those ones.
A bunch of us went to have drinks later at a hotel bar on the harbor where we told still more stories of the old days. This is what you do. This is what people do. I also did not invent this. I stepped outside a few times naturally and as the sun set over the water I watched as hundreds of kids filed onto a party boat docked at the pier for a prom. They glowed in their borrowed fineness. Practicing perhaps for the first time in their short lives what it is going to be like to be an adult.
I had a few new short pieces go up at Flaming Hydra the other day. Here's one.
Luke O’Neil
The process
I shouldn’t have started running. I know now that that was my chief mistake. It sounds silly in retrospect but I imagined that they could not perceive me in my stillness. Sense the warm beating blood of my chest. Which was no different than theirs by the way. But they lingered long enough in their own stasis that it confused my every instinct. What kind of threat could I ever have posed to them. To anyone. No matter it was all transpiring now. Once they have you in their jaws they will never let go. Even if they’re not sure they like the taste. It wasn’t even me that they were after specifically it was the chase itself. I just happened to be on the other side of it.
I had a really lovely time reading as part of the Maynard Book Festival this weekend in my cute little town. Thank you to all who came it was very nice meeting a lot of you. I read a bunch of "the hits" from We Had It Coming but also some newer ones like the recent fan favorite When It Happens which you can listen to here:
When It happens
It is going to happen this year. You know what I mean. God’s will. Naturally of course. No need to come knocking on my door. I’m chilling at home and I’ll be chilling at home when it happens. Before I go running out into the streets that is. Shaking the mailman’s hand. Kissing nurses and shit. All of a sudden there’s a drumline and a mariachi band and breakdancers and fuckin… David Guetta is DJing on a rooftop if David Guetta is still around. Maybe we’ll even get to watch it live on TV. The first flicker that something is really wrong. Slowing it down and rewinding it after like when Lisa broke Ralph’s heart. The realization in his eyes. The first single moment of self awareness in 80 years. Like a flailing panicked deer you’ve crashed your car into on the side of a snowy mountain pass. The eyes fluttering back and forth. Surely this can’t have been it. Perhaps a brief bargaining with God. God saying he’s going to pass on the deal. I do not agree with your terms sir. It’s gonna be like the Will Smith Summertime video out there. Everywhere. We’re all going to get fired from our jobs for posting. 100% unemployment. One good day.
A better world is possible.