Triplet

I've dreamt about you.  The latest found us in that old comm center; it was different but I can't quite put my finger on how.  There was a cluster of us, four maybe five.  You were redressing us for all of our failures and we, we knew you were a ghost.  Still making jokes and being sarcastic but understanding how we'd let you down.  With nothing for us to do now to make it right.

We trained where you ended and it hit me hard.  When I found out where we were going and what the scenario was, an elephant sat on my chest and made himself comfortable.  It was a clean summer morning and the dew clung to every blade of grass if only to soak my shoes, and my socks.  To make me uncomfortable the entire time.  I knew you were there, I could feel you.  Two months to process and still there was nothing I could say.

I worked a suicide where the husband killed himself in protest for the way his wife's cancer was being mishandled.  Left her to deal with all of it from her room in a nursing home.  What followed was a quiet rage, a slow dying of joy.  If life is not the pursuit of happiness, but of meaning, how does one interpret such a tragedy.  What sense is there in any of this.

What sense is there.  I think of your last drive.  The twisty wooded roads of the late night Metroparks.  The crushing darkness.  What was the thought that dominated your mind.  Or was it only a feeling.  Did you see the ranger checking your car?  Was it a last minute fight or flight panic that led to the shot placement and the slow anguish that was to follow?  When did you steel your mind and commit?  Who hurt you so long ago, and so far beyond repair.

Your daughter is as old as I was when my grandfather passed.  I remember my sister and I painting a model airplane in our living room, while everyone else was at the hospital watching him die.  Pretending that a simple act of normalcy could keep our world the same forever, but knowing that in reality we were being cheated from an honest grief.

*********

Later, your name lay embossed on his chest in a shade of blue that people use to display loyalty, fidelity.  A hero's hue.  We wended our way west, late autumn sun doing its best to turn the cab of his truck into a greenhouse.  My hungover head was throbbing with dehydration in the heat; the smell of coffee from my thermos was comforting, but not helpful.  I should have brought water.  I shouldn't drink so much.

Finally we arrived and after a few moments of disappointment and realizing that I would not find the subject of my quest, I let the rail-thin middle aged man talk at me while I picked the dried husk of a corn kernel from the back of one of my molars with my tongue.  It still surprises me when people won't make eye contact.  Later in the restaurant bathroom I looked deeply into those cold, icy pools of blue -- not the hero's hue -- and I knew why.  Something feral stirred behind the black of my pupils and I wondered how long ago I stopped caring.

**********

I read a study that someone did (I'm bad at details, but remain a champion of gists) the result of which was that more first-responders die from suicide than from on-duty incidents.  The battle within is far more dangerous than the one without.

I saw a show about wolves on the National Geographic channel while on vacation months ago.  If an alpha wolf from one pack challenges an alpha wolf from another pack and loses, its pack banishes it to a life of solitude and adopts the winning wolf as its new leader.  Solitude is a death sentence in the wolf world. 

The study and the show conjoined themselves in my mind as if to say, see, I told you, we are doing this to each other.