boccaderlupo

The story was that when they found him, he was sitting stock still, staring straight off into the distance, like someone waiting for the next train to arrive, lost in a trance. He had just been exercising, apparently, and stepped off the home exercise machine and sat down, and that was that.

He was a major figure in his industry, and the outpouring of grief was significant. He had a rare charisma and a keen sense of human nature, and yet I was never entirely certain how honest he was being with himself—or anybody else, for that matter. Still, his passing left a mark. I'd talked to him maybe the day before, and I'm certain he was plotting his next moves for world domination up until he wasn't.

I dreamed I was walking through the woods at night and encountered his ghost, floating above a bed of moss, of a blue-greenish tint like a flame. He was talking excitedly and without stopping or slowing down about the wonders of the afterlife. I tried to tell other people that I'd seen him, but no one would listen.

In the same dream I cradled my son in my arms, him just an infant once more, rocking back and forth on a sofa in the dark.

They didn't find his body for almost three weeks.

The other tenants had been complaining about the smell. He was behind on the rent. By the time the landlord kicked the door in, after nearly a month in the sweltering sun of the Garden State summer, the body was in no shape for an open casket. They couldn't salvage anything from the apartment, or so they said. No mementos for his mother. It all had to go. They apparently hired a professional cleaning company to take care of everything, as if it were a hazmat scene.

His father had killed himself some decades ago. He and his siblings had cut the rope and brought the body down from the ceiling. That shot had ricocheted through the family's life and history over the years. They receded from us, walled off by traumas they didn't dare name and we could barely fathom. Still, after a long spell of darkness he seemed to make a go of things: a sunny countenance when we saw him at gatherings, an expression of joy that we all agreed was not faked. Career success, friends...the shadow seemed to be at bay.

Until just a few years back. They had found him in the gutter, or so the story went. Alcohol, a vice handed down through the generations. He apparently couldn't shake it, and finally it took him.

His mother, not generally given over to oracular utterances like my father's family, had foretold it. Once during a birthday get-together, she had clasped my hand and said: I think we're going to lose him. A fact I did not remember until she reminded me, the two of us standing in front of his casket.

But how does someone just fall off the grid like that? We knew there was a problem, but had little understanding of the severity of it. Or maybe we failed. Failed to care enough. How does a person like that, though, unemployed but still loved by a family, go missing for almost a month?

I remember my own father, a rough hewn man from the Eternal City. I envision him scampering about with the crowd in that square where Giordano Bruno burned. I remember his cobbled together English, his roaring anger and weeping laughter, his own family of curious magic and sad curses from a distant mountain. We surrounded him when he passed, and though it was ugly, he was not alone. "I lived better than Kings," he said towards the end.

Yes, the shadow returned for our lonesome, afflicted friend. Or perhaps it never truly left, and he dined alone with it. Mangia da solo, muore da solo.

In my mind eye he's still just a kid, a skinny twelve-year-old with dark eyebrows and a sunny look. This was before the shadow, when things were weird but mere rumblings before the disaster struck.

We do not get to choose what family we are born into when that first spark descends from the blessed realm and enters the realm of relentless change. Some are born to sweet delight; some are born to endless night. We do not choose the hand we are dealt. All that remains is the playing.

May the God of your ancestors hold your battered soul forever in the light. May that Divine One piece back together your shattered body and exchange it for a better one.