No More To Be Done

You can't find peace, Virginia Woolf wrote, by avoiding life.

On a warm spring afternoon in March, my friend Hutch connected a hose to the exhaust pipe of his old pick up truck and fed the other end into the front seat.  I don't like to think about what he was thinking or how long it took him to die. I don't like to think about the fact that he was 51 years old and couldn't see a way through.  I don't like to think about how terribly sad it's making me feel.  Most of all, I don't like to think how close I am to understanding why anyone would do such a hateful, needless thing.

I haven't felt it often but there have been times - all recent - that I find myself wondering what the point is, as if there isn't anything more to be accomplished, as if there's no particular reason to try.  All the things I've worked and sacrificed and struggled for are done and the truth is that from here on in, it isn't likely that life is going to get any easier or any better.  It's not a bad thing, of course, I have a roof over my head, my little ones are happy and well and I have most of my health.  I can still work and write and take pictures, I haven't run out of money - yet - the little car still starts every morning and more often than not, I manage to fight off the future and its dread.  I still have friends that I treasure and music I haven't heard.  It ought to be enough but at night when I can't sleep and my mind strays to the dark and uncertain places and dredges up every fear I have and every disaster that might happen, then I wonder.

I'm far too encumbered to commit suicide, this I know as surely as I know anything, but the thoughts come anyway and they're wrapped in shame and guilt that I would even allow this mindset.  Life is precious, I tell myself, life is short.  And so it is.  But it's also finite.  After a certain point, what more is there to be done?

Hutch's obituary is tragically short - it gives the day of his birth and the day of his death and tells the city where he lived when he died.  There is nothing else, as if nothing in between even mattered or made the smallest difference and when we gather to mourn him, I realize that all any of us have is bits and pieces. 
There were two marriages but the details are sketchy.  There was a daughter, estranged for most of her life.
He was a landscaper, a handyman, a builder of rock gardens.  He favored old country music and played the guitar right handed.  He loved dogs, smoked like a chimney, occasionally drank more than he should've and danced with his eyes closed.   He had a brilliant and infectious smile.  It's not much to know about a friend.

How much we hide from those who care.