Off the Grid: The precious moments in between

The note in the paper said he was hard to love. It wasn’t an obituary, more a brief explanation about an opening available in the local population count. Maybe that was the problem. We won’t ever really know because no one was there to hold his hand. Suicide tends to be a lonely last act.

What I do know is that my friend could no longer resist the ever-bludgeoning of life or the ever-drowning of it in the latest flavored form of ethanol.

And that he was not hard to love.

It is the ways in which we limit ourselves from loving the unwell and the struggling and the wounded. It is in a culture that tells people they need self-care and discipline and commitment and dry 12-step programs and an identity in a hard-work job.

It is in how we cannot seem to find the balance between boundaries and acceptance.

When I walk into his shell of a house, now devoid of his soul, I am there on a strange errand. My final act of love is to paint, because it is too late for me to wash his body and run my fingertips over the scales of koi fish tattoos.

Did the firemen and undertaker know the stories behind each of those flowers and fish? This one was for his little brother, who died when they were just boys, these, for his own. Each one held a story of redemption from one sin or another, but none was bright or big enough to cover his sin of being unlovable. Of being not enough. A stamp he has now firmly smudged onto the hearts of his own children.

The colors he had painted were an homage to the skater days of a Vans loyalist. We would leave the crass orange but change the rest. The chalkboard on the wall had his faded handwriting. The height and ages of his boys were scrawled in pencil on a door frame they will never walk through again.

I have a memory of us in that doorway, tying our running shoes.

“New kicks!” he said, his slender ankles and chiseled calves emerging from the kind of shoes that make a boy run faster. He sent me his mile times, photographs of his new bike, photographs of his old bike, and always, Bubbies Sauerkraut. I knew he was sober when he was eating sauerkraut; he was firm in his belief it healed the damage wreaked in the months of his latest battle.

“Being sober is easy, Norway,” he told me. “It’s getting sober that is hard.” He left out “staying sober.”

He ran 7-minute miles off the couch. He played the guitar, skated, loved his LeMond and Gordon Lightfoot, and had the kind of brilliance that is acutely aware of how ill-fated his path was. No miles on foot or bike could fill the void in those sober times. When being sober became not enough of a motivator, when that battering ram of the human condition came (divorce, broken ankles, the union striking, the flu), he had not stuffed his pockets with the survival tools necessary.

A Leatherman is only so useful.

“I look forward to more of this trail running,” he said after our first day winding through the cedar boughs of a frozen winter morning. I wondered if he’d discovered the same panacea I knew there. I don’t remember the last day we ran together. It is locked away with a thousand other memories I cannot seem to find in the sifting of my sorrow.

I read once that people die the same way they lived. In his case, alone.

I am here, we are here now, I say as we work to complete the forever-under-construction ball-and-chain house that probably bore the most blame for his demise. I talk out loud to him the whole time, sometimes sweetly, sometimes in anger. I want him to see how good it looks now, as if he’ll return from the bardo with his usual swagger and a break dance move.

“Norway!” he’d say. “You deserve some fried eggs and a guitar solo!”

I don’t know the safe way to love the afflicted. I don’t know how we survive their lashings and rage, their transgressions and their pain. I just know that today, those precious moments in between seemed worth it.

Ammi Midstokke can be contacted at [email protected].

If you or someone you know is in distress, you can call the National Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988.

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