A Tragedy in Vaughn

I liked the boy. He’d been in school with my son since kindergarten.”

I was driving home from the oncologist Jan. 27 in my pearl-white roadster with the top down. It was 45 degrees out, but the sun was sort of out, too. Freezing, of course, but when you’re leaving your oncologist, you don’t care about that. Another 11 months of chemotherapy, he said. A setback, but I thought it best if I were to survive.

So, top-down: Tito Puente up.

I’d picked up the car used not long after I was diagnosed. It proved to be an effective antidepressant.

I stopped at the Key Center post office and then took the long way home through the lonely roads of Vaughn.

I drive fast on these occasions, though I’m careful to slow down when I see another vehicle or anyone walking, especially if they’re walking a dog. I’m afraid my speed and music must irritate them, but so far, everyone has waved back.

As I was thus celebrating myself, very nearby and at almost the same time, a young man of my acquaintance ended his life, after doing the same to his mother and the family dog while his father was at work, leaving a scene of annihilation for him to discover.

I liked the boy. He’d been in school with my son since kindergarten. I was a reliable school volunteer in those days, twenty years ago, and I saw a good deal of their cohort.

He had just the right amount of happy craziness one hopes to see in young children who fear nothing and want everything.

I saw him put mud in his mouth once on the playground and asked what he thought he was doing.

“I want to know what it tastes like.” He looked at me like I was an idiot, and in that moment, I felt like one.

I knew his mother slightly, and I liked her too. We volunteered together but didn’t talk much until later years, when we’d see each other at the post office. We talked about our sons, naturally, and she slowly revealed more about hers in brief moments that became a larger conversation over time.

I was always glad to see her. It reminded me of happier times for both of us when all the kids were small and their problems even smaller.

I still feel the same crazy boy I once was dwelling unhappily somewhere inside me, encased by responsibilities and expectations. Except when he can drive top down, his foot on the floor in third gear with the engine screaming while mambo kings play songs of love.

I have spent a bit more time than I otherwise might have this last year meditating upon mortality, though in my case, at 62, it’s been in the interest of getting all the paperwork straight. If I didn’t have so much to lose now, meaning my family, I might feel differently about it. But as a young man at 20, when I spent my first year in the gulag of chemotherapy, I had no doubt I would survive even as the injuries and injustices piled up. I wasn’t brave, or strong, or very different from my fellow travelers. I just had nothing to lose, so nothing to fear. When cancer came back for me at 60, I had everything to lose, but I had learned not to fear it.

I think our old friend, whoever was left of the boy we once knew, must have had something to fear. Perhaps he was afraid of some catastrophe he thought impossible to manage, which he then created to avoid being overtaken by it. Perhaps he thought it was the last piece of control left to him.

That’s just a guess. I write this not because I once knew him, but because I want some explanation. Too many of us have faced someone prepared to hurt themselves or those closest to them, or who has done so.

In my experience, it was never from hate.

It was from anguish, which is a suffering from loss so intense that it blinds one to life.

I was driving top down in the cold, accelerator against the floor, with mambo on my mind, while he faced something we can only guess at.

How could a boy who wanted to know the world end up destroying it? What remains for the living left behind?

I am clinging to the world because the world is full of things I love. But that boy I knew lost control. I wish I could have told him: It’s not about control, it’s about response.

Keep driving. Top down. Someone might wave.

And if no one does, you know how to find me.

Ted Olinger lives in Vaughn.