When Brian was diagnosed with
having contracted a brain tumor, he was removed from school. The parents
didn't want their kids touched by death, especially one that passes slowly like the
voice of a clock ticking off shadows. Death threads a dark fear into the animal cloth
of superstition, and so Brian was promptly delivered up to the black arts of a hospital,
a church of syringes, gauze and surgical steel.
As nature has it, there is no anodyne for the metaphysic of loss, it seeps the
distances and through walls to sodden the porous heart.
Brian was the first of my
friends to die and in my mind I watched his passing although he was in Boston
a hundred miles away. In the box of a mechanical surgery he is still there,
opening and closing the door to my own clocking.
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