Shang High Life, #9

Shang Hai Life, #9 November 12, 2001 Message Undeliverable Every time I spew one of these out, I get a few cryptic text-bots spit back at me, mechanical rejections spurted by computers unable to do the job they’ve been told to. “Message undeliverable. Recipient not found.” The failure to connect is conveyed with an absence of warmth. The messages tell of people lost to me, not how or why. They can mean anything. Suzanne is on maternity leave. Doug changed jobs, again. Luan got married and has a new name. Whatever the explanation, the fix is clerical. I can bring back the lost with a few keystrokes. I update an e-mail address and the person who ceased to exist is snatched back into existence. I am omnipotent. I want that to be true, today, like it always is. Each of half a dozen automated replies reminds me of something I already know: the baby, the new job, the wedding. I am grateful to the computer for the reminder to do something about them. I know what to do. I know how to stay in touch. I know how to bring these lost connections back. Except one. Cdavreux@julian.uwo.ca. “Message undeliverable. Account inactive.” Intended recipient is dead. So dead the Canadian ground is already frozen around him. It’s been weeks. That my e-mail doesn’t find him isn’t a shock to me. The surprise is how frozen I am by the cool mechanized message: He’s not here. You won’t find him. He’s not anywhere. I am not grateful for the reminder. I have been failing, for weeks, to find a way to eulogize him. Everything is inadequate. I can tell you about Chris, but I cannot tell you who he was to me. All the labels fall short. I can tell you that we were so close, for so long, that we often defined ourselves in terms of the other. I can tell you that each of us spent years wishing to be more like the other. We became such different men, but each of us saw in the other our own path not taken. Chris was handsome and smart and kind. He was father of three boys. He was a brilliant surgeon. He was humble and loving. Chris was my oldest friend, my closest friend for years, my only friend in darkest adolescence. He made me his Best Man. He named one of his sons after me. He killed himself. His wife, Fiona, died suddenly a few days before September 11. Her death rocked us. I almost went to Toronto for her funeral, for Chris. But I didn’t. Now, I pace every measure of every clichéd version of “What if. . .?” Two weeks later, Chris was dead. Hanging over him was the accusation that he murdered Fiona. The story is all bad. An autopsy showed she died from an insulin overdose. She wasn’t diabetic. She either committed suicide or she was murdered. The police went after Chris. Chris got away. From them. From me. Whether he walked away from his life, from his children, from who he was, out of grief or out of guilt, no one knows. I have been over and over this. I build story after story. I can start from any set of assumptions and string plausibly to any conclusion based on what little I know. I loathe myself every time I start with any assumption other than “Chris did not kill Fiona.” The anguish I feel because he’s gone is almost equaled by the pain of this realization: that what I *know* to be true, wasn’t. I *know* Chris would never, under any circumstance, consider suicide. I *know* Chris would never leave his children without a parent. I hate what my logical fucking brain does, now, when I say, “I *know* Chris could not possibly have killed Fiona.” In the end, I know what I believe. But my heart is broken by having to doubt it even a little. Every hypothesis that says he did it battles an equally plausible hypothesis that says he didn’t. By killing himself, he did the one thing that makes it impossible for me ever to know, for sure. It is, coincidentally, the one thing that could make me doubt twenty-five years of knowledge of Chris. So, I’m left with the pathetic question of how much of him I didn’t know. I *can* imagine him, in his grief over her death, losing all reason---even losing sight of his children. After the birth of the twins, five years ago, Fiona nearly died. For a couple of days right after the birth, she was on the wrong side of the odds in intensive care. He lost it, then, thinking of her dying. I had known Chris 20 years, and had never seen him lose it, but he lost it, then, in the ICU, his home turf. I can *not* imagine him taking her life. I watched and listened to Chris counsel others with his warmth and acceptance. I knew him through injustice and trauma and setbacks, all of which he countenanced with humility. I saw him awed by what he had found with Fiona, and I watched, envying his commitment, as he wrapped his life around his love for her. As I said, I know what I believe. There is, however, a battle raging over what others believe. Chris’s mother has asked me to come to Toronto and join it. It is a fight to clear Chris’s name. The idea of fighting for him vibrates in me like a bell struck hard. When we were boys, he stood firm with me when I was getting beaten up. The fight was never his. He wore the names “fag” and “sissy”---whatever they meant to acerebral sixth grade bullies---because he didn’t abandon me. This fight should be my chance to stand for him. I should wear the names of someone who defends the dishonoured. But I’m not going. I will choose my battles as Chris chose his. It had nothing to do with his chances of winning. It was all about whether the fight would make some kind of difference. The fight for Chris’s name won’t make a damn bit of difference. Chris is dead. His cleared name won’t make him any less gone. The police can say he did it, he didn’t do it, or they can’t be certain. There is sure to be doubt. Fight or no fight, those of us who loved him will be left to make up our minds about what we believe happened. Or, we will come to some kind of uneasy peace with not knowing. The police and the media reports have done their damage. The story is as cold as Chris is. But what have they damaged? His loving mother, his knowing friends: we have our beliefs about Chris, about what must have happened. I don’t need more certainty than I have. The police, the media have no power over us. I see no use battling impotent enemies. Only his boys give me pause to doubt whether I’m making the right call. I want them to know he didn’t kill their mother. I want them, someday, to be proud of him, to see him as a man whose only weakness was to give in to grief and give up on life, unforgivably leaving them behind. I wonder whether the police report will have an impact on that. Truthfully, I can’t say it won’t. I just don’t think it will be the thing that turns the boys toward or away from their father. Those three boys will believe what their aunts and uncles and grandparents tell them about Chris and Fiona. The police report be damned. If the families think the police got it wrong, so will Michael and Robert and Ian. If the families suspect, so will the boys. I just hope like hell both families believe in Chris and Fiona. The fact is, the families, like the rest of us, will never know for sure. That is what makes what they believe so powerful. The only fight that matters is the fight for the faith in their hearts. And that’s a fight in which I’m impotent. I can’t imagine it going smoothly. How could you be sanguine in the face of your child abandoning his or her children? Regardless of what you believe happened, a large shipment of blame is going to be apportioned. It’s only a matter of whether it’s done lop-sidedly or evenly. At stake are the boys’ memories of their parents. I won’t enter that struggle. It’s not my place. More to the point, the blame means fuck-all to me. The police, the press mean even less. Chris is gone. Someday, perhaps, I will sit with those boys, perhaps when they are about the age Chris and I were when we had no one but each other. I will give them all I have of him: every memory, every bit of love that two men can stretch over twenty-five years. I will tell them stories about one of the best men I have ever known. They will draw their own conclusions. That Chris is lost to me, forever, is only slowly finding its place in my consciousness. I go through all the stages of grief every day. The one I hate most is denial. Coming out of it is so painful. Being jerked back, being forced to see the Chris-shaped empty hole in my life, makes me angry. I am especially angered by today’s cold reminder in my e-mail box. “Message undeliverable. Account inactive.” (I know, I know. I know he’s gone. I know I can’t fix it.) Address book. Davreux. Delete. Alt. File. Exit.