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It wouldn’t have shocked me if Carl had died for I was expecting it.
After
all, he was getting older. Maybe not really old but it did seem that way. It had always seemed that way. As I recall it now,
even when we were children he was like a little old man.
And he was ill. Mountains of smoldering tobacco, one cigarette
at a time, had scorched his throat and seared his lungs. Rivers of alcohol, drink by drink, had done the same to his stomach
and liver.
Years before, his doctor had given him no more than twelve months to live if he didn’t quit smoking
and drinking. Keep on, he was told, and it’s even money on which part of your anatomy will fail you first.
He
didn’t quit. Didn’t even consider it. He was wed to the weed and carrying on a thirty year affair with the bottle.
And there wasn’t anything - or anyone - else to love.
No, his death wouldn’t have shocked me or anyone
else. More than that, no one really would have cared. Living alone, dying alone, he wouldn’t be missed.
But
it wasn’t Carl they called me about. It was Jeff. When they had found him, just minutes before, he was alone and he
was dead.
Jeff was Carl’s brother, a couple of years younger by the calendar but decades younger by any other
measure. Even approaching middle age, Jeff still seemed young. If he had lived to be a hundred he would still have seemed
that way.
He was always excited about something, always laughing, always full of life. Like a child. Not immature
in any fashion, but filled with enthusiasm and vitality and wonder, like a child.
And he was healthy. Very healthy.
And clean-living. No alcohol. No tobacco. Early to bed. Lots of exercise. All that.
This was the man - big, strong,
handsome - who had pitched his high school and Legion teams to state championships. It was he who had married a beauty queen
and fathered two boys just like their dad. Professional man, civic leader, paragon of virtue, Jeff had seemed indestructible.
I told them it couldn’t be Jeff, but they insisted it was. Not Carl. Jeff.
That was four years ago.
Carl is still around. Still smoking, still drinking. He’s full of death but he is still living.
And Jeff, who
was so full of life, is four years dead. His wife has remarried and the boys scarcely remember their father.
The French
have a way of dealing with things which confound them. They shrug their shoulders and mutter, “C’est la vie.”
It means that’s just the way life is.
I think I’d phrase it differently. “C’est la mort.”
That’s the way death is.
C’est la vie, c’est la mort. That’s life, that’s death. It
really makes no difference, for either way you say it Jeff is dead and Carl is still living.
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