The Journal of Gregory Lightyear - 27th September 2003

10:38 pm - Squeaple died today.

Motorcycle accident.

I've been flipping through various photo albums; Norm has a few photos of him, and I've got some old photos from the Catcher's birthday party in 2001, but I haven't got much of him that's recent - I haven't seen him in quite some time.

Most of the time, the fact that I haven't seen many of my friends in a very long time doesn't get to me; I still think of them the way they were the last time I saw them, a frozen memory I can reconnect to anytime I felt like doing so. Most of them are no more than a phone call and a pub away.

Or they were, until tonight. And now, for Squeap, all I have left is that frozen memory.

Not one of my better days; and it's left me with a lot of questions over what, on closer inspection, looks like pretty questionable behavior on my part. "Endeavouring to do better" isn't going to make him any less dead.

I'm okay - feeling a bit numb about it. It doesn't help knowing that he died in a motorcycle accident, of course; having just about barely survived one myself, I seem to have woken suddenly to the awareness that everyone I know, just about, is now riding one - including M., the other half, N., who I just got off the phone with, and J., one of the guys I work with. The only time the list gets shorter is when one of them ends up as roadkill or gets an all-expenses-paid morphine addiction courtesy of their nearest NHS A&E.

I'm definitely going to the funeral; I just don't know how I'm going to react. Of the many people I know who've been in accidents, this is the first of my friends to die on one. I want to see him again, to give him a hug and say goodbye, or something. Instead, I'm left wondering whether there's going to be an open casket, and trying not to imagine how it's going to feel to know he's lying there. I imagine this horrible moment of falling to pieces at the casket, just for a moment; it's hard not to think about the purple elephant shaped like your dead friend in a silk-lined box.

This will be the last thought on this I'm going to allow myself before the funeral, I think. Unlike job interviews and dates, funerals are not one of those things you're meant to go over and over in your head, rehearsing and imagining outcomes of. You don't build little scripts of funerals in your head. Or shouldn't, anyways, I think, and so I'm going to give a damn good try at not doing so.