Litany

Between 2010 and 2012

Septembers the month that Loddy died. The first in what became a list, a litany of faces fallen. So strange this feeling of disjointment. A derailment of the mind that lingers on. He was always ‘older’ in that way the upperclassmen are cemented by the years they’ve completed. Thus ‘older’ he will remain, though dead at twenty-two, yet always ‘older,’ though I find myself five, no, now six years older than he will ever be. An odd disconnect…

And Daren never saw 25. His shoulders and back braced against the wall, calling minutes to lunch, suppressing a smile while we hazed him, gone in a burp of smoke and steel. Tom strumming guitar at OCF. Sal cracking jokes in English… Rockeman eating dinner with Lloyd, hidden smiles… Stocking the humvee with Goeke the night before the plebe retreat… And now PK, always smiling at something, implacably happy, killed by a man gone mad. The litany goes on…

For awhile deaths were razors on the heart. Anger. A burning need for moral reasons in a cold, mathematical universe where time and place, and then physics, have more to do with who dies than does the merit of their character. The ‘why’ is but a quantitative function, a numbers game, a hard science of probability, timing, carbon plus a heat source and compression, velocities of metal and fire… not part of a grand moral design. Kevlar-clad sacks of water and bone rolling dice for the pleasure of the gods.

Feeling stops being reasonable. One tires of it… grows callous… stops marking the dates and the faces, the new outrages. Greater loss is needed to reach through the leather of the heart. One accept that choices bear risk and consequence, for valiant good or naught. Death cares not of causes and the the still-framed memories are buried, out of place and unbelonging to a time of shallowness. And if the best are ‘inculcated’ to lay their lives on a usurped altar it is not ours to judge the choice, only ours to hold accountable those who point the sword, which we still fail on all fronts to do.

The dead don’t haunt us. They but waver like smoke over a snuffed fire. Fading in the morning wind the way fog rises out of the valley, whistling over the whispered names and white stones of those with whom we shared board and laughter, with those who are naught but faces fallen.