Bright Eyes

When you write about someone’s death, you may think of it as a memorial, a eulogy, a requiem, an obituary, an oration, a valediction, or many other ways. In short, there is no one good way to say good-bye to the one audience member you are not sure is hearing your message or not.

There’s the rub.

For whom the bell tolls, and for whom the words flow. Is it the survivors, or for the departed?

I received an email today from a former student informing of the death of a mutual friend, a man who had grown from the kid that was in my class to a very troubled person, though in some ways, was all too clear. Unfortunately, this email did not come to me as a surprise. There are those we know will burn brightly and shatter into the night as quickly, for some reason, we know. I knew this of Joshua.

Joshua was a visionary, but he was also deluded by some of his visions, and those visions both comforted and haunted him, guided him and derailed him. His visions were of Love, and what is Love, and is that not the guiding principle behind everything?

Yes, and No, dearly departed warrior of the Soul.

Joshua contacted me on Sunday, two days before he died, asking about the true definition of Love from Plato’s Symposium that he could use. The Symposium, which literally means a “drinking party” is an extended ode to the god Eros, or Love, and all his attributes. My response to him was that, it was just that, a sym-posium, and that all of the discourses and paeans to Love were collective, not distinct. Parts for the whole, the calculus of the unknown.

Although Joshua suffered from certain afflictions of the body and mind, his Soul was pure. Some may argue that how can that be, but those some would be all too arrogant to say that he or she knew the Truth.

Life is not a tick-the-box scenario, where we can say, “yep, you got that one right, nope, that one is wrong.”

My heart and Soul grieves for Joshua, his family, his friends, and the unfortunate driver of the truck who ended his life, and whose life was in turn invaded and tormented by the tormented Soul of a stranger.

Joshua had a message, a message of Love, one that was all-encompassing, but perhaps the world cannot encompass that message at our stage of existence. Why does the greatest power of Life, that being Love, become our undoing at times? It is a mystery and a struggle, and a power that we may forever strive to know.

Farewell, Joshua, may you have found the Peace, the Love, and Beauty that you so desperately sought to find.

Namaste,

Robert