The beginning of 2017 also marks the first anniversary of a dear friend’s death—his suicide to be truthful. Can’t help the re-flooding of mental images and emotion imprinted almost exactly a year ago on a rainy Wednesday night when I got that first phone call. And yet, a year later, an email from his sister says that after a year, having now been put into contact with me and all of us as result of her brother’s death, to lose a brother but gain new friends that have become so important in her life carries its own “strange beauty.” That phrase, strange beauty, sticks with me like flypaper on the brain, and I realize that she had captured so much of what life is really about.
The beginning of 2017 also marks the first anniversary of a dear friend’s death—his suicide to be truthful. Can’t help the re-flooding of mental images and emotion imprinted almost exactly a year ago on a rainy Wednesday night when I got that first phone call. And yet, a year later, an email from his sister says that after a year, having now been put into contact with me and all of us as result of her brother’s death, to lose a brother but gain new friends that have become so important in her life carries its own “strange beauty.” That phrase, strange beauty, sticks with me like flypaper on the brain, and I realize that she had captured so much of what life is really about.