Lightning crashes, memories burn

BY STEVE JANOSKI

Five years ago, on Jan. 19, my best friend Ryer died two short months after his 22nd birthday.

The human mind, amazing machine that it is, can make a traumatic event seem like it happened decades ago and just yesterday at the same time.

When I look back at what happened those years ago, the memory is still so clear; every detail, every moment is outlined so sharply that I feel as though it happened last week.

In the same vein, it seems that he never lived at all, that my mind just conjured the ordeal up from something I read in a novel.

I remember every detail of that frigid day, from the phone call I received on my lunch break to the start of the heavy drinking that followed in the evening. I remember the horrific song that was playing when I got the news (“Lightening Crashes” by Live), individual words of the calls I had to make after, and the remarkably difficult days that followed.

He had been a fearless young fighting buck, a scarily strong bodybuilder with a goatee as red as his Scandinavian skin. His strength was useless, however, against the freak medical condition that took him. He had been like an older brother to me over the years, had even saved my life once, and his stunningly sudden death shook me to my core.

It snowed hard that day, as it did the day they lowered him into the ground, as if God himself was sobbing frozen tears, guilty of the old cliché of taking a man who was too young.

It was years before I considered myself “normal” again, before I could talk or think about him without choking back tears. Certain songs would launch me into a rage, while too much drink could have me cursing God in a sloppy, slurring fashion.

I wanted to learn Latin so I could yell at Him in his own language, because I knew He wasn't paying attention to my whiskey-soaked rants.

But time has a way of leveling things off, softening the body shots that life gives you as the years progress. It made me realize that “grieving” was not, in fact, synonymous with “raging,” and that memories of the dead do not always beget tears. I even visited his grave a couple times, even though both trips were treacherously difficult.

And so I sat at a dark Irish bar on the five year anniversary of his death with a couple of our closest friends, as well as his own younger brother, a carbon copy of the dead man in so many ways.

There was no more crying into the bottom of a pint-glass, as those days have since passed - lighthearted stories and jokes took its place. But we still knew that his specter sat in the corner, silently reminding us of why we were at a bar on a Tuesday night.

 As the hours passed and the stream of Jameson continued to flow, however, our smiling eyes softened, and the night inevitably turned to those memories that we don't talk about much. For a while, we allowed the sadness to envelop us once more and felt the pain that we'd buried for so long.

On the way home, though, it struck me how warm this night had been, in stark contrast to how bitter it was in 2005. For a moment, there was even that smell in the air that comes only when spring is emerging after the long dying time is over, announcing to the world that life is resurrected.

Maybe those shadows do rise to walk again, I thought.

Sometimes it takes a true tragedy to make brooding people like me realize that we truly must live life only for the living, because the sun is rising tomorrow, and to do otherwise would be to dishonor the fallen who never had that chance for success… or redemption.

So for the first time in a long time, I can simply say, “Rest in peace amigo.” I will see you at the crossroads.