Day # 52 Proxy

I did not chase the news yesterday but the news did come knocking.

My office is on the edge of some very large industrial parks on the North side of Sumner, WA.  It is a flat river valley that was once some of the richest farmland hereabouts. Many of the farms around here were dedicated to growing turf or sod.  Over the years the land has been paved for parking lots and covered with tilt up warehouses for distribution of goods to Seattle and Tacoma.  It is a wasteland of huge one story building with facades painted in the same muted colours and surrounded by fake landscaping and sidewalks that almost no one uses for there is no where to walk to.

Since Monday, the area has around my office has been searched by helicopter, the local police, search and rescue and volunteers with blood hounds.  The subject of this search was a 21 year old man.  He had apparently been to a New Year's Eve party at one of the warehouses close around here.  Why a party at a warehouse, I don't know.  Lots of stuff goes on around here after hours.  The man never made it home.  First his friends searched the area, cruising around in their cars and trucks and then the search became more official.

Yesterday, as I was leaving the office, the road West was blocked with myriad flashing lights.  I usually go another way and I did, leaving what I thought were more searchers to do their work.  This morning we fwere told  that the police had found the young man's body in a ditch along the railroad tracks just West of my office.  So far the police do not have a cause of death but have tentatively ruled out trauma.  It seems that this poor person, for whatever reason, ended up in the watery ditch off of a small road in an almost deserted neighborhood and died there, alone.

I share the usual feelings that people have about tragic events like this.  I say things like "What a waste" when talking about it with my office mates.  What I feel, on only a slightly deeper level, is what a lucky bastard I am.  In my years of being an addict, there were so many, many times I could have ended up just like this poor guy, dead in a ditch.  I pushed the edge of the darkness so hard, so many times, I do not need to ask "How could he die like that?"  I know exactly how it could happen.  Leaving somewhere, blind on alcohol or whatever else, not knowing where I was going or why.  I do not know if that is the case with this event and I do not wish to speak ill of the dead but generally, sober people don't end up dead in ditches without the intervention of bad folks taking their stuff.

I am very, very sorry for a life lost in such a needless fashion.  It truly is tragic, especially for someone so young.  I watched this happen with some regularity when I was going to Twelve-Step meetings.  The old-timers, of whom I am now one (don't use and don't die), call the folks who "go back out" and drink the Rangers.  The Rangers go back out into the drinking and drugging world and try again to fight the good fight.  If they are lucky, they get their asses kicked, often literally as well as figuratively and then they come back to the meeting tables to tell the rest of us how bad it was.  They enlighten by negative example. If they aren't so lucky, they never come back.

I am very sorry that this young man is not coming back.  His stark and lonely death speaks to me on a gut level, re-informing me how precious and tentative this whole business of life is and how many times I could have ended up just like him.  But so far I have not, and for that luck and blessing I an thankful and I realize, again, that I have a debt to settle.  I never know when I get to pay back a little, but it happens and I hope that it continues to happen for a good long time.  Its a big debt and I need awhile to work it off.