I’m not depressed.  Nothing suicidal here.  I’m not being ironic, so in case anyone out there is starting to hyper-ventilate about my emotional state, don’t.  It’s all good.

Well, that’s not completely true; the latter portion, I mean.  Things are far from good, but that’s actually not the worst thing in the world, because I find that it’s when things start spiralling downwards that you find yourself gaining some sense of perspective.  For example, when I woke up this morning, I found myself on the receiving end of an e-mail that sent me into a very weird headspace…it was almost like getting dumped (well, in an odd sort of way, it was involved being broken-up with), and pretty much blew the one thing I was really looking forward to this year out of the water.  I’m still not sure how exactly I feel about it (Vaguely? Upset.  Specifically?  Kind of upset…), but I was certainly not happy when I got to work, even less so when I had a non-committal “career discussion” with people from the global HR team about what I’d be doing some time in the next six months.

And then I got a telephone call telling me that an acquaintance of mine had died.

Death always helps contextualise life, and all the strange little things that happen in it.  At least, it did in this case.  As I was telling Beanz earlier today, I feel conflicted about this death.  Asim Butt, my…acquaintance I guess, I can’t legitimately say we were friends, died last night, and I can’t find it in myself to generate the levels of grief and trauma that many other people I’ve run into today have been demonstrating.  I can’t qualify the depths of their sorrow, but I know that for me, I simply wasn’t close enough to Asim to grieve for him the way I feel that I should.

Mourning is a separate story though.  I mourn the loss of someone who had more passion and perseverance that you’d have thought from a brief interaction with him.  I mourn the fact that someone who had got his act together after some very difficult times, suddenly found himself going off the rails and didn’t know how to put the brakes back on.  I mourn my lack of interaction with him, the realisation that he could be so frustrating and awkward and difficult that it was easier to avoid him rather than put up with the sturm und drang of his day-to-day existence.  I mourn for his parents and his family who lost someone so young and who had such potential, and who was–unlike so many of us–on his way to realising it.

Like I said, we weren’t friends.  But remembrance and regret doesn’t have to be just for friends.

Asim was viciously intelligent, incredibly down-to-earth and a prima donna like you’ve never seen.  To realise that he is no longer part of my life, even tangentially, is–of course–devastating, but more than that, it feels wrong, twisted and unheimlich and clashes with my firm belief that everything happens for a reason, even if you can’t see the reason for it at the time; it taxes the limits of my ability to believe in some sort of greater plan or design because there’s something too raw about someone who was chatting away with people on Facebook until five in the morning, who was excited about the new mural he was going to paint at T2F and was found dead three hours later by a gardener.

You may have loved him, or hated him, or like me, not really have known him.  But it would be difficult to, if you had in any way ever encountered him, dismiss the spark that animated his every conversation, even the darkest ones when you found yourself telling him to go home and take his meds.  I don’t find tears or horror or trauma in me, but I can’t avoid (nor do I want to) the inalienable sense of loss that I feel on so many levels at his passing.  Because it is, in all senses of the phrase, a loss.

And we–all of us–are the poorer for it.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 15th, 2010 at 18:56 and is filed under Ponderation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.