Requiem

His name was Jerry.

I thought about him a lot tonight. Well, frankly I've been thinking about him quite a bit over the past few days. Ever been hiking through the woods and get a face full of spiderwebs? In the first few minutes, you can get most of the big chunks out of your hair, but for many minutes to come, you're yanking a strand out here and there.

That's what it's been like with my feelings about the hit-and-run event on Monday. I poured out a lot in the hours immediately afterward, in conversations with various people and especially in online outlets like my blog. Now it's just a pesky strand here and there. Some of these strands have been particularly sticky. "A real man would have been able to save him," snickered a particularly nasty one this morning on the way to work. Crazy, I know. The only way I could have saved Jerry is if I had wrapped his body in a ridiculously thick layer of bubblewrap right before it was struck by that pickup truck.

But although I can never un-see what I saw, I think I've turned the corner in dealing with it. I chuckled yesterday when I realized that I had previously agreed to go see a performance of Mozart's Requiem by a local church choir and orchestra. A requiem Mass is where we ask God for the souls of the departed to enjoy eternal rest. So the timing of tonight's concert was simply impeccable.

As the story goes, Mozart himself was unable to complete the composition of this Requiem. As Mozart fell too ill to continue, another composer named Franz Xaver Süssmayr took over to finish it. Tonight I was thinking of all those who have died preceding our lives, leaving custody of the planet and of its history to us -- until it is taken from us too, to be passed to those who survive next. Behaving as if we permanently possess it is laughable. But during the brief time this is all in our hands, we have the choice to make a difference by adding love or detract from it by inflicting indifference. Whether we like it or not, that's the choice we have on each morning we are able to wake and go about our daily business. It really is like being given an incomplete musical composition and then being asked to try and finish it.

As it so happens, tonight's performance was a very much a contrite prayer offered up in the form of music. I'm not going to be attending Jerry's real funeral, but tonight's concert was an opportunity to offer my own "Bon voyage!" as he takes his ride to wherever he's heading next.

And now I'm left to compose my next movement.