For D, who died

DEAR D,

The morning after you died, I went kickboxing. Through the 23 minutes, the mirrors bounced off attempts to breathe. A breath is life, and I thought I should keep at it. The business of life.

Not that I wanted to be there. Life is thrust upon us, and from the moment of consciousness, a series of false choices are presented for the picking. Once you cross 35 years, muscle gain stops, and presumably the decline is sharpened.

So as your lungs scream murder, you will yourself to temporal death for 23 minutes, in hopes of another 23 minutes down the road, to apparently breathe easier. We choose nevertheless, until we don't get to choose.

Like, in your case, when blood clots raged through your brain, and plunged you into deep sleep for two months. Till it was decided that deep sleep was no longer different from the end of life.

It was noon. In September, you would have turned 33.

To jab and kick through still space is infuriating. The futility is offensive.

And as I make fists against the air - faultless but annoying as that perky person who pulls sunshine from his privileged behind - I am only reminded of the 99 per cent that is you and me.

It was said that when you collapsed in the hospital from a blinding migraine, your bag was stuffed with work. In a world that bends to a bell curve, those who do not choose their parents well enough will grow a consciousness that says it is hard work from the time you wake up to the reality. You who knew so well that work is hard, worked hard, without lamenting a difficult lot.

I know you believed, like most of us would believe, that if we put our utmost into our pursuits, that if we kept at it, despite the odds, we would make something good out of our median birthright. That you - already a revered breadwinner - would hope for just some control later in life, to make more palatable choices, to shape the world with more charity than perhaps was dealt with us at its start.

But time was robbed from you, choice was completely taken out of your hands.

Life is unfair. Then it slaps you in the face, so you wouldn't forget.

It has been difficult, listening to some in suits who amplify the smallest of victories - many of which are not theirs to claim - without remembering that a friend was lying in bed, with a hole in his throat helping him to breathe, who just wanted to be a little more than ordinary.

People say nice things about those who die, but the telling is sincerely consistent: D was a kind, generous person who got snuffed out too soon. We always realise too late that we had always rested upon the quiet, unassuming goodness of people such as D, to live another day.

I would have asked if you wrestled with faith, as I did. God balances the books differently from we do, but I had hoped He'd have heard our plea near midnight, a prayer with a cadence broken by sobs of grown men huddled in an intensive care unit.

All other times, we would talk to you with as much cheer in our voices as we could pretend there were, to rouse some kind of response, as if you being hooked up on humming machines was the most natural thing for us to take in on any given day. I think it was a coma. I'm still not sure.

Working through the last of the uppercuts - gasping with fury - I asked you who is no longer with us, whether you would have chosen life, for its futility, and unfairness, and vanity, if only to try again to make something out of the ordinary.

I only know that whatever you say, there would have been no blame. I would have asked, but you never woke up.

Twenty-three minutes was up, for another 23 minutes. Tomorrow, there will be another 23 minutes, for another 23 minutes.

I finally cried.

Bye, D. You rest now.