Death and other pastimes

This guy from high school died. It's weird right? When real life intersects with your own? Real life all muscling in, pins in hand, a bulls eye on your bubble. People die! All the time right? Not people I know, but people in general, in Africa or somewhere, in bank heists and in movies and in nursing homes but twenty year old kids with friends and dreams and etc that need accomplishing?

He was a year younger than me and we didn't know each other very well. Facebook friends. I last saw him a year ago maybe. At a party at someone's place. The last time I talked to him. We were out on the balcony and we were drinking and it was just us two, talking, and he was probably doing most of the talking and I was probably bored or something, in that way you get, when you're cornered at a party by someone you don't really want to talk to because there's a guy or girl in the corner of your eye who you should be talking to, if the universe was feeling just and fair towards you on that night. So that was the last time I saw him.

He was a popular kid if Facebook is anything to go by. He went missing two weeks ago, after a formal dinner. Disappeared into the night and then yesterday they pull his body out of the lake. All those search parties, and this was the result. He made the news a couple times. "Toronto Man Missing" or something which was weird because those are not very good descriptors for anybody, which is the kind of thing you only think when you know the person in question, when "Toronto" and "Man" seem like such poor words: your whole life summed up in one headline. Also: the word "man". He was a man technically, which means so am I which means that headline could easily have been about me, about anybody, is the chilling part, I guess, if we're going to keep digging. I don't feel like an adult but headlines don't know that.

Young people shouldn't die. It seems like a dick move on someone's part that bad things happen to young people who haven't even lived long enough earn it or deserve it or want it. He wanted to join the military, oh irony, was his aspiration, so maybe he would have died later, but in a far off country, a roadside bomb and his face on the front page instead of A25. No fuck off cheap irony is lazy and boring and disrespectful.

My problem is that people around me don't die. I don't know what to do with it. I've never been to a funeral. I know I shouldn't be cracking jokes, and I know it would be inappropriate to post a link to a youtube clip of the final scene of Shane even though it is perfect and I'm sure if Shane were just on-the-run-from-people-who-he-owes-money-to-but-still-checks-facebook-and-keeps-in-touch-with-select-people missing instead of body-in-the-morgue-can-you-identify-him-ma'am? he would appreciate it + find it touching which is the way is how would have intended it to be. Like how funerals should be about celebrating the life that was had instead of mourning that which we lost. Something poignant goes here.