With Ben’s recent passing, among other things, it has struck me that things have changed. Stepping out of the workaday I’m in and looking back down the hallway of my life (that’s how I visualize time past and time to come) has allowed me a bit of perspective. It feels to me as if I’ve just changed rooms — a door has shut behind me with a thud that surprised me. I remember a similar feeling in early 1997, the day another friend of mine committed suicide. I felt then as I do now that I’d changed rooms. The comfortable uncomfort of high school was a thing behind me — death and those it that it touched was and were real, and I better get my head on straight.

This last nearly 8 years were ones where I think I found myself — where we all found ourselves in one way or another. The fluid uncertainty that is growing up and out of high school and into college gels into what we are now. It is a time of serious stresses, new boundaries and slowly settling uncertainties. Morals and ideals begin to align themselves like iron filings in the presence of a magnet. Grief and resentment come with the realization that time has passed beneath your feet and behind your back, and it’s all a little bewildering. Eventually I found my feet. That me in that when is now looked back upon with amusement, wonder and occassional disappointment. I’m happy with what I’ve become, and I don’t regret as much as I used to. I am comfortable with who I am, partially because I know I’ve changed for the better. I made it through that time of uncertainty, fear and change, and I’m a better person for it.

However, as I sit here on what I assume to be solid ground, I look back through those doors and I see those who I left behind, those who stayed behind, or those who just didn’t make it. Ben didn’t make it, and as much as I’d like to drag him into that next room, I know I can’t. He’ll have to remain back there a constant reminder of closed doors. A piece of me stays behind in each room, too, and as much as I’d like the old me to come along, that me in that when and me here, we both know where we stand and where we need to be. And that is something I learned not too long ago. Perhaps that bit of knowledge allowed me passage on, I don’t know.

Like looking across flat land on a clear day, I think I can see far down the hallway now, but there have been times in my life — darker times — when it’s hard for me to imagine what will be coming, what is in my future. I can’t say how far away the next door is, or really what is across it’s threshold, but I have ideas. I wonder what I would see had I had been in Ben’s shoes. From what little I knew of his state of mind in the last couple of years, I understand that he felt under great pressures to succeed — academically and personally, and I think I can understand some of those pressures. Marriage and work and the loss of friends, the rest of your life now solely in your hands, all things that lay waste to even the strongest of people. The last few years of my life have certainly been challenging ones, ones where I certainly felt lost and in the woodwork. Each one of us, friends and family alike, have a separate path in life that may lead us further away from one another, but in the end we are never so far away that our bonds are not worth testing.