It Hurts

I recently received an email from an old acquaintance letting me know that one of our friends had died.

Bill would have been just a few years older than me and even though I had not thought about him in years, had last seen him in the mid-eighties when we all worked together on fashion photo shoots in Chicago, the news bore a hole in me.

Reaching for some sort of understanding, I asked questions and found very few answers.

Until this morning when, along with a few photographs that I now deeply cherish, I was told that "Bill was having some mental issues and was seeing a doctor about it but just couldn't cope."

That's all I know and very possibly all I will ever know.

Could I have helped? Could I have found the little seed of joy in him and watered it enough to make him want to stick around and see his daughters grow up?

Is it arrogance for me to think that I could have altered his path? Even to think that his path should have been altered, that it is anything else than perfect?

Even that, I don't know.

I just know that it hurts.