Learning stuff

Last Friday I was having lunh at work and idly looked through a magazine someone had left on the table. I came across a page where there were things to do and see over the weekend, and one of them was a memorial gig for a guy I knew when I was under twenty. I hadn’t known he had died the previous fall. I vaguely remember reading about a fire where a young man died but at the time I had no reason to believe I’d know the victim. He was a friend of a friend of a friend, someone I never knew well, who used to hang out with the same crowd of people, and for the last ten years I’d see him occasionally around, nod a hello, if even that.

So then, the next day I was reading another magazine. There was a story written by a freelance journalist, a story about how her mother got cancer and how they took care of her until the end with her siblings. In the story was a mention how the night when her mother died there was a fire in the building where the journalist lived and in that fire a young man died. With the details and the timeline it was certain that it was the same guy. So how spooky is that?

I mean he had died three months earlier, I had no idea and then when I finally knew, he’s all over the place… I can spice this story with one more detail before the grand finale of this post. Three days before I read about his death I was in a recordshop and saw the first album he published with his band, and I decided to go and get it later. For the first time in a really long time I thought about him and the other guys. This is starting to turn into Twilight Zone episode…

Last night I dreamt about him, I was on my way to go see his band play and I could’t find a parkingplace and when I finally did make my way to the gig it had turned into a memorial show because he had just died. And I left and I cried and cried and made my way into a bar in Lahti and drank and drank. But when I woke up I was feeling quite well, kinda relieved.

So what does this tell me? One line from Melissa Etheridge comes to mind, “the letting go has taken place”. I don’t think I had to let go of him, as a person, because I did not know him well enough to, well, personally mourn for him. Not really in any other aspect than the general way of feeling sad when someone dies young. But I think this was one of the moments when I let go of my youth. Of the teenage years, of the people I knew, of the person I was. And because it is me, drinking in the dream was a symbol for letting go.

I am letting go a lot of stuff, gradually. Moving on, letting some things rest. Learning to let go of things that I have no way of ever finding out why they happened. Letting go of hurt. Piece by piece.