One of the things about Aaron's death is that it has jarred me into really thinking about L's situation in a different way. I'm not sure if I mentioned this before, but L has lost his job. He claims he's not able to work, and he might lose his place to live if he doesn't come up with some way to get money.

Of course, there's still a part of me that empathizes with him. Actually, a rather large part. I don't know how bad his injury is, and I have to believe him even though I'm tempted to disbelieve him. Actually, I have to believe that it's as bad as he says it is, because otherwise he's a lot worse off than I thought he was.

The thing is that I'm worried that he's lost all hope. I've known this man for a long time, and I understand his cycles. He's always been able to pull himself out of them, but it takes longer and longer. Unfortunately, having not lived with him for over a year, I don't have access to any unspoken information about him...and the spoken information I get from him is sparse. So I'm left to gauge his mental/emotional state from the outside.

L and I have experienced the suicide and untimely deaths of friends of ours many times. He is the person who helped me to process the death of my friend/brother Michael, and the OD of Lorri. Monk's middle name is the name of L's best friend who shot himself in the head shortly before I met him, and shortly after I met him, another close friend of his OD'd. Just before Monk was born, a friend of ours was hit by a car and killed.

I was reading through zines yesterday, and I stumbled across a eulogy for another person I have known through words who committed suicide. I had forgotten about it. Buried it, I'm sure. He struggles to be remembered. His name was Paul-X. He did a zine from prison, and was a wonderfully smart, gentle, loving soul. He was, from my knowledge of him, a career criminal who had been pretty much in one jail or other from childhood. At the age of 28, he finally was free. Shortly thereafter, he checked into a mental institution under a pseudonym, climbed to the rooftop, and jumped off.

I was devestated when I read this. It's hard to lose someone you've never had a chance to physically touch, because it's difficult to really know if they knew you really loved them. I really loved Paul-X. His words warmed me, and his life gave me hope.

Another friend of mine, Bobby West, was an inmate who published a zine from death row. He was a high school drop out who had educated himself WELL while in prison. We corresponded for over 10 years, and he taught me a lot. When George W was in office, many, many prisoners were being executed. I think out of fear or curiosity or maybe a sense of "what the fuck...I'm going to die anyway." Bobby sent me a letter and asked me to describe what it was like to have sex with my boyfriend. Or something like that. I got upset with him, because that's not what our correspondence was about, and I felt that really cheapened our relationship. We stopped writing so frequently, although we did check in every now and then. The wolves were at his door.

One day, I was in a hotel room...traveling for work...channel surfing, and I happened to stop on a show about death row in Texas. I watched the second half of the show, hoping they would interview Bobby, so I could finally see what he looked like.

I saw what he looked like, but it wasn't an interview. At the end of the show, they showed pictures of all of the inmates who had been executed that year. Bobby was one of them. I cried all night.

Later, I found a site that listed the last meals of death row inmates in Texas. Bobby had a hamburger and french fries.

Why am I saying all of this? Well, mostly because all of this is what cycles through my head when I try to make sense of untimely death. I think this is what I'm attempting to short-circuit by paying extra close attention to my children and the details of the day.

But also, I think I'm preparing myself, and conserving my energy to mourn for L. Whether it's just an overblown paranoid reaction to Aaron's death or not, I feel like with L I'm watching a familiar storm cell gathering, and there's nothing I can do to prevent it. Instead, I'm trying to build a sturdy umbrella large enough to shelter myself and my children, and hoping I'm making the right choices...all the while hoping I'm wrong about the warning signs.