Weekly Writing – April 8 2023

For someone like Thomas, who had always had a particular horror of death, attending the funeral of someone close to his own age came with a shameful sense of relief.
The Grim Reaper had swung his scythe, after all, and had missed Thomas, who had always felt so singularly marked for it. Surely some time would have to pass now before he tried again.
There was no real sense in it, of course. Death was tireless. It cared as little for mourning periods as it did for age, success, poetry, and all the other bulwarks humanity tried to erect against it. But it felt, at least for an afternoon sitting in an uncomfortable pew, as if the great judgment had come and gone.
The face smiling up at him from the paper pamphlet he held, a picture of muddy newsprint quality, was older and thicker, wryer and ruddier than he had last seen it alive. He and the deceased had been close friends in university, but not so close that they had tried very hard not to drift apart afterwards. Life, indifferent as death in its own way, had taken them their own ways – only when he’d heard about Gregory’s tragic and decisively fatal motor accident had he found out the man had gone against all his confident declarations of a great life to come and had settled only a few blocks from the university to become an accountant.
Only a few of the pews were filled. Old Greg, it seemed, had been a stalwart bachelor and solitary soul, and even fewer of those who braved the podium had anything of real substance to say about him.
Thomas’s guilty relief soured as they mumbled through their eulogies. It was all that horrified him about sudden death – the idea of stuttering out as just a half-finished story no one cared to make sense of. Of everything important to him being sold or thrown out, rendered silly and pathetic without his perspective to elevate it. Greg had collected stamps, it seemed.
He left in his new sour mood as soon as propriety would allow. Even if he’d had the sentimental right to stand by the graveside, he had no desire to watch the most important part of Greg, rendered nothing but hazardous waste by a simple brake failure on a winding road, disposed of while everyone stood around and tried to think of the whole thing as holy.
He flinched at every revving engine and wail of a horn on his way home. It could happen to anyone. It could happen to him at any time. His apartment was no protection, not really, not from cancers or aneurysms or slips in the bathtub, but it shut out at least some of the most violent and immediate threats. He locked and bolted the door behind him, and noticed only then the crinkle of paper he had been heedlessly treading on.
He frowned down at the envelope someone must have slid under his door. Most of his mail went to the little box downstairs, labelled 2B to distinguish it from the honeycomb of others, so this must have been something delivered by hand instead of sent through the post. He stooped to pick it up, and his fingers turned cold and nerveless an inch before they could touch it.
There was only a name scrawled on the back of it. His name, but not a way he ever spelled it. There was only one person in the world who, in reference to an old film that Thomas’s mind fumbled and failed now to put a name to, had ever called him ‘Tommie’.
One old friend in university. Only ever Greg. Though he stood with his back to a locked and bolted door, a dozen comfortable blocks away from where the man whose handwriting marked the envelope was being buried, death suddenly seemed very close indeed.