Jimmie

A few days ago, I finished up an essay I wrote about a man I met in the woods one night while on homeless outreach and yesterday he died. He was tall and substantial, a good looking guy with great confidence and bravado but many bad circumstances, some that happened to him and others that he made happened. But, I did not know him. I just knew people who knew him. I had only met him once or twice.

He had many terrible ailments which, finally, taken together, ended his life and the volunteers and professionals who knew him felt a great loss. I didn’t feel the loss in this way because I didn’t really know him and I also feel that death is sometimes a gift if someone is suffering and cannot be made well. That seemed to have been the case for him. It seems wicked to say one is glad for someone who escapes great pain and the dread of dying so I won’t say that.

I will say this. This man has stayed stuck in my head for a long time. So much so that it’s taken over a year to craft an essay that conveyed how I felt the first time I met him in his camp in the woods. There is no good explanation for this, no way to describe how he was different from other men I had met, no set of reasons why he was unique or remarkable. That he has stayed in my head all this time is, I suppose, just a fluke, just happenstance.

Some people you meet are like that. They get in your head and stay there, sometimes forever. There is no rhyme or reason for this. It’s a look, it’s the light, it’s what was said, it’s the ten thousand questions with no answers, it’s the feeling of walking out of the woods an ever-so slightly different person. It can’t be explained and there’s no point in trying.