It seems that mortality is around me everywhere these days. Relatives left and right are failing, and a few days ago, my sister-in-law’s mother passed away. I have many poems about death and dying, because I have had a lot of people die in my life — most specifically, a lot of peers. Over time, it happens to everyone, of course, but I had three or four deaths like this happen before graduating high school.

Over time, of course, our brains are cruel things: they blur details, they preserve memories of memories, and we lose people twice over: first the loss of the person themselves, and then the loss of the real memory. You could even count that third moment, that instant when the person’s death makes of them something other than what they were: a giant stumbling rock of grief or dismay or shock or horror or even fear, obscuring the person they really were behind our emotional reaction.

This is a poem about memory. Specifically, it is about remembering Ed Schroeder, who was a friend in college — not a close one, but a friend nonetheless. He was a theater geek, specializing in lighting, and he died electrocuted while working on his senior obligation play. Kristen and I were gone from college by then, and we got the typical phone call.

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