The Last Time I Saw Rowe

After he got married in the summer of 2008—on oh-six, oh-seven, oh-eight, as he liked to say—I didn't see much of Rowe Coley, my close friend of almost three decades. To borrow a line from the end of Jack Kerouac's seminal Beat novel On the Road, “we [had] moved on to different phases of our lives'.

He had settled into a routine of commuting between his own house in Winston-Salem and his wife's in Scaly Mountain—alternately spending a week or two in each location, working at the bank in Winston with his colleagues or telecommuting remotely from what was, and yet would never entirely be, his new home in the mountains. While he loved his wife and loved being married to her, the grind of that commute eventually got the best of him.

Meanwhile, I was knee-deep in my own struggles—scratching out a living teaching part time at the community college and supplementing it with another part-time retail job and a little freelance magazine writing, all the while looking for that elusive thing called full time employment. Although I was somehow making it financially, it left little time for travel or enjoying life as I once had. Also, while he was making the adjustment to married life, I was coming to grips with the loss of Natalie, a woman I had been dating, who had died tragically in a house fire.

Ironically, a year or two later, his struggles had come to reflect my own. The bank where he worked had been bought out during the Crash of '08 and although he had survived the first few rounds of layoffs, his number inevitably came up in late 2010. Though they gave him a generous severance package, he ultimately didn't survive the layoff.

Although we talked regularly on the phone during that time, often commiserating over our respective employment situations, we would see each other only twice in 2011—once in the spring when he was in Greensboro for a job interview and we went out for a Mexican dinner, and then the final time when I visited his house in Winston in early December. He had landed a job at Western Carolina University and was there to begin the process of winding up his affairs in Winston before reporting to work in Cullowhee a week or so later.

It was a rainy late fall night when I made the half-hour drive to see him. In his typical fashion, he had called me up out of the blue and asked me to come over for dinner. And as was common, his cabinets, containing mostly condiments and canned goods, were ill-equipped to prepare us a meal, so we went out to grab a bite at one of his favorite 'greasy spoons,' a Greek restaurant—more a diner, really—near his house.

On the way there, he insisted on showing me the site of a fatal car crash that had occurred in the neighborhood earlier in the day. A vehicle, traveling at high speed, had run out of road when it failed to stop at the end of a dead-end street and had gone airborne on its way down an embankment and ended up in a city park. There wasn't much to see as all but the tiniest bits of debris had already been removed, just a few flattened saplings and marks on the ground to illustrate where it had been. Nonetheless, in his typical fashion, he ignored a perfectly good paved walkway, which he later claimed not to have noticed, and instead led me on the exact path the car had taken, down a steep, wet embankment, slippery with fallen leaves. Holding onto sapling trees for balance, he made it to the bottom without losing his footing, but I didn't.

How often had we been down that path before? Usually in such circumstances, I would get upset with him for choosing the “dog trails” instead of a more established and well-lit path. But this time, I just laughed it off, noting how emblematic it was of our friendship, and washed up as best I could in a nearby drinking fountain. There was a feeling of peace between us that evening, as though all the petty struggles and squabbles of the past had been put to rest and need not be disturbed from their slumber.

At the restaurant, we enjoyed our gyro platters and after we'd mopped up the last of our tzatziki sauce with pieces of pita bread, we returned to his house and talked about the past and the future while we watched part of an old movie on TV—Charade, starring Audrey Hepburn, Cary Grant, Arthur Kennedy, and James Coburn. We remarked at how much James Coburn resembled our mutual friend Terry, a point I reinforced by pulling up a YouTube video of one of Coburn's old Schlitz Light commercials on my new smart phone that I'd gotten a few days earlier. It was a comfortable evening, two people who had known each other for most of our lives and between whom no secrets were hid, just enjoying each other's company for what would turn out to be the final time.

In the midst of all that familiarity, there were a couple of things that set the evening apart. One was that we spent the evening sober—no booze, no weed. We had been longtime drinking and toking buddies, but the appeal of that had begun to wear off for both of us. At that point, he had been to a handful of AA meetings and was taking the first tentative steps toward a life of sobriety that ultimately eluded him. As a grateful member of Al-Anon for the previous few years, I was more than willing to be supportive. And on that particular evening, we truly didn't miss the intoxicants that had been so much a part of our adventures together over most of the previous three decades.

The other thing that was unusual was that he gave me a “Christmas present” consisting of several mementos from our past—more specifically, my past. There was a tee shirt from the college we had attended together, but from which he had transferred, an old business card from my time as a newspaper reporter in his home town, and a couple of similar odds and ends—the types of things you might expect to be returned to you after someone close to you has passed away—things that might only have meaning to you.

When we parted company a little before midnight that final evening—somewhat early by our normal standards—it was with a feeling of peace and comfort, perhaps even a bit of closure. Over almost 30 years, we had become more like brothers than friends. We'd had high adventures together, been there for each other during various low points, and on more than one occasion had totally pissed each other off and later just as totally forgiven each other. There was no denying we loved each other as only brothers can. I was aware of all of those feelings as we parted, and that's why can't ever shake the feeling that when he said goodbye to me as he walked me to his front door and watched me pull out of his yard and into the night, he was really saying farewell.

Although things were looking up for him on that December evening, as he anticipating a new job, albeit at a lower salary than the one he had recently lost, I can't help but wonder if he wasn't also contemplating and maybe even making preparations for the end he would arrive at some ten weeks later. His passing occurred exactly three months to the day later—almost two weeks after he had put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger. Ironically, he died on what would have been Natalie's birthday.

Between the last time I saw him in December and when I attended his memorial the following March, I spoke with him on the phone a few times and it was clear things were falling apart at the seams. His relationship with his wife had become strained when he'd abruptly quit his new job after just a few weeks—the physical stress of the daily hourlong commute on winding mountain roads, he said, was more than he could take. That, along with a few other demons, led him to his final and tragic solution.

In one conversation, he'd admitted to me that he had seriously contemplated suicide a couple of weeks earlier. He said he'd wanted to hang himself with an electrical cord but couldn't remember how to tie a noose. I told him I was glad he had given up on that attempt and pleaded with him to seek professional help. I heard later that he had tried at least once more before getting hold of his grandfather's pistol.

While know the survivor's guilt I have experienced—and occasionally do to this day—is quite natural, I have also known with certainty from the moment I heard the news that there was nothing I could have done to prevent it. As we say in Al-Anon, I didn't cause his problems, I couldn't control them and I couldn't cure them. Of course, that doesn't mean it doesn't hurt. That loss has affected me deeply and there isn't a day that goes by that I don't think of him and pray for those he left behind who loved him.

I also can't help but wonder what the difference was between us. There aren't any good or easy answers there. We had experienced many of the same travails in life, but, to date at least, I've been able to survive mine and move on where he could not. Maybe it's faith, maybe I was able to find something in twelve-step recovery that he didn't; there's no way to tell for sure.

They say that when you hit rock bottom, there's no place to go but up; but that's not entirely true. A lot of people bounce back and keep on keeping on but there are those unfortunate, fragile few who hit bottom and simply go 'splat'. Somehow, when I've bottomed out in life, I've found it within myself to minimize the impact, like the guy I heard about one time who jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge, changed his mind on the way down, tucked into a 'cannonball' position and survived the impact with only some bruising on his buttocks and the bottoms of his feet. But when Rowe hit his bottom, there was nothing left. Call it bad timing, bad circumstance or bad character, he just couldn't find it within himself to go on. And there, but for the grace of God, go I—and perhaps all of us.

One thing I've learned in this life—and of which I have absolutely no doubt—is that struggles of all shapes and sizes are part and parcel of life. And it is in grappling with them that our true character is shaped, much like molten steel under a blacksmith's hammer. The stresses of life—especially the act of learning and growing from them—strengthen us and make us who we are—perhaps they even make us whole.

As I look back, the struggles I was facing when I last saw my friend Rowe are now largely behind me. As new and different ones inevitably take their place, face them with the strength and wisdom gained from what once was and is now in the past, especially the knowledge that all things do eventually pass. Does this make me perfect? Does it make me superhuman? Absolutely not. I'm still the same flawed and fragile person I've always been and always will be, but I've got a few new tools in my toolbox and I can use them to face such situations in the future in a more effective and healthy manner.

No matter how bad things get in my life, I refuse to let go of the faith and knowledge that I will survive. Before going to sleep on the nights following some of my darkest days, I've said to myself as an affirmation and perhaps as a prayer: “I've made it through today and that's good. Chances are—and with God's help—I'll also make it through tomorrow and that's enough.” That's called taking it one day at a time. When it comes down to it, that's all we've got and it's all we need. The rest of life, as John Lennon observed, 'is what happens while we're making other plans'. The only thing we can do is keep making those other plans—and keep on living, one day at a time.