Matt Urban collapsed on my birthday in 1995, and
lay in a coma for another week before he died. The last time I saw Matt
alive, I was curled up next to his hospital
bed, sleeping on those awful folding chairs. During the early morning hours of
March 4th, while his wife and daughter left for a necessary breakfast, I
quietly stroked his hair, and whispered
in his ear how much he meant to me.
Visitors
to the hospital were running back and forth from their cars
throughout the entire night, shielding their heads from the rain with magazines
or newspapers. Sometime during the dark hours, I could hear the unmistakable sound of ice typing out a rougher prose
against the window. I turned to look at Matty one more time because I knew I
could no longer stay awake. I was near the edge of consciousness, where all
thoughts make perfect sense and questions give way to tacit understanding.
As
the sound of the storm grew stronger, I
pictured all those frantic souls running to the lobby with soggy paper draped over the top of
their heads. I thought to myself how much the rain must love these human faces-
so very much more than puddles or cervices along abandoned roads and swelling
creeks. How each and every storm will trick us into looking up with squinting eyes, just to gather more around the parts
they seem to enjoy the most. Maybe the rain finds something in common with the
place where tears are shed and want to feel something just as we do; maybe the
storms want to be a part of us; to be anything other than the shapeless life
they have outside of these human bodies.
The endless
traffic on the highway grew quiet as it should be. And I pictured the pavement
being scrapped clean by a single piece of bread, making its way around an empty plate, sopping up all the muddy
gravy.
When I
awoke, Matty was still breathing. I
walked over to the window and turned the handle on the venetian blinds
expecting to see something ugly and mean below.
But the daylight came, one match at a time, to each branch of sycamore and
maple below covered in ice. Smoldering sweetly, tiny flames began to form, then perfectly- burning like the
tips of candles on a hundred chandeliers.
Parked
automobiles had been adorned and rounded off with the whitest frosting of snow, and each and every newly
fashioned dessert, waited beside a tall and shiny spoon, that only hours before had been a parking meter.
Coming back
into the room with tears in her eyes, his wife Jennie sighed, “Oh look Matty,
this is all for you.”
I drove home
very slowly that morning, and threw
myself into bed the moment I made it through my door. It seemed only a short
while before Jennie called to tell me Matty had passed away .
I have kept so many memories to
myself; stored away in a packaged deal with my own mortality. I owe my friend
another version of a life well lived; to speak of an addendum to his story, the
story of a life long after
the hedgerows of Normandy. And I will tell you, of this incredible
friendship; I will tell you of this incredible man- in the coming weeks and
months, but how do I begin and end a story such as this? The story of Matt Urban, my great and
enduring friend? I will try. I will try.
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| Painting by K. W. Morford. All rights Reserved. |
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