Allan MacDonell - Now That I Am Gone: A Memoir Beyond Recall

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Copyright 2018 by Allan MacDonell

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Set in Dante

epub isbn : 9781644280232

Publishers Cataloging-in-Publication data
Names: MacDonell, Allan, auhtor.
Title: Now That I Am Gone: A Memoir Beyond Recall / Allan MacDonell
Description: First Trade Paperback Original Edition | A Barnacle Book |
New York, NY; Los Angeles, CA: Rare Bird Books, 2018.
Identifiers: ISBN 9781947856202
Subjects: LCSH MacDonell, Allan. | Music journalistsBiography. | JournalistsUnited StatesBiography. | JournalistsUnited StatesBiography. | Death. | Reincarnation. | BISAC BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs
Classification: LCC ML423 .M33 2018 | DDC 780.92dc23

To Mom and Dad, for everything.

Nobodys old in heaven. And nobody wears glasses.
God and Jesus light up heaven. It never gets dark.
Its always bright.

Todd Burpo, Heaven Is for Real

Contents

Deaths Foreword

Five Stages of Schmaltz

T heres a door at the end of a hall. Its marked private. But no one can keep me out of this club. The ranks of the dead, it turns out, are open to all comers. Everybodys a prospect. Rich and poor, smart and stupid, ugly and plain, wallflower, shrinking violet, late bloomer, apple of the eye, we all go sooner or later. Death appears to present itself as the ultimate common denominator. An extinguishing moment is the thing that unites us all.

Unfortunately, or maybe not so unfortunately, dying separates us in its universal process. Deaths approach isolates us more completely than anything else that has come before it in this life. We may all be in this together, but youll leave on your own, which is how some of us lived all along.

As a kid, as an adult, right up until the end of me hanging in here, Ive displayed trivial variances. I scale toward obliviousblind to so many obvious, crucial behavioral cues shared among the general populace. Still, I notice discrepancies between me and any of you who are not me. I unravel the mysteries of life a little slower than most of you do, or a little earlier, or not at all. Never right on pace. The rest of you and I, weve been this way all my life. Consequently, Im not a joiner. Ill hang back. Im not complaining. Ive kept myself company.

But theres no turning back the fact that Ive been born, spun into a cycle of life. The cycle includes a few nonelective twists. For instance, that one final mandatory and universal turn of human events. In the approach to death, we all become the other.

Rally around the gravely sick or hope-to-die initiate all you want. Shave your head in solidarity, but dying people dont fit in. Savvy party planners exclude the terminally ill from all popular festivities, until that time-honored time-ending gathering at which the expired other will be the center of attention, the guest of honor, and not present.

Now that Ive passed on, left us, passed away, passed over, add euphemism to taste, now that I am dead, I have pledged the worlds most inclusive fraternity. Membership has changed my life in several significant ways. Before I delve into all that, lets clear out a few common misconceptions regarding our last and eternal condition:

1. You wont be hearing from me again. This is it. I wont send down any messenger angels bearing cryptic instructional or inspirational dispatches from the great beyond.
2. Dont ask me for any favors. I havent the heart to pass along messages to your sorely missed loved ones. My commitment to absolute nothing leaves me no time to track down the lost dogs of your childhood.
3. Nobody you know knows where Ive gone. You will never meet a breathing soul who can tell you what I am about or what I am not about. No occupant of your planet or user of your Internet is positioned to share an informed opinion on what I am capable of or incapable of doing at my current place or non-place.
4. Everyone you meet cannot contact me. I am taking no calls.
5. I have no unfinished business. My work there, where you are, is done.

A Few Deaths I Have Known
and Some I Dreamed

I n a way, the end of individual existence does not come out of nowhere. Previews abound, like coming attractions for a movie you have no intention of seeing. The void ahead is introduced fairly early on, and youre face-to-face with it, now and again, from then on out. Id been walking home from school, happy just to be doing something I was not supposed to do. I was following the bad example of a kid two or three years older than me. This was so long ago, neither one of us had even learned to say fuck yet.

Id crested the top of the hill behind the parish house. A kid of seven could look up across the church road and farther out, above a cluster of evergreens that hid the house that sheltered my family, and his eyes would settle upon an ocean backdrop. Beyond where I lived, a steep descent of side streets bottomed out at train tracks, a pebbled shore, and the sea. The far-eyed kid on his way home from school could gaze upon a mild edge of the Pacific and follow that flat, blue-steel mirror to its outer limits, where it slices into the horizon. If that little boy stared into the big picture, he would see an infinite vista so sky blue that the wind took the blueness for a taunt and had smeared glowing streaks of cloud across it.

I wasnt looking toward the horizon. A white delivery vans tires hissed on the wet, black roadway. My companion and I stood safely off the pavement, innocent and still. The vans tires splashed through water left by the rain.

Our town was called White Rock, perched beside the sea outside Vancouver on the west coast of Canada. We stood on thick tufts of fat wild grass, a vibrant green testimony to rain being always in the forecast.

The van slowed at a cross street, and the kid, my mentor, made the first move. I was in action right behind him. We yanked clumps of grass out of the soft, wet earth. Clods of mud stuck to the twined roots. The delivery van idled at a stop sign. Without pausing to look both ways, my mentor and I ran into the road. We flung our green mud grenades at the back of the van. Two starbursts of filth exploded on the white paint.

Satisfaction! We scrambled into a roadside ditch, digging up more ammunition.

The truck skidded and swerved. The driver had mashed his brakes without considering the rain-slick steepness of the street. His rig spun half around and, to my eyes, looked as if it might slide sideways through the intersection, top the cross-street ridge, and tumble into the big ocean at the bottom of the drop.

Allan, get away! yelled my mentor. We ran.

Ill fuck you buggers up! The driver was out of the truck. He sounded angry and was in pursuit. I was galloping. I didnt stop to look at the driver. He sounded like an adult, and hed spotted us.

My friend and I split up. I didnt want to run alone. Splitting up was the bigger kids idea. I hesitated, and my friend threatened me with a face punch, so I took off on a tangent. I slid my scrawny limbs and jug head beneath hedges, through gateways and between bramble bushes. No grown man could follow in my tight squeezes.