Flinn

Sometimes it is very hard to abide ... you live, laugh and love, but the scars are alwasy there and the pain takes a lot to fade away.

You people probably remember I posted this a few months ago., and in particular my last reply to comments:

Originally Posted by me

It will be long before we could heal from this, but thanks for your kind words anyways

No words have been more prophetic than those.. it is really taking time to heal from that, and the worst part is that this is the kind of pain that dwells deep inside. I mean, some of the crap of life, it makes you suffer quickly and hard, but even if it pains a lot, it goes away quite fast.. I guess those are the kind of things one can cope with easily, like loosing a relative who was old and sick and the such. But when you can't really cope with it, there's a sort of self defense mechanism that kicks in, what I would call "rationalize" it, so to say. At first it seems that everything is falling in place: "such is life", "it happens", "no one could have seen that coming" etc etc, and what you do is pushing the pain deeper and deeper, burying it. But it's a double edged sword: our subconscious is a , and it won't have us forget, not even a single moment, of our most painful wounds.
That is happening to me quite a lot recently, due to this friend and relative I recently lost.

You all know who this Dude is, I'm not at all a weak character, but no matter how strong you are, the real pain will always find a way to hit you just straight in the middle of your eyes, especially when you are defenseless: I dreamed a lot of him, almost every day.
It happened with my father as well, but while the sadness is still there when you wake up, I never really felt bad about that. This time is different, there's an uneasy feeling that follows me for a while into the day.. I dunno from what that comes from, I mean I felt pretty sad (and I even cried once, after a particularly hard dream), but it's like there's more.. maybe it's just fear that something like that would happen to me as well, or even guilt for not doing all that I thought I would have been doing for his family or I don't know really. Either case, it sucks.

So I decided I had to do something more, or at the least try. "Helping" his family is easier said than done, I mean money-wise we already did a whip-round and we collected quite a good amount of money; sure it's nothing compared to what he could have earned with his work in the next 20 years or so, but it's something anyways. The problem is staying in touch with his wife, who is not Italian and never really integrated with the small local community. I know that some shiny soul found her a new job, and if we meet (or rather if she meets my wife and my daughter) there's always a polite and kind interaction, but it never reaches the second step, such as having a meal together and the like. I don't think that that can be helped at all, my real fear is that one day she will decide to leave and of course bring her daughter with her, and that will take away from us even the last living memories of our beloved friend. Time will tell.

What I could really do was to put up a token to his memory, something people would see and make them talk about him and remember him... I told already that we used to meet and drink at the local bar, and he had his own exclusive sitting place there, so at first we did hang his favorite football t-shirt (from when he was still playing) on the wall above his seat, with his nickname on it (Boe, which actually means bull in local dialect, this because of his roaring character and strong body) and a few days ago I finally forced myself into writing a memento about him, which I later had engraved on a brass plaque and hanged below his t-shirt. It says (translated):

"You, who are sitting here, know that this was Boe's spot
You, who are sitting here, remember him
Remember his courage, his strength, his kindness, his honesty
Remember how he never backed away, how he was always there for us
Remember how he never failed us, how he was the best of our family
Remember how he did not fear pain, how he faced the death
You, who are sitting here, think of him and drink to his memory
You, who are sitting here, rise your glass and shout: to the Boe!"