Some Final Thoughts

This week of mourning for Acidman is drawing to a close. By all accounts I've come across, his send-off - the services, the gatherings afterwards - were just right, fine and fitting tributes that he would have approved of and enjoyed. That's some unusually good luck.

Probably the kind of good luck that people make.

As the week wore on, among the blog eulogies for this man I never knew were more fine and fitting writings. I saw little to none of people pretending he was never a jackass. Among the ones that spoke most to me, and to some others, were these:

Kelley at Suburban Blight, http://www.suburbanblight.net/archives/002415.php#comments
Juliette at Baldilocks, http://baldilocks.typepad.com/baldilocks/2006/06/robert_smith.html
Steve at Hog on Ice,
http://www.hogonice.com/2006/06/why_i_read_gut_rumbles.html
Rube at You Bitch - a very funny piece called The New Guy,
http://www.youbitch.org/mt/archives/000643.php
Nancy at My Garden Spot,
http://nancysgardenspot.blogspot.com/2006/06/loss-another-one_27.html
Desert Cat, http://desertcat.blogspot.com/2006/06/requiem.html
Acidman's excellent friend of 30 years, Catfish, http://www.catfish.blog-city.com/all_about_the_service_for_my_buddy_robbie_the_bowlegg_smith.htm
and the woman he'd had his last serious connection with - including the subsequent blogdramas - Livey, Northwoods Woman, http://northwoodswoman.blogspot.com/2006/06/i-cant-sleep.html

Kelley is Livey's blogmom, and Acidman was her blogdad.

Would you like to do something to honor Rob's memory? Make a donation to the American Diabetes Association. The complete info is here:
http://www.catfish.blog-city.com/do_this_for_my_buddy_rob_smith.htm

Catfish, who is spoken of as having no filters - and if you read him for a minute, you'll see why - has been a beacon of strength and graciousness throughout. I read post after post of thanks to him for this, for being such a rock in his own time of great loss. This side of Catfish, this pure and true Southern gentleman, might surprise folks from other parts, or any people who are lazy and ignorant enough to bore their own selves by only looking at what's immediately apparent in another human being.

I see so many interesting accounts of the contradictions inherent in this Acidman. Often I see him called *a true Southern gentleman,* yet I know a true gentleman does not call women cunts and black people niggers. The examples of his tenderness and harshness, his superb advice and his foolish choices, abound. He was - and also, he wasn't.

We're all a mass of contradictions. Perhaps one thing that drew others to him so, that sense of being *larger than life,* was because in him those contradictions were so very large.

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Speculations on the cause of his demise have been surprisingly few and courteous. People are curious, and I myself don't consider this automatically inappropriate. Most of what I've seen fits with my own thoughts on how it occurred. While, as I said, the jury's still out, I think it might have gone something like this:

We have here a man whose health has tanked, whose bad choices are starting to overwhelm him, and who's seeing that the hope for improving many of these things is not so good. While he recently survived a perforated ulcer and subsequent peritonitis and gut surgery, I can tell you very well that curing serious infections can fool you. I won't bore you with any of my own experiences there just now - no, I will later! - but it's quite possible that it recurred.

I think it was on Catfish's blog a month or two ago that the subject of pain treatment came up, and Catfish said Robbie had been throwing up from pain. That happens. But at that rate? I wondered at the time if it weren't at least partly due to the belly complications acting up again.

Add the damage to his liver from years of alcoholism, to his entire system from prostate cancer and its difficult cure, a family history of early demise. Added up, I think it made it possible for him to just...quit.

I don't think this man wanted to die so much as he didn't want to keep on living in the condition he was in. There is a difference.

On reading of his death, my first reaction was that he wouldn't have deliberately done this without seeing his beloved Grandmommie first. His *suicide post* said he hadn't seen her for a month and really needed to. Catfish pointed out other things he would have done too, like saying goodbye to his closest friends. His beloved daughter was coming to visit in a week. The timing was off.

And he posted again after the *suicide post.* That would not be characteristic of most peoples' suicide notes, surely. It was characteristic of Acidman to rant some about wanting to die; it wasn't the first time by any means. If he was so sick he was about to die from natural causes, writing that rant in his extremis would make sense.

Livey, an astute health professional, talked about the connection between physical and mental health. She put it in such a way that it rang eerie bells for me about what I'd just posted about my cats saving my life.

You see, if you're really sick, and you don't want to keep on living like that but you also don't want to commit suicide, you don't have to kill yourself.

All you have to do is give up.

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Was he really, at heart, an atheist? There's another question being bandied about a bit. A few who knew him have said he acknowledged a God in rare private moments. That his argument wasn't against God's existence, but against the turns his own life had taken. That he was mad at God, and we don't get mad at something that doesn't exist.

From what little I've read of him, I'll put in another two cents' worth: he seemed angry at the charlatans who prey upon believers, and angry at those who try to force others to live by their own religious beliefs. Those are both angers that I share.

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As I've said, Acidman and I never knew each other, and probably never would have. Not just because I am, and must remain, a hermit; we were simply too different in too many ways that matter. I dislike being around the sort of train-wreck life that so fascinated his many readers. Personal taste. And while I certainly can't begin to guess, it wouldn't surprise me if he'd have had a similar reaction to me - though perhaps not on a train-wreck issue. A boredom issue, maybe!

Catfish, you and I don't know each other either, and for my recluse life and other reasons too, I expect we never will. But that doesn't mean I have any less regard for you. I can honestly say that I truly do not wish to add to your sorrow in your loss of your loved and loving friend.

But I've been grinding my teeth down, keeping my mouth shut, holding back an intense fury at something you and Rob and I do have in common: terrible pain, and terrible obstacles at getting it treated.

I know, absolutely, that Rob Smith's problems getting treatment had nothing to do with any of his friends or family. It had everything to do with people who think they have a right to impose their moral code on others. The sort of people who a friend of mine calls *health Nazis* - they'll kill you to save you from smoking cigarettes.

Or, too often, to relieve their guilt or anger over a friend or family member who died of a drug overdose. You see, if they can sue the prescribing doctors, and make very stringent laws against pain meds, they can pretend that their dead loved ones weren't really responsible for their own actions.

To the extent they added to the burdens of Rob Smith's life, added to his suffering, to his losing hope and wanting to give up, those people are, to my mind, very close to being murderers.

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I see I've spent a quiet week on my blog, mulling over all the events surrounding the demise of this man I was pretty much uninterested in. More than anything else, I can now say this for sure: I can see why so many others were very much interested in him and the things he had to say. I can see not just why people got angry at him, but why so many of the same people held him in such high regard.

Thank you all for listening.

I'm done.