when Ed poured the orange juice

 when Ed poured the orange juice

      This was a mystery we talked over repeatedly without ever coming close to really answering our questions. Those mortal inquiries are now just doubled with the crossing over of my good buddy to the other side of whatever it is waiting for us all. We experienced death with our fathers in 1992 but that was to be expected and accepted as part of the tapestry we described over and over. The great joys we were able to experience were balanced by the losses we had to survive like the ends of BC and John's grand excursion. It was a pleasant Spring day in  April of 2007 when Greg and I received a strange phone calls from Nick Caskey who was worried about the failure of Ed Carroll to show up for work. Nick, went to Ed's condo and was preparing to enter his home because responses were lacking from inside. Greg and I communicated our forboding expectations and minutes later Nick confirmed that Ed had been found unconscious at his desk chair with a glass of orange juice and stubbed out cigarette in front of him. Mortality had snuck up on us to become an unwanted part of our lives. While we got together and talked we knew there was little hope for our great pal. After the decision was made to let him go it was one of the rare times I heard Greg cry. It was in the form of a gasp that came from deep inside the love he had for a truly irreplaceable friend. We talked about the mystery of Ed's last moments and what it was like for him that morning. There was a damp towel on the bed from a shower, he was in his underwear, getting ready for work and then the juice. Was it a headache and blackness or just a void. We never stopped talking about this ominous day and how we knew Ed was just the first of many of us to enter the unknown. Whenever I played the theme from American Beauty by Thomas Newman we called it "when Ed poured the orange juice" and listened in silence, imagining the last moments of our happy lives. No matte how much you put up a front, life is never the same when you endure such a loss. Tim joined Ed and now Greg himself has taken the final voyage. I am left to ponder this cessation of sensation alone.