Ghost Story

For years I worried about what would happen to Shannon if anything happened to me. He barely made it through a few of my visits to Tennessee without drifting into psychosis, so my being gone forever would have pushed him over the edge, almost certainly. And not only would he have been crazy, he would have lost his major income stream: me.

We never had "my money" or "his money"; it was always "our money". But without mine in the mix, he would have been hard-pressed to make ends meet. He was the beneficiary of multiple life insurance policies, but that money would have run out.

I didn't know if he would have been able to cope well enough to keep functioning on any level.

I don't have to worry about any of that now, but the question still haunts me because of something that happened years ago: I saw an old man who looked like an older version of Shannon standing on a traffic island asking for money. I keep wondering if that was something he might have been spared from.

I don't want to say that I saved him: we saved each other. But I was the one thing he could count on. That I would be there day after day, whether he was sane or not, in good health or not. I don't know that he had that assurance from anyone else or that anyone else understood him enough to care on that level.

I wonder what happened to that old man. I look for him, but I've never seen him since. What I remember most about that chance encounter is his shoes: from a distance, they looked just like the ones Shannon wore. Up close, they were tattered. Shannon's were never tattered.

Those shoes haunt me more than anything.

That, and the image seared in my brain of someone who looked like a possible picture of the future for the man I loved.

I always knew that Shannon would probably die before me because of the age difference (14 year), but I never expected him to do so this soon. His death devastated me, but I can take a small (very small) comfort in knowing that he was never reduced to begging for money on a traffic island.

It wasn't as large a leap as some might think.

In the end, I took care of him, as I always had. I advocated for his best interests when he couldn't do so for himself, both in life and death.

Still, that old man haunts me.