Eulogy for a Bad Man

He was not missed.

Indeed, there was much laughter in the back rows at his wake, now that he was no longer there to enforce a grim obedience. We felt lightened, free, emboldened though our future was anything but certain. But of this we were sure: he was gone, and would never be a matter of any importance or of any consequence whatsoever in our lives again.

We mentioned all the crazy things that happened; crazy, now, yeah-we-can-say-that-now, but heart-sickening during the times that they happened. The late nights, the early mornings, the unscheduled conferences, the chewing-outs, the pressures to do the wrong things. Was he born mean, or did he just become that way? That was another topic we were divided on, with the majority of us, however, affirming that it really didn’t matter one way or the other. He was now gone, forever.

How much time and energy he wasted, or caused to be wasted, we realized, at the bar after the funeral, how much pain and distress he caused scratching out a couple of decades of life. Was it all worth it? Perhaps, one of us wondered aloud, perhaps there were charities we were unaware of, some fellow human being or beings, somewhere, anywhere, that benefited from his love – His love? No, his money (on that point we all agreed). But none could name any names or point to any persons.

We laughed now that the routine memorial service washed away into the past. No more wondering what he thought, mimicking how he stood, how he walked, how he talked. No more predicting the sourly unpredictable. No more sleepless nights agonizing over t’s that might not have been crossed nor of lower-case j’s that might have escaped dotting. No more. No more. Oh, it feels so good to say those two words. We held drinks up in the air: beers, whiskies, flutes of champagne, and chanted the new mantra of freedom: No more.

There was a lot of money to be divided up, after the firesale, after the circling sharks. Always was in situations like these. But we all knew who’d get most of the slices of pie: the lawyers. None of us thought we’d factor into any of that, and on that account we ultimately were right. But it didn’t matter. A couple of months, a couple of years: at the end, we all were doing all right doing something else. Our little business venture faded into that wing of the cerebrum reserved for faded memories. The mental and psychic wounds healed, mostly from inattention now that we’d moved on.

In the end, no one missed him. At least, no one we knew. Whether that in itself was to be pitied or not, we could not tell. In any event, we soon stopped thinking about it, and about him.