Understanding Aaron With Help From Emerson

Behind us as we go, all things assume pleasing forms, as clouds do far off. Not only things familiar and stale, but even the tragic and terrible are comely, as they take their place in the pictures of memory. - Spiritual Laws, Ralph Waldo Emerson

The terrible days of the late summer and fall of 2003 took their place in the landscape of memory. From a distance and in comparison, the war waged against life and death from drugs, deceit, and recklessness were becoming less threatening than clouds. Until last week.

In December 2003 we literally pulled Aaron out of the clutches of death in the darkest hour of the night and hustled him 2000 miles away to a safe place in Oregon. We lived for 13 months without Aaron around a few weekly phone calls, a quarterly trip out for a two day visit, and two-one week home visits. In the nine months since Aaron died, I have had the deep thought about was it the right thing to do. Should we have continued the battle on the home front? Would Aaron have pulled out of the spiral on his own? Was it worth it?

On February 9th, I witnessed an event attended by some of the players from 2003. These players are losing the war. They're losing their opportunity. They're losing their rich minds. As a friend of mine said of a similar struggle, "Pain is the price you pay and the seeds you sow when you pursue self-centered pleasure." I've done that too. With help from Aaron I began to change my life. These warriors can do the same.

The days of darkness are no longer faded into beauty in my mind. The sharp, jagged edges, temporarily dulled by a file of contrast, cut deep into my heart again. Seeing the shattered remains, hearing the self deceit tinged voices of the walking wounded brought the ugliness into full focus. Broken and breaking dreams litter the roads and cemetaries.

On Tuesday, February 7th, I talked to friend of Aaron's who walked the walk with him. I was wondering if my memory of Aaron had faded into a fantasy. Was the Aaron I remembered just what was left after I scrubbed the memory clean? This young man knew only the post Mount Bachelor Aaron. He never saw the high school athlete, the up and down high school student, the confused, angry teenager in the middle of the war. This friend knew Aaron the way he was. He told me Aaron was about living a healthy life. A high from drugs was a temptation, not a passion. Aaron stumbled a couple of times after MBA but he didn't stay down. His friend recalled how Aaron was dissapointed in himself for succumbing to temptation. But, he noted, Aaron knew exactly what to do to get up out of the hole. He admitted his transgression, took the heat, and went back to doing right things.

Aaron was all too human of a teenager. But, his life did not burn bright from a fuel of drugs and alcohol. Aaron's soul was his engine. His mind was full of thoughts of nature's spirit, happiness, and serenity through freedom. Aaron wished to see an equality in happiness. To Aaron, success was overcoming the next hurdle and not harming people along the way.

I vividly remember how Aaron walked. His head was often down in thought. (The ancestor of every action is a thought.) His gait was original; a stride and a bounce with angled long limbs covered in crumpled, loose fitting clothes.

Aaron was born 105 years after Emeron died and Aaron related to his writingvery well. Emerson wrote: To think is to act...Be and not Seem... Real action is in silent moments. The epochs of our life are not in the visible facts of our choice of a calling, ...but in a silent thought by the wayside as we walk; in a thought which revises our entire manner of life, and says, "Thus hast thou done, but it were better thus."

"My children", said an old man to his boys scared by a figure in the dark, "my children, you will never see anything worse than yourselves." Essays and Poems by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Spiritual laws p 163

Praying that some will honor their friend with thoughts that grow into healthy action,

Tom