Page 185 - Chasing Danny Boy: Powerful Stories of Celtic Eros

The Lake of Being Human: Dead Sea Fruit 175

until recently—when it had come merely to amuse him—how
every life, no matter how careful or willful or brilliant or sad
like Lar’s or my father’s was doomed by chance which was not
the same as Sorcha’s predestination.
Ruden seemed wise. I did not feel uncomfortable or out of
my depth with him. He fit right in with my other, even older
friends, the stylized hippies, whose intellectualism did not
faze me. What Ruden ultimately did for me was open me up
for the first time to the absolute acceptance of my impulses.
The summer day we came across the thermal-clad suicide
in the lake was almost the first anniversary of our meeting.
Earlier that day, Ruden had finally made clear to me that my
desiring to continue on with him was “really,” he said, “quite
totally a useless lust.” He finally persuaded me he could never
really love someone younger, that despite a year’s infrequent
but often intense physicality between us, nothing permanent
could come from it. “You are at least owed,” Ruden said, “com-
plete honesty in this.” With our intermittent intimacy ended,
I hoped to continue our companionship. “People,” Ruden said,
“always want to remain friends.”
Swimming out into the lake, rejected and dismissed and
disappointed, I felt the cool current pulling me in the direc-
tion of my father’s lonely journey into the world. Sorcha had
warned, “Remember, there exists a future time when we are
all already dead.” When first I heard them, those were fear-
less words.
Nevertheless, all that summer we continued to swim in
the reedy section of Lough Nasool where we had come across
the floating dead body of a man, dressed only in his thermals,
who had embraced death in the middle of the night after his
only daughter had abruptly run off for England with a lover.
His child, he had often boasted to anyone in the town who
would listen, had taken after him, and her image, as a very
young girl, he gripped in his dead hand.
As we continued to swim there, we fed each other chunks
of what I told Sorcha was our dead-sea fruit, our dead-sea his-
tories. Eventually I told Ruden I never grieved for my father.
I had always toyed with ideas of how and why and when my
father might die. In fact, I had always considered him dead,
but that, late as it was, late in the summer, and for what it
was worth, a dull sympathy had actually begun to form for
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