We met before classes started freshmen year, on a hike. We would share many more hikes - our love of nature and exploration were a strong common bond. Our foundation of friendship was built on trust and many conversations and shared experiences. I remember our adventure in San Francisco, and a young man's awe and confusion at the big city, with all its lures, glamour and forbidden sins. Here was a brilliant and strongly impressionable mind, feeling out the world, updating his reality after years of captivity in a rural Pennsylvania valley. We were finding our place in the world together; two friends who desired to understand people after a lifetime of self-imposed alienation from the human experience, with all its madness, passions, and uncertainty.
I remember all-nighters of mental communion. I was overjoyed to find a kindred spirit, one whom I could trust. As far as our expanding sensibilities would allows, we would share and probe and debate the so-called weighty matters of life.
And death.
From the earliest moments of my acquaintance with Michael Leon Rhoads, death hung conspicuously in the air, first as a mist, and later as a thick fog, so thick its paralyzing restraint could be felt.
We spoke frequently of leaving everything; leaving society, dying. We played with the thought of knowing the day of our death and how wonderful it would be to live knowing you're only a few moments away from the door. To control one's own death. Not unlike Jesus, eh? How interesting. Destruction seemed a reasonable choice: too afraid were we to give life a chance.
I remember our amazing trip to Death Valley, whose ominous foreshadow haunts me to this day. It had been a strong desire of mine for years to walk through the valley of the shadow of death. And fear nothing. Mike would come to share this fascination and obsession with the desert. It's embodiment of isolation, desolation, and death gave physical form to our troubled hearts; a landscape mirror of our discontent. On that trip Mike asked to be left in Death Valley, to walk it alone. And so at his request, I did. At the time, it seemed morbidly humorous.
Even then, death's shadow was looming. But for the time, life's rewards outweighed death's release. Mike looked for meaning and fulfillment in many things: music, writing, and painting, relating to others, caring for friends, even studying and academics. But malignant perfectionsism and self-loathing would not release their strangling grip. His best was never good enough for himself. Death was an easy escape hatch from life's torture; a simple and final solution to the problem of existence.
Sophomore year, the darkness became palpable. That year, I lived with a very depressed Mike. We called our place the "Ausland Empire," German for "Empire of Outsiders." And outsiders we felt like. Mike felt a failure at life and love and friendship. No amount of encouragement would persuade him otherwise.
His internal torment led him to seek help; salvation through counseling and therapy. But the hope faded. Despite their debilitating effect, Mike didn't want to give up destructive parts of himself. He would rather give up all to the grave. He obtained a list of the best ways to die and even then chose the method of his demise. Many nights, he came close to death. With the means in his possession, it was almost too tempting.
But hope returned, as Mike took a leave of absense to rejuvinate and later went on a summer long hike through the Oregon wilderness. At the time, he described it as his "alternative to suicide," which it most definitely was. His hike inspired me this past summer to take a similar journey. It has the same re-energizing affect for me as it did for Mike, and to him I am eternally grateful.
After the hike, things looked positive. I remember many days of exploring L.A., journeying to coffee shops, lectures, exhibitions of art and music. We both felt a new sense of maturity and independence. We discussed our feelings, aspirations, and fears in refreshingly new ways. We even began to hug; embraces I'll always cherish. I sensed a lot of growth in both of us. I felt very close to him. Over the past two years, he began writing and illustrating quite a bit; poems, prose, and paintings would gush out of him in ways he didn't expect. I encouraged my friend's interests. He had discovered a new direction, and I felt that if he gave himself to it, he'd find himself content. But satisfaction was never to be had.
Mike would always look deeper, to see the facade of false happiness. Vanity of vanities. Everything was utterly futile withing the confines of his materialist philosophy.
If all we are is matter
Than nothing really matters.
Ashes to ashes and dust to dust are all we can hope to be. Hope - that blessed word. It was hope that was missing from Mike's vocabulary.
Nihilism's ulitmate purpose came to completion in my friend. It reduced him to nothing. No hollow sentimentality would satisfy him. No relationship could make him complete.
But it was a struggle. He wanted to feel, to love, to be intimate. God, did he try. He had many friends who felt close to him, but he would open up only so far. He said life was a joke, and death its punchline. I told him not to reject hope. He told me hope was a lie.
Though he thought it absurd and incomprehensible, it was God's love, Jesus' love, which kept me alive when all seemed dark, when death's shadow would enshroud the night's lonely hours. God saved my life, as I had told Mike often. The last time we met, a day before he died, we spoke of God and love and life and death. I felt I might not see him again. As Mike and I both knew well, as we discussed even then, that last time together, our lives were a tale of two brothers, both distraught by the world, its pretenses and false promises of salvation, both seeking meaning and love.
When the appointed time came in life, each brother made a decision: to embrace God, hope, and ultimately life, or desolation, hopelessness, and death. I made my decision. And Mike made his. Sooner or later, you will make yours.
Two months ago, I lost a friend and brother I dearly loved. But I am grateful to be alive. And I hope you are also. My life is not my own; this is borrowed time, the gift of my heavenly father. I can only pray that Mike made his peace with God. And I pray that you do too.