Eulogy

The Life and Suicide of Rutherford Jones

His name was Rutherford Jones, but they called him Ruthy for short. A tubby rugged boy with a pimply face and hair one could only call tawny, which would make a world of sense if he weren’t, well, Black. Together with his wide set nose, bulging waistline and knock-kneed gait, he inspired so much ridicule that, on one hot summer day in the spring of ’03, he went running in the darkness for so long he spent the whole night in intermittent flushes and vomited anything he put down his throat. So goes the story of Ruthy, a young bronze man with middling intelligence and nervous shyness that kept him from keeping company with what he called ‘the fairer sex’. Though why they were fairer, he never could quite tell, he had only read it somewhere and was wont to copy things—just like his father, his mother often said. The same year he graduated, he lost her for good and stared into the open pit where her body would be interred with not a tear on either of his cheeks and would later go on to share anecdotes about her with strangers at parties. His first actual job in ops at a startup in ’04 lifted him out of precarity into something resembling a real life, then real love that could weather the recession of ’08 but not long enough to see the turn of the decade. Just about the time ’13 rolled around, he had lost his umpteenth job due to sheer lack of ambition, and by ’15 had spent his days ruminating over things he could neither change nor wanted to by any means in what seemed to be a willed perpetuity. His AA sponsor would tell him about serenity being what one finds when they accept what cannot be changed—a platitude he found laughable given what he called the balance of things. By ’17 he took to buying love for the first and last time and laid awake on the cusp of 11pm in the discomfort of his own home wondering what had become of his life. He recalled the distant voice of his mother and thought deeply about the father he never knew in that sullen darkened room, slowly becoming conscious of the fatigue he’d have to carry with him to work the following morning. Later on that same year, he went to visit his only friend at a well known high rise just south of the main thoroughfare in the heart of the city, and instead of making his way to the 17^th floor, apartment 193, opted for the rooftop, hellbent on flying off the edge to see if it’d change things. It did. He hit the ground with a thud, and disintegrated in what could only have been a painful apprehension of oblivion, so it was said by the solitary bystander bearing witness to his unhoused viscera, hitherto unknown. At his sparsely attended funeral, at which they had to keep the casket closed, dimly spiritual platitudes about his good qualities were recited by a Methodist priest who only knew the dates around his birth, death, and the grim circumstances attending to the latter. Rutherford Jones, 1987-2017—MHDSRIP.