Peter is Dead

Peter is dead, and I feel sad and deliriously happy. Triumphant. As if I had won a life-long contest.

Why is this?

Or perhaps “Why are these?”

Why do I feel sad? Probably because Peter is, was, my age. We entered university in the same year and spent four years at the same residential college. That Peter has died, is dead, means that I am now in the waiting line at the front of the ante-room, not just driving by or in the parking lot.

If Peter is dead, then my time can not be far away, although publicly I maintain that I want another twenty years yet of this life. I am having too much fun, still. Even writing about death is fun compared to the alternative.

I assume but do not yet know how Peter died. It might have been a collision in traffic or it might have been a disease, or it might have been a pump that failed during a game of squash. Peter played squash at College.

I did not play squash at college. Squash was a game for rich people, or at least, for people whose father had enough money to buy their son a squash racquet. Peter played squash with, or against, Mike, Jeff, and Bob. I went by myself, jogging for an hour around the suburbs.

Peter went home on weekends, for his parents lived only three miles away. He could have walked home in an hour had he not had a car. I went home every three months or so, by train, through a long night, to a town I hardly knew, three hundred miles away.

In four years at college I can say that I did not associated with Peter and his clique, except that my “year” sat at the same table in the dining-hall.

When university studies were finished I went off to be a programmer-in-training and an itinerant life as a jobbing programmer. OK, it was a bit better than that, but not much. My dad did not know directors of large companies, nor did he have any idea of commercial life. My Dad was not around (he was after all three hundred miles away) and too wrapped up in his own affairs to think about his son’s career.

I left that college and, in sixty years, never met Peter again.

I saw his photo each quarter in the magazine that was printed for ex-students. He was on The Council or The Board, or else President of something related to College. He was standing next to someone slightly older than him, someone who wore a nice tie and had the look of a KMG, KCMG or a GCMG

If I feel sad because Peter is dead it can only mean that my time is drawing closer.

Then why am I deliriously happy?

Because I am alive and Peter is not. I did not hate Peter. Envied him and his head-start in life. I assumed that with his parental contacts he shot to the top of the firm, and then started at the second-from-top in the next firm and grasped the top rung, over and over again. I assumed that he had the beautiful wife and 2.3 children, the superb house in the posh suburbs where I used to jog each night. The Works.

But whatever he had, Peter does not have it now. Cremated or rotting, he has none of it.

And me? I have a smattering of French from my time in the Île de France forty years ago, and a sprinkling of Spanish. I can compost and make useful things out of logic.

And I can type on a computer keyboard, as I type these words.

I Rejoice!

Peter was described at high school level in terms that were applied to me - I scored more distinctions in the matriculation exam than any previous student at Swanleigh, so we were well-matched at that time.

Peter married about the time I did, and that marriage ended about the time my first marriage ended. Peter started a new relationship about the time that I did. Peter worked in the UK, North America, and Asia, as did I.

For sixty years I have assumed that Peter had it all. Truth is he lived a life somewhat similar to mine. Our paths might have been seen to cross, had we stayed in touch.

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