Ross Nickle (or Death: The High Cost of Living*)

Death is quick.

Back in Mississauga, my good friend Ross Nickle was struck down in an instant. His story is one so common as to be cliché: Loving husband and father of one, seemingly perfectly healthy, dies suddenly sitting at home on the computer on a Monday night.

Just like that, it’s done and he’s gone.

But, Death is also slow.

I joke that I’m living in the future over here in Japan, but news of this death only reaches me now, when it is already in the distant past. March 22^nd. Two weeks to the day, for me. In our digital age, it happens upon me in an email so brief and strange as to resemble comedy. I accuse it of being a bad joke—April Fools lost somewhere in the complications of email and time changes—so I check facebook for proof of life. And, sure enough, your profile is your pulse, and Ross’ has been showing signs of death for days: filled with a litany of eulogies from his friends, each eerily addressed to him in the second person:

“Ross, you will…”

“Ross, you were…”

“Ross, you always…”

And I am faced with another reality of Japan for the first time.

People have gotten sick while I’ve been over here, and I’ve contemplated having to make returns for them should situations turn dire. People have died while I’ve been over here, the sad outcomes of long, old-aged declines. In those events, I’d felt the distance between me and Canada growing. However, those were, essentially, all warnings. They all gave me time to react if I needed to: time to say things that needed to be said. They were conclusions slowly drawn.

This is a fragment. This is a story that ends mid senten

What’s more, I am too late for this by an order of magnitudes. Ross’ death is now past tense. He has died; he was mourned; he was buried. No matter how many planes I jump on, no matter how the paradigms of datelines can land me in Canada an hour after I left Japan, none of it can bend time back two weeks plus a day.

Yes, it's a truism of wishing I had made more time and wishing I had said what I’d always meant to, but I maintain that the frustration of it all is compounded significantly by being so far away: mentally just as much as physically. As his friend Norm informs me when I question him on not telling me all this when he added me on Facebook, this news was sitting, waiting for me, on Ross’ profile for two weeks. However, I was too caught up in all of this Japanification to ever notice it. I now wonder what earth-shattering things I might discover should I go looking at all of your profiles…

And here’s one more thing while we’re on the topic of online presences. For those of you familiar with the terminology, had Ross and I not lived so close to one another, he surely would have been another of my internet boyfriends. We were both mixed up in the same dorky worlds, and now, as the one from those worlds who knew him best, it falls to me to go out and inform them of his death. Should that seem like some meager thing in your eyes, then I would tell you that you know little of the worlds that exist out in the digital cosmos; know little how someone like me or like Ross can grow to be many times our size and extend our reach to touch many more lives around the world than we ever could have hoped to in the worlds of flesh and bone. That’s not a boast; that’s a truth. His passing will happen there, again, tomorrow when I have to tell them, just as it happened again for me today, and how it happened initially for his family and friends two weeks ago.

Eventually I want to say more about Ross here, as it seems as good a place for it as any, but for now this is all I’ve got.

* It should be noted that I stole the alternative title for this from a Neil Gaiman comic of the same name. I take no responsibility for the man’s brilliance.