The Hopeless Fight of The Raging Bull

It's been 2 weeks, 3 days, 29 hours and 15 minutes since my best friend Chris died. Or, at least, it's been that long since I found out he was dead. It was quarter-to-midnight when I found this out and, I was laying in bed tossing and turning half asleep when my phone began violently vibrating against the glass of my bedside table. In the darkness, I fumbled around for my phone, picked it up and glanced at it; my eyes struggling to adjust to the brightness of the screen. It was a phone call from an unknown number and I sighed at the prospect of some scam caller waking me up while I was dozing off and I tried in vain to fall back asleep. It vibrated again, same number; I declined almost instantaneously. Then it rang a third time, same number again. Still assuming it was nothing, but eager to put this to rest, I picked up the phone; "Hello" said a solemn voice on the other end.

If I was still half-asleep at this point, I fully woke up immediately; I knew the voice - it was Angie, an old college friend who me and Chris used to hang out with near-daily, but who I hadn't seen or spoken to for over a year now. "It's about Chris" she said, a hollowness running through her voice, "I....I don't know how to tell you this, but there was a car accident and...", what could only have been a few seconds silence - but felt like minutes - passed, "he's dead."

I moved the phone away from my ear and down onto the table, as if by being unable to hear Angie that would somehow make the news she had delivered to me less true. As the reality of what had happened kicked in, all I could hear suddenly was a high-pitched buzzing while my vision began to blur as if I was about to faint. From my phone, I could hear a distant voice, "Ben? Ben? BEN? You still there?" Recomposing myself, I picked it up and reassured her, "yeah, uh, sorry, still here". Angie went on in a sort of stream of consciousness about how she "couldn't believe this could've happened", how he was "so young" and how she can't "imagine how hard this must be" for me. But, I wasn't listening, I couldn't stop hearing Chris's voice in my head; every word he had ever spoken to me tumbling over each other in a rush to reach me; a slideshow of our memories played hurriedly in my head. Waves of grief hit me one after another and the last thing I wanted to do was talk to anyone, let alone someone I hadn't spoken to for over a year. "I.....I'm going to go. I'm sorry", I said - interrupting Angie mid-speech - and hanging up.

I lay in bed paralysed, in shock about what I had just heard and with no idea of how to comprehend it. I was trying, at once, to come to grips with Chris and I's past - all the things I wish I'd gotten to say to him and all the mean, drunken things I wish I never had said to him - and the future; my future without him. A close friend who I imagined would be there side by side with me throughout my whole life, it turned out, would be little more than a fleeting presence in it; leaving just as quickly and as suddenly as he'd arrived.

I was so angry, and I was angry that I was angry. It felt like such a brutish and inappropriate response to such news; I was supposed to be a sad, grieving mess; crying an endless stream of thick, fat tears while flicking wistfully through old photos of us together and calling everyone I could think of to let them comfort me as I, in turn, tried to comfort them. Instead, all I could feel was rage, pure unadulterated anger; anger that he was dead, anger at Angie for telling me, anger at myself for picking up the phone and not giving myself a few more hours to indulge in blissful ignorance. The angrier I got, the madder I got at myself; 'why is this my first feeling upon finding out he's dead?', I thought, 'if this was the other way round, he wouldn't be angry, he would just be sad', 'he always was a better person than me' I reflected, 'I should be the one laying lifeless in the wreckage of that vehicle not him'. In my resentment towards my anger and my powerlessness, I let out a raw, primal scream; loud enough and long-lasting enough to wake up the neighbours above and below me. I could hear the sound of quiet chatter and feet getting out of bed from the apartment upstairs.

I got out of bed. Having minutes earlier been half-asleep, I was now wide awake and couldn't stop thinking; memories of Chris haunted me like a ghost. I considered ringing everyone I knew who also knew Chris and telling them the news, in the hope that sharing our grief would be cathartic somehow. But, I realised that if I couldn't even handle my own grief without bursting into screaming, how could I expect to take on anyone else's?

I got back into bed and looked desperately around the room for some object that might take upon new significance given the news, or that might, at least, offer a momentary distraction from my grief. My eye's honed in on a small raging bull figurine, sitting atop my bookshelf, that my mother had bought while on holiday in Europe. I'd never cared much for the little thing and had largely forgotten about it; allowing it to collect dust for years, but now it took on new meaning. I thought about the bull and I thought about bullfighting; how hopelessly unprepared the bulls in that situation were for what was heading their way, I thought about the revelling crowds and how we, as humans, revel in the pain of others; perhaps as an outlet for our own pain. I thought about the bull's horns - their only defence against the cruelty of man. I thought about my own anger and my own prickly, defensive exterior and wondered if, much like the bull's horns, it wasn't something to be ashamed of, or something to be suppressed, but if instead it was vital to my survival and to my recovery from this harrowing news. In that moment, as I lay in bed staring at this figurine, I thought about the bull, ready to fight; it's protruding head, arched back and, wide open nostrils. As soon as the bull entered the ring, their fate was all but sealed and at some point, I thought, the bull must realise the hopelessness of their situation. Yet, the bull never stops fighting until it's over. In that moment, it was impossible for me to feel even a glimmer of hope, but maybe that wasn't the point after all; maybe I didn't need hope to keep me fighting and moving forward. Life, I thought, is fundamentally hopeless; we spend our entire lifetimes fighting against the inevitable; death. It may come sooner and more brutally for some of us - the bull and, unfortunately I had just discovered, Chris - than others, but the point is it comes for all of us in the end and, yet we still keep fighting nonetheless.

This realisation was enlightening, but it still didn't make the matter at hand much easier to deal with; my best friend was dead and he was never coming back. Even after the shock of the news passed, things didn't get much easier. What I didn't expect about death was the way the grieving process is forced upon you again and again, each time like it's the first. Every time I see a funny joke on the internet and go to text it to him or, every time I pick up the phone to tell him about my fraught day, I remember he's dead like I'm finding out for the first time again. I eagerly await the day where any memory of him feels less like a punch to the gut and more like a warm, nostalgic reminder of all that we shared, but until that day, I fight; eyes forward, face up. Not because I have hope things will soon get better - I don't - but because I have no other choice. Deep down, I know time will eventually heal all these wounds, but until then I'm ready to fight off everything grief throws at me; regardless of how hopeless doing so seems.