“I sit here drunk now. I am a series of small victories and large defeats and I am as amazed as any other that I have gotten from there to here without committing murder or being murdered; without having ended up in the madhouse. As I drink alone again tonight my soul despite all the past agony thanks all the gods who were not there for me then.”
— Charles Bukowski
This last week, as I have moved through the stages of grief from the news of the death of my friend (and former Indy news editor) Michael Flynn, I am oddly comforted to have seen that a paraphrase of this quote was one of Michael’s last posts.
To his last, he was bold, beautiful, and honestly flawed.
Michael was a curious mixture of the boldness and frailty of humanity. He was fierce and fragile at the same time. Yet in all of what comprised this aggressively timid soul, there was an authenticity of presence that was unmistakably genuine.
There is an urban legend about those whose veins course thick with Irish blood, and it is that they are impervious to psychoanalysis. Michael and I often talked about having this in common, and we came up with a theory.
You see, by design psychoanalysis is intended to help a person sort out the things within them that are troubling them and causing consternation in their personal and perhaps professional lives. It is wholly beneficial to help a person understand themselves and become better humans.
Celtic descendants, by and large, are famously known to wear their hearts on their sleeves so to speak. Which is to say that they hold nothing in; therefore, there is nothing really to help them get out.
We both acknowledged that this was far from an academic assessment but found some relief in the idea that we knew of at least one other person who was afflicted by the dilemma.
However, in light of his suicide, I am admittedly grief stricken that I did not inquire more of my friend when often there were indications that perhaps I should have. I am further embarrassed at my lack of humility in not being more transparent with him.
You see everyone reveres, or at least admires, the lone wolf. But a lone wolf, apart from the pack, dies.
Michael was a lone wolf. I know this not only because he told me but because it takes one to know one.
He was the keenest of intellect burdened so deeply by empathy for anyone he met that his own inability to feel the weight and the depth of the love those who knew him had for him became too much to bear.
I have read some beautiful tributes to Michael, and I concur with them one and all. However, mine was a complicated and at times tumultuous relationship with my friend that ended before I was able to tell him I loved him and truly respected him.
Some people write great but Michael was a great writer. He now joins the ranks of the mysterious and largely misunderstood lone wolves whose lives ended too soon, and the pack is at once lessened for having lost him but better for having known him at the same time.
See you out there, Michael.
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Very nice, Dallas.
I knew Michael and I’m glad you wrote this article. He was a great writer and a gentleman. We will miss him in our writing group.