Short Story: "The Death of Jacob Wenzel"

The Death of Jacob Wenzel

“The good die young.”

—Anonymous

I read his obituary in the Chronicle-Journal. I knew him. We both went to St. Jude Roman Catholic School. His name was Jacob Wenzel. He came to Canada with his family from Switzerland the same year that our family came from Italy: 1951.

Three weeks ago, Jacob was still working. He was a millwright at the plywood factory in St. Jude. He had worked there for thirty-seven years. Married to Sandy, he had one son and two daughters and three grandchildren, plus one grandchild that he didn`t know of; his unmarried son’s son, who was my life partner Cathy’s niece’s second-born. Jacob was 57 years old. It was a consolation to go so quickly; but death is death, regardless.

It said in the paper that he was proud of running a half marathon last year. I heard he had taken up running, and I was happy for him. His obituary also said that his goal was to run Grandma’s Marathon in Duluth, Minnesota; but a month after he ran his half marathon, he was diagnosed with terminal cancer.

I ran a marathon. Not officially. I went for a leisurely run one Sunday spring morning and ended up running a whole marathon on the Trans-Canada Highway along the shores of Lake Superior. My butt was sore. I had never gotten a sore butt from running before, but it felt good to have run my own marathon.

I don`t know exactly how long it took me, maybe four and a half hours; but that didn`t matter. I enjoyed my run. Then I burnt out. Business complications with a job on the St. Jude reserve that went sour on me; building my own house, a triplex; a long-distance romance with Cathy, whom I had moved to Cobourg where I had planned to join her, and I stopped running. I haven’t been able to get back into it since. That was eight years ago.

I gained weight. I don`t wear shirts any more. I used to enjoy wearing shirts. I wear T-shirts for work now, and loose sweaters and polo shirts. My pants are tight around my waist, and I hate it. I’m not grossly overweight, just enough to frustrate myself.

I tried to get back into running, but I keep falling off the program; and my will-to-run gets eroded a little bit more each time I take up running, which has been every spring since my burnout from my big taping and painting job on the reserve that went sour on me.

Now everything I do seems to take more effort. It can get pretty exhausting some days just completing the day. I’d love to run Grandma’s too, but the thought alone scares me. The very idea of two, three months of training just to break through the runner`s wall again—O, life! What I wouldn`t give to know then what I know now!

That`s been my whole problem. I’ve never had a mentor to guide me through your little pitfalls; but I can’t blame you, can I? That’s what you’re all about, isn’t it?

But it was a mystery there for a long time. God, what I had to go through just to learn this simple truth! And to think that it was all so unnecessary. So damn unnecessary!

It was a big game with you, wasn’t it? You moved, I responded. I moved, you responded. Just a game of give-and-take. But you played fair. I couldn’t see it then, but I do now. God, how you used to frustrate me. And everyone I talked to said the same thing: “Who said life was fair?” They still say that. Every time I turn around, I hear someone shouting their own profane variation of Shakespeare’s “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods, they kill us for their sport!” I laugh about it now. But I cried an awful lot then. And I cursed more.

How I used to curse you. I remember when I had my pool hall and vending machine business in St. Jude, pointing my pool cue to the heavens and cursing you with a string of profanities that went well beyond my twenty-two years of life experience; and to this day, I can still feel the bitter taste in my mouth of my vitriolic anger at you. And for what? Because I had run out of luck? Because I was losing my game? That’s why people curse you, isn’t it? They run out of luck and blame you; but what the hell do you have to do with luck, anyway?

Whoever said that you were the dispenser of good and bad luck? Where did we get that idea from? And why on earth do we think that we should win every game we play? It’s preposterous, isn’t it? But who has the courage to point the finger at themselves?

Who can say, mea culpa? Who?

O, life! How much life do we have to live before we can see the mote in our own eye? And there you are, standing back not saying a damn thing. You just make your move and wait for us to wake up and smell the damn coffee!

It took Jacob Wenzel fifty-seven years to dream of running a marathon, but he never did; he died first. I don’t want to wait. I want to run an official marathon. But then, what makes things official, anyway?

What does it matter if somewhere it’s recorded that I ran a marathon when I know that I have run the mother of all marathons? What does it matter?

It’s amazing, the power that image can have over us; a power so absolute that it paralyzes our spirit to just go out and live our life. That’s what I used to do. I didn’t need approval from anyone. I just went out and did it!

God, those were good days. I wasn’t afraid of anything. I was too stupid to be afraid. I just did it. I gave up the lease on my pool hall business, sold my vending machines to the man who took over my lease, and went to Annecy, France to find myself. I didn’t need permission from anyone. I had no idea what game I was playing, but I played the seeker’s game with you; and that’s all that really mattered, I played!

Now I’m afraid to play. Every day, I find myself taking fewer risks. I can just see myself sitting in a nursing home one day wondering what might have been…

Play. That’s what I miss most about running. The play that came in the run. It happened all by itself. I didn’t call upon it. It just came. A child-like feeling of innocence so light and free that it still makes my heart leap up and cry out, “The Child is father of the Man!”

That’s what frightens me, the loss of my child-like feeling. Without it, what am I? Just another face in the crowd. Just another one of the desperate many whose dreams have been shattered and whose life has suddenly been exhausted of its ambition, and energy.

O life; what a cruel taskmaster you are! You come and come and keep on coming, never stopping to teach us the final lesson that will set us free from our bondage to you. But in your cruelty, there is kindness. I know there is.

I’m free. That’s the irony. I no longer doubt my purpose in life. I suffer from too much purpose, in fact; and that’s my problem. But time is quickly running out, and I fear like Jacob Wenzel that I may die before I get to run my official marathon.

It’s not glory I seek. It’s not praise and adulation. It’s not attention. It’s the simple satisfaction of having done it, that’s all. I don’t care if I go out with a whimper; that doesn’t bother me. What bothers me is that all of my efforts will have been for seeming naught. Life is not a useless passion, as monsieur Sartre believed. We come into this world to find our true self, and I did; but “at my back I always hear / Time’s winged chariot hurrying near,” and what a shame it would be to have my story go untold.

O life! Spare me the indignity! So, another one got away on you. It was inevitable. Eventually everyone will find the sweet exit before they die; so, please, don’t be angry with me. I have seen behind your grotesque mask of phony absurdity and I know Camus’ Sisyphus is not happy, and I ask nothing more of you than to let me be me. I have earned the right. But regardless, I’m going to do it anyway. I want to play again, risks be damned!

We were never friends. But something about Jacob Wenzel that I always admired touched me deeply; something I had to cross the Atlantic Ocean and into another world to reclaim, and when I came back home, I no longer fit in.

But Jacob Wenzel recognized me. He knew. I could tell by the way he looked at me that he understood where I had gone, and why; but we never talked. Just a brief hello, a few words now and then, nothing serious. But I knew that he knew, and I respected him for his acknowledgement of who I was.

Jacob Wenzel bowled in both town leagues, the mixed and the men’s league. He was an excellent bowler. When I came back from France, I took up bowling in the mixed league, just to fit in with the townspeople; but I didn’t fit in. It wasn’t European culture that had changed me (although cultural shock had affected me); it was my new perspective on life.

So lofty, so distant had I become that I had to go to university to study philosophy to make sense of it all; but even Plato, Kant, Sartre, and Camus couldn’t do it for me.

“I am what I am not, and I am not what I am,” concluded Jean Paul Sartre; but so incomplete did that leave me that I had to drop philosophy for fear of blaming others for the abysmal depths of my despair; and I went to work in a bush camp choking trees with a tree harvester for all the paper they would make upon which to write the books that I never stopped reading in my indefatigable quest for my true self.

And there was Jacob Wenzel, plugging away in the plywood factory, day in and day out, raising his family and living an average life in an average job in an average town with no great compelling need to know who he was, just another man in the grinding factory of life working to survive and making the best of what he had.

Jacob rented most of his married life, and only the last six years of his life did he own his own house; and so proud of it was he that for the past three Christmases his house won the best decorated house in St. Jude. And now he’s dead at 57, and he never got to run his Grandma’s Marathon in Duluth, Minnesota.

I built my own house. A triplex with four levels. The top floor of the third unit had a loft, where I did all my writing; but it cost me to build my own house without a mortgage: Gurdjieff’s teaching of “work on oneself,” Christ’s secret teaching of the way of self-sacrifice, and the Sufi path of “dying before dying”—that’s why I’m so bloody tired now!

I exhausted myself dying daily to be reborn to my true self, and I have no energy left to run another marathon, official or otherwise. But it didn’t have to be that way. I didn’t have to work through so much karma had my parents been more discerning, more self-aware. But I did, and there’s no use crying about it now. Suffice to know that the sins of our parents are visited upon their children, and every descendent in the family tree…

It said in his obituary—Mr. Jacob Anthony Wenzel, 57 years of St. Jude, Ontario, passed away Saturday, February 10, 2001, in the St. Jude Memorial District Hospital, St. Jude, Ontario, that he played soccer for the city’s Juventas, was an avid bowler, enjoyed hockey and broomball, pitched slow-pitch for the Rebels, loved running, and took great pride in his family, especially his two-year old granddaughter “Pammy,” and that his favorite hobby was playing Pictionary with his niece Carrie. Just an average Joe.

But not to his family and friends. To them, Jacob was special. A unique man. An individual. And his funeral was one of the largest in the Roman Catholic church.

“The good die young,” someone said at the coffee shop after the service. Another man nodded in silent agreement. I didn’t say anything. I just smiled. I knew that Jacob was a good man. Everyone knew. They have a look in their eye that not everyone has; a glint, a smile, a light that never goes out. That’s what Jacob Wenzel had.

O life! At every turn, you are there, ready to take our light away with fresh bobbles of desire! A zillion pathways to the same spiritual entrapment, a never-ending struggle to keep the light alive; but Jacob Wenzel kept it alive. He didn’t have to go out of his way to find the Light Giver. The Light Giver found him here, in his average little life with his average little interests. And now he’s dead. Just another official statistic in the data bank of life.

But average or not, Jacob Wenzel lives on in the hearts of those he touched with the light of his uncompromised soul. I shed a tear when I read his obituary, and with a lump in my throat, I bid a fellow traveler goodbye.

——