The funny things one remembers about a person once they are gone…. Jeff Crilley roomed with me for a few months in Louisville, Kentucky. In my meager apartment, there was no furniture other than a desk and chair, so he slept on the floor. It was winter, 2003 if I remember correctly, and he’d proudly gotten an entry-level job in construction – a double major, honors graduate from Carnegie Mellon University working on a cleanup crew. Hard to explain, but it was a “thing” among spiritual seekers in the Richard Rose tradition, to use their backs and save their brains for the spiritual search. I recall him showing off his brand-new hammer and nail apron, though he didn’t do much hammering or nailing and told mostly of trying to keep warm while burning wood scraps on the job site.
Jeff was always considerate of others, so when it snowed one morning, he paused to scrape the windows of my truck with the claw of his hammer. “Nice guy,” I thought, then later that day I realized what looked like lines on my windows from road salt were actually scratches left by the hammer claw. I’m sure I was pissed, but now I think how those scratches stayed with me till that truck finally went to the scrapyard a decade later.
Jeff left more serious impressions with me, as well. His friendship shaped an essay of mine called “Depression and the Spiritual Search.” In it, I wrote that there are “a few people on whom depression descends like a shadow with no cause.” Jeff opened my eyes to the need to use any method available to help with depression, and not believe that mindfulnesss/meditation/will-power alone could lift one out of the depths.
After losing touch with Jeff for several years, in 2016 I called him out of the blue and apologized for not being a better friend when he was in Louisville. He was on my mind as a person who once looked to me for help, but I’d had little to offer. In retrospect, I thought Jeff was going all-out, really throwing himself into the spiritual search, and I could have spent more time trying to understand him. He was surprised by my apology. Ever polite, he humored me by trying to recall some way I’d let him down, but Louisville was a distant memory. Since that call, we stayed in touch with an occasional email or text, usually to chat about stocks or finances.
Once again, I find myself wanting to apologize. Jeff last emailed me in early May, sounding well. I thought several times of sending a text or email to see what was new in life but didn’t. A few days became nearly three months, and now it’s too late. I join a long, sorrowed line of those saying, “If only….”
Jeff also appeared in my film Closer than Close, as one of the “seven friends seeking freedom.” In the ending scene, those friends walk away from the camera and into the night. Their backs are to us as the music swells, and the scene fades to black. Jeff is at the front of the pack, leaving us, the audience to his story, to figure out its meaning on our own.
A phrase that has brought me solace over the years is, “I am the bowman, the arrow, and the victim.” I attribute it to the Bhagavad Gita, though Google tells me my memory is flawed. Regardless, there is truth in those lines: I am the bowman, the arrow, and the victim. I’m in the last scene in the film, too, walking at the back of the pack, trailing my subjects. All of us walking into the night together.
We are the bowman, the arrow, and the victim.