All of those Walt stories are incredibly poignant in their own right, but I always find myself going back to Preacher Man. The way he paints mental health issues within the black community; the isolation, loss of faith over the inanity of death, sentimentality of lost loved ones, and subsequent catharsis. Just....FUCK. These are things that as a white male I'm not able to fully understand yet at the same time seem universal. After reading that this morning I found myself thinking about the handful of people I've grown close to, the only people I actually feel comfortable around, and how I'd handle it if I got a phone call one day telling me they were gone. That's something I've thought, read, and written about a lot. How one innocuous decision can beget such an undeserved consequence. How forces outside of your control can dictate, and potentially end, your life. Karakand calls it "the ephemerality of life." Yet even an individual as sesquipedalian as Kara can't truly express what permanent loss feels like. Words do not do it justice. They provide excuses and rationalizations to an inherently nonsensical situation, they eventually evaporate until the only tangible thing left is the pain of loss.
I really believe that the most powerful ability we have as humans is empathy. How, in those moments where existence tries it's damnedest to dissuade us from finding meaning and focus in itself, we experience real, uninhibited emotion and latch onto the people next to us. And they experience it too. I think there's beauty in that. I think that's where life's ultimate meaning reveals itself to people, and it's with each other.
So, to Walt, if you're reading this (you aren't), thank you. Your writing played a small but essential role in shaping my own views of race, sex, life, death, and love. Thank you for empowering a young, white, middle class cismale to divulge his hokey, candid views anonymously on a splinter forum of some 30-regulars to an irrelevant gaming website. It meant a lot.