Since his hospitalization, Robert has said he’s feeling better, but sometimes he’s still weak, dizzy, unsure on his feet. I am not my flatmate’s keeper, but on Monday, when I hadn’t seen him for a few days, I texted him and said, “How ya doing?”
He didn’t reply, but I’m a lousy human and completely forgot about him, until I checked my messages on Wednesday afternoon, and noticed he hadn’t replied. We text fairly often, so this seemed unusual, but I was watching a good movie and forgot all about Robert again.
Thursday, riding a bus for a long errand to the north side of the city, I remembered and realized I hadn’t seen Robert in a week. I texted, “You OK, man?” but on my way home a few hours later, there had still been no reply.
As my bus rolled along, I imagined the worst. Maybe he’s fallen and he can’t get up. Maybe he’s dead on the floor in his room. So, like my mother who nags too much, I texted him again from the bus, “RSVP if you’re alive.”
He didn’t answer, and I pictured myself banging on Robert’s door when I came home, calling 9-1-1 if he didn’t answer.
Usually, whatever you’re worried about doesn’t happen, and indeed, Robert and Dean were in the kitchen when I came home. Much, much later, Robert mentioned that he’s lost the charger for his phone. A new one’s coming, but it’s coming by mail, and that’s why he hadn’t seen my texts.
But the first thing Dean and Robert both said, talking over each other, was that ‘L’ had died.
Dean said he’d noticed that his door was ajar, and ‘L’ was always paranoid and very, very private, so this was peculiar. Dean knocked, he said, and when there was no reply he nudged the door farther open, and saw ‘L’ in a crumpled heap in front of his toilet. Dude died on the shitter.
‘L’ had been sick for months, and knew he was dying. We all knew. He had announced in Spring that he was moving out, to die at home with his family. His mother and brother had helped him pack, and the house’s common areas are still cluttered with stacks of L’s boxes, but he never left.
Well, until yesterday. The coroner took him away about an hour before I came home.
♦ ♦ ♦
Dean and Robert and I talked in the kitchen for a long, long while, remembering ‘L’. We’d all found him prickly and short-tempered, but I’d thought I was the flatmate ‘L’ hated most. Turns out, I was nothing special. Dean and Robert had stories too, about how mean and generally impossible ‘L’ had been to them.
Dean told me that there’d been long, loud arguments between he and ‘L’, even before I joined the household in 2022. Robert said he thought Dean broke into his room once. They each had several stories, and said they’d been on edge around him, and that he’d sometimes seemed so angry over the tiniest things that they’d wondered if he might take a swing at ’em. I shared my story of L’s first screams at me, and the three of us bonded over our hatred of the dead guy.
Some people live their lives abrasively, making things worse wherever they are, and that’s a fair assessment of my late flatmate ‘L’.
Swapping horror story after horror story of awful things ‘L’ had said and done, it’s hard to convey how un-sad our conversation was, mere hours after his body had been discovered. We laughed, often, and loud. Dean opened his freezer and brought out a gallon of ice cream, and we each had a bowl. For an hour and a half we spoke ill of the dead, with no remorse. Good riddance, was the gist of it all.
Already, it feels like sunshine knowing that any time I come out of my room, there won’t the danger of a spring-loaded argument with ‘L’, over nothing.
I asked Dean and Robert if they had any happy memories of ‘L’, and I’ve never seen Dean so quiet. He and Robert looked at each other, stumped. Even at his best, ‘L’ had always been difficult, and none of us had any memories except the many times he’d been an ass.
“Well,” Dean finally offered, “today will be a happy memory.
♦ ♦ ♦
What occurs to me the next morning is, if Robert had died yesterday, I’d miss him. He’s a borderline friend and a decent guy.
Dean is often annoying, but if he had died, I could remember some moments when he’d been good for a laugh or told a story that wasn’t stupid, so yeah, I’d be a little sad.
If you stuck a gun to my head and forced me to say something nice about ‘L’, the best I could come up with is this: After we’d had three screaming arguments, and after he’d ordered me to never speak to him again, we had sort of a truce.
And over the past several months, we actually did speak a few times — always incidental nothings, and he always spoke first, but I responded, so perhaps it was detente.
Here’s our longest peaceful conversation, from September, I think, as we passed each other in the kitchen…
‘L’: You have mail on the porch.
Me: Yeah, I saw it and junked it. But thanks.
Now, we’ll have no more such charming interactions. Instead there’s a room for rent, and anyone who takes it will be an improvement over the previous tenant.
11/14/2025
Leave a Reply