A little guilty

Somebody I know is dying, a guy I used to run around with a little in the years between college and grad school, back when I was smoking and drinking and generally bouncing around. Not my best years, mind you, but thankfully I didn't kill anybody.

So this guy, whom I'll call Billy, never quit drinking or smoking, or just generally hanging out in bars. He doesn't seem to have formed any deep relationships, certainly not a family. I used to have fantasies about running into him in AA but somehow it never happened. In his case, the memo never quite arrived. And now he is dying of lung cancer.

The last time I saw him, he was doing something pretty asinine, and most of the times that I saw him in the last decade or so he was kind of a jerk. So part of me feels like his dying is really no big loss, even though I see an outpouring of affection for him on Facebook.

At the end of the day -- which is about where he is -- I think what is nagging at me is the sense of superiority that creeps into my sense of who I am relative to him, when that flies in the face of the concept of substance use disorders and mental illness as diseases. The guy is just sick, and it has killed him in the end. Something else will kill me in my time.