How to sum up the experience of a friend? Someone you had spent days and days for years on job sites. Someone with whom you had shared joys, sorrow, failures and success. I could only sum it up with one phrase. I loved him.

It took days to get over the shock. After more than a week it is still incomprehensible. A day or so after I got the news about Charlie Morgan, I had no choice but to rail at God, the creator, the higher power. I started off railing about Charlie, imploring why? Then I moved on to wars, famine, loneliness and all the ills we suffer and all we create. The whys weren’t enough. I started admonishing, what’s the purpose? What do you get from all this suffering? You floating around in the ether, randomly letting people suffer, what do you get from it?

In the end I wept, knowing I would have to accept the facts of life, death and suffering. There is, in some circles, a concept that we suffer so that we can grow and evolve as souls. The jury is still out on that. I didn’t get an answer from God, the universe, the creator right away, But I know the universe does at times communicate with us, often in the oddest of ways.

Riding my bike home from work a few days after my railing, I was thinking that I wanted to write about Charlie to share his sense of humor, sense of integrity, his grit. I didn’t know if I could, or that I should. The expression came to me about how one was to keep their friends close and their enemies closer. I disagreed and thought, no, I’ll keep my friends closer. Just then, at the long fence of the airport that borders the Edgartown-West Tisbury Road, I encountered something that caused me to be able to let go of my negativity toward the universe, because the universe spoke. A flock of bluebirds, 20 or more, emerged from the woods and followed me down the bike path, some landing on the fence, then hop-scotching in the air in front of me.

I had to stop because the message was clear, Charlie was safe now, and the bluebirds were his angels. Like it or not, I had to evolve.

Rest in peace friend, thanks for the message.

Joe Keenan

Chilmark