Twenty-five years ago, when Jerry Garcia passed on this day in 1995, I was jaded and angry. Still reeling with unprocessed grief from the death of my only sibling a few years earlier, I had distanced myself from the scene I had once felt an affinity to (which had grown increasingly sketchy in the 1990s anyway). I refused to leave my apartment, stayed in bed most of the day, steadfastly avoiding the vigil in the park down the street from me filled with people tearful over somebody they “knew” as an abstract entity.  He was deified as a free-spirited messenger of peace and harmony while nursing a decades-long heroin addiction, the antithesis of freedom.  I felt like that dichotomy between a starry-eyed expanded consciousness and a hedonistic enslavement to the pleasure principle could have very nearly ruined my own life if it hadn’t been for the actions of a few people, my lost sibling among them, which took me off that path.  Famous musicians driving themselves into early graves through hard living — Garcia was barely 53 but looked about 80 when he died – was nothing new. I couldn’t or wouldn’t empathize with the collective eulogizing because all I could think was that it seemed in some way profoundly stupid for people who “had everything in life” to careless throw it away – I’d thought the same thing about Kurt Cobain’s suicide a year earlier even though I had only a passing interest in his music — while all over the world, parents had to bury children lost to horrible circumstances – accidents, diseases, murders – inverting the “natural order”, things weren’t supposed to happen that way. Those families, and mine, didn’t have crowds holding vigils in the park. They got awkward attempts at soothing from friends or relatives, often with platitudes like “he / she is in a better place now” or “God has called home another angel” and insipid shit like that.  In memoriam, Jerry Garcia (August 1, 1942 – August 9, 1995)