February 26, Third Age 3020
I repeal the ban on self-pity and, once again, promptly proceed to wallow in it
I wept today, though I scarcely knew why; nothing upsetting in particular happened. I berated myself after for my weakness, and sat awhile and pondered why this sudden outpour of misery had come on. It was as though a dear friend had died, I determined, and I had mourned him as I thought his due when it had happened, but because of a mixture undetected of numbness, preoccupation, and disbelief, only today had the fact really registered that he is dead; he is gone and I will never see him again, and so I mourned him afresh. I knew it was not Boromir for whom I grieved, for had it been, my tears surely would have started anew upon thinking of him; but who else had died that I had known?
It was myself, I answered, reacting with barely a start to this revelation – that Frodo Baggins fellow I had known very well back in the Shire. He and I had both taken grievous hurt at Weathertop, and while I had been healed and quite well enough to travel by the time the Company left Rivendell, he, poor Hobbit, had never really recovered. He ailed ever more as we went on, finding some brief respite in Lothlórien and again in Ithilien (though by that time he was sadly far gone), and finally died quietly in his nightmare-troubled sleep some cold, thirsty night on the vast, barren expanse of Gorgoroth. I think I must have been too caught up in my own troubles to fully realize he was gone, though at times, when Sam brought it up, I think I came close to understanding that a part of me had gone missing for good. It was today, when I had naught else to think of or despair about, that I was struck as if by lightning with the terribly final meaning of dead, and the realization was so awful and so desolating that it made me weep for my loss, which I fear can never be repaired.
I wonder what I would say of him, were I called upon to give a eulogy (being that he and I were so very close all our lives) – after all, when one is mourning a death, one must first and foremost celebrate a life, though more often than not, it is a challenge to convince the mourners of this. Mr. Baggins and I were counterparts, one might say, and one would hardly be complete without the other. He was a cheerful Hobbit, with a sunny outlook on life and a fond devotion to his homeland of the Shire. He enjoyed his pipe and, I admit – for no one is without his faults, even our most beloved – his drink, and I shall never forget when his love for mushrooms was his downfall, and while I can look back on the incident with a hearty (if wistful) laugh, he never found it at all amusing. While he was the even less eager to embark upon the Quest of the Ring, being that his attachment to his home was the stronger, he was the one to make the most of every situation we and our companions encountered. We shared between us what little wit was our lot; his was the most part of the quick and clever tongue, and mine was the judgment and the caution – perhaps the wisdom, it can be said, though our share of wisdom was even smaller than that of wit. He was considerably more open than I; it was he who first chose to trust the foul-looking yet fair-seeming Ranger named Strider, and he who finally deemed Faramir the man of Gondor worthy of trust as well, while I followed suit. Were any such person to ask for my faith unproven now that he is gone, I cannot say if I would give it. Yet while he was quicker to trust, he was quicker also to suspicion (being quicker, in general, to judge), and it was I who pitied Gollum the more – perhaps because I feared more that he was what I could become, because I understood better how he had wasted under the influence of the Ring, and it was I who finally fell under its evil command, where perhaps the Frodo who is gone would not have. It was I who forgave Gollum in the end. And it was I who was able to make my peace with my failure; with the part that Gollum was destined to play; with my role, like Gollum's, as no more than a pawn in the game played by fate; and with the idea of my own impending death.
The other Frodo Baggins' was the optimism, mine the patience; his the dogged determination, mine only the grim despair; his the hope, his the dedication, mine simply the single-minded desperation. But such qualities as he possessed do not withstand long an utter absence of joy; when my hope and my optimism met with a darkness that overcame them, they began to fail, and when all reason for hope died, the keeper of my hope died with it. His were the strength and the will that only come with having some sort of hope, and when he was gone, mine left me as well, and in the darkness of Mordor I could not have gone on without another counterpart to lend me these.
But what I could not say, were I praising and lamenting the deceased part of Frodo Baggins, is that the companion who took the place of my previous other half, I think, was hardier and more determined, and if possible fit even more seamlessly into the empty chasm in my being than the person who had filled it before. And he loves me far more than did the other part of myself – before Sam truly became my other half.
Yet I cannot forever rely on Sam to provide what is dead in me. He will live ever the more fully for his experiences, dark and wonderful, on the Quest; he will open his heart ever the more and love ever the more his home and the people who live there. I cannot take these opportunities away from him by always clinging to his steadfastness, anchoring him to the darkness that lingers in me still – filling the crevices in my soul where my departed "friend" once resided, the crevices that open again as Sam's way ever strays from mine – as in Mordor he anchored me to light and hope. I wonder where I may find the part of me that is gone; perhaps it awaits me in Valinor, in the Halls of Mandos where the soul of Beren waited for Lúthien, his other half. Or perhaps it is fully and truly dead, and flies wherever the spirits of Men, and Hobbits their kindred, go when they die, the only place where the mortal Children of Ilúvatar can go but Elves cannot. If this is so, perhaps I can only be whole again when I die as did the other part of me, suffocated by the hopeless dread of Mordor.
And here I go – I can't help it; I'm crying again. What if this dear friend is lost forever, and we will never be reunited? Without him, the joy I found once in beauty and the complete solace that friendship once gave are faded, gone. It never occurred to me before that I had parted with these things long ago and did not say farewell to my light and my hope, did not savor the warmth they afforded me and rejoice in the simple things that pleased me before the time came when all chance to enjoy them ever again was gone forever.
Still, I do not think that I have lost completely the ability to laugh, or to love, or to live for the while that is allotted me yet. I may dwell mostly on my miseries, but my life is at least half-blessed in that I, though I suffered loss as do too many who play a part in war, live yet to write, to speak, to laugh, and to love, and by one path or another I have helped to give the same gift to all those who may live in freedom of the Shadow that is fled. Even when mourning death, after all, it is important first and foremost to celebrate life.
Author's Note: Believe it or not, this entry was the beginning of the Random Musings. I wrote it and it was just another angsty introspective vignette that I write way too many of, and then I thought, while I'm writing a whole ton of them, why don't I make them into a collection? So I did…and I realized that this kind of a revelation would probably come after some less earth-shaking ones, so I posted a few other of my ideas first. Then I decided that maybe Frodo wouldn't have this particular epiphany in Minas Tirith – maybe it should wait until the Shire. And so it did, and about a year and four months after I wrote it, this, the progenitor of "The Random Musings of Frodo Baggins" – my magnum opus, as things stand right now – is finally being published. I feel like saying "Happy birthday, Random Musings," and so I will.
No, I didn't set it on the Breaking of the Fellowship and Boromir's deathday for any particular reason, other than that a) it said "late Feb./early March 3020" at the top of this document for awhile, and I thought, "Aha, there's a significant date around there, I think I'll use it!" and b) I briefly mentioned Boromir in the entry, so why not?
A last note – though I don't terribly often mention reviewers by name, I would like to acknowledge the steady readers from before my four-month disappearance from the face of the earth who returned afterward: shirebound, Tathar, Kathy B., and mali that is called mali2 (sorry, Monty Python reference). Thank you for remembering me, having me on Author Alert and neglecting to take me off, whatever.