Do you find life sometimes to be odd? Hard to understand? Best to be accepted as is, with no more thinking than absolutely necessary?

These are sincere questions. I just find life puzzling sometimes, even when its pieces should make up some obvious whole.

I just lost another friend to cancer. Neil was a nice man. I spent some time with him and another friend a couple of weeks ago and, frankly, he seemed to be doing well. He previously had surgery to attack his lung cancer, and it had come back. But he didn’t seem overly concerned about it. I got the feeling he thought all would be well.

Was that because that’s how I wanted it to be, or how it was? Was it how he wanted it to be and was successful in presenting a wish as fact? Or did things just get rapidly worse, regardless of what anybody thought or considered?

Neil was a man of true faith. He knew God was there for him. One of the nice things he used to do — at least I thought it was nice — was pass out little things, for lack of a better word, to people. Medallions, coins, little geegaws, you know, things.

The common thread among them was that they were designed to make the recipient feel better. One might have had a positive saying on it, some few words to help prevent a stumble by someone he cared about. It might have been something with a religious theme or overtone to help people, literally, keep the faith.

I didn’t get the sense it was a one-size-fits-all sort of thing. Usually what he gave fit the person he gave it to, and was something that was likely to give the recipient a boost right there, right then.

Let’s face it. We don’t really “know” other people, do we? At best, we compare our insides to their outsides and, in the end, only know what we know about them. But, I think people really liked Neil, and his wife, Kim. I know Sheri and I did. I know, too, that we wished he could stop smoking, once and for all. I’ve written about that before, though. My father couldn’t stop, neither could my sister. It seems that Neil couldn’t, either.

But, though we had that in common, what was really at the heart of my relationship with Neil began with the fact that we were both about the same age and both born in Scotland. More than that, we were born, as near as I can figure, about 25 miles apart. Greenock was his hometown, while mine was Johnstone. Growing up in Scotland in the early 1950s and ’60s virtually guaranteed that there was no way we were ever going to run into one another, never mind develop any sort of relationship.

Also, Neil was Catholic, and I was Protestant. You have no idea what a big deal that was back then. It may still be for all I know. There was some mixing, but there wasn’t a lot.

So, anyway, Neil and I are growing up a few miles apart and, at some point, both families move to America and, at some other point, as adults, we each move to Maine and then at some other other point, we each move to be back within about 25 miles of one another again.

Don’t you find that odd? Interesting? What do you suppose the odds would be against that happening? If some cosmic bookmaker in, let’s say, 1958, decided to make book on the chance of Neil and Jim living within 25 miles of each other, in Maine, United States of America, in 2015… Don’t you think you could get pretty good odds against that happening? Like eleventy-seven gazillion to one?

And, just to stretch credulity a little more — let’s also say that we would both end up with cancer in 2015? Whaaaat? If you read that in a work of fiction, don’t you think you would be hard put to believe it? Don’t you think you would say, “Nah. That’s too much to expect us to swallow. I’m willing to suspend disbelief, but only so far.”

And yet, I’m glad it was true. I didn’t know Neil super well, but I knew him well enough to be glad I did; well enough to see some of the encouragement and hope he offered to others, including Sheri and me. Look, he and I had both come a very long way to end up with cancer in a wee town in Maine.

And I know this: As far as Neil is concerned, a lot of people are very happy that he made that journey. It made a positive difference in their lives that wouldn’t end just because he died this week. Besides, a lot of us have geegaws we can pull out to remind us of the man.

Jim Arnold is a former copy editor for the Kennebec Journal and Morning Sentinel. To read more about his journey through cancer, visit his blog, findingthepony.blogspot.com.