"We always knew this would happen."

And then it says,

"We never believed it would happen."

Over the past few days I have read and heard numerous accounts of Allan's scrapes with cars and motorbikes that go back to his school days, it seems, and each one confirms the double impression that we had of his mortality. I thought I would read a message from David Scanlon, who refers to Allan in an e-mail as "my good friend, my brother, Al," and tells us something of Allan before he came to Hiroshima. He writes:

"I met Allan when I was in grade seven. A lifetime ago. We have been close since. I introduce him as my brother, we had different parents together¹. Even if we do live a world apart. And apart was probably a good thing. We got into too much trouble. God it was fun though. Good clean fun of course, rarely did the law have to get involved...although on occasion they did...

"Allan and his damn bikes. The first one was a 400 Maxim Yamaha. Well there was a 360 Yamaha prior to that but it was his Dad's. I ended up buying both of them. Allan had dropped the Maxim a couple of times prior to me buying it from him. I cleaned it up and painted it a very cool custom red colour. That bike looked great...then one morning Allan asked to borrow it. Twenty minutes or so later he came back with some really cool looking scars on his neck. I think he wanted me to be mad but all I could manage was to ask if he was OK.

"He was in another accident with a 550 Honda on the evening of my sister' wedding. His girlfriend at the time, Alda, was on the back of the bike that night.

"I probably should have tried harder to convince him that a bike was something that should not be in his future. The trouble was I rode as well and still do. His Dad rode when he was younger as well. I guess it was just who Allan was. The last time he was in Canada I took him to see his Mom and she had just bought herself a bike.

David Scanlon continues:

"Hmmm now that I think of it his first car was a baby blue Scamp. My Mother's car. That car was in the ditch plenty of times. Perhaps he shouldn't have had anything to do with motorized vehicles..."

So on that last Sunday evening we were all just "chilling" as Allan would say. Yet, as we reconstruct the events that led up to Allan's death, we are struck by how representative of the whole fabric of Allan's life in Hiroshima they happen to be. It is as if that mercurial god³ who presided over the pathways of Allan's life was granting Allan the inestimable privilege of dying as he had lived so that we who remain here can say that his life and his death were made seamless and single.

Firstly we have the circumstances of the early evening. Allan had invited friends over to watch football, which he had watched, played and discussed with a brutal passion ever since we set up the football team known as Intermilang in the days before he was sacked from Lang Education Center for reasons that some of you know and the rest of you may be able to imagine.⁴

Of course, we went over to Allan's to drink beer. He was a copious beer drinker, and it was usually better if he stuck to beer and didn't mix his drinks.⁵

We went over to Allan's to play mahjong. Mahjong had become one of the great enthusiasms of the last two years of his life. And that game, a peculiar mixture of skill and luck, often testified to the myth of "Lucky Jenkins". I remember one evening when we played mahjong at his student, Mr. Yamaguchi's, apartment and Allan, against all the teaching of probability theory, won, and won, and won.

Incidentally, Allan lost his last game of mahjong. Less than three hours after that last game he was dead. But, despite that swift transition from life to death, that last game of mahjong was not actually the last game he ever played on earth.

After we, his three friends, had gone home at about 1 o'clock in the morning, Allan went out on a mission that reflects on other aspects of his character. He had lent something to somebody. This reminds us of his generosity - he was always lending stuff to people. But the thing that he lent was not his to lend, so he was under pressure to go and recover it and restore it to the special someone who had given it to him.

So he went out. He went, of course, to a bar, to Kulcha bar, where he collected the portable property and played a game of chess. There was always time for another game with Allan, and I don't think there was much of a distinction in his mind between the games he loved to play and the life he led, which was itself a glorified and rather complex game, the rules of which were ever open to new interpretations as the moment required.

After that last game of chess he left the bar, but, instead of going home, he went riding out towards Hakushima to meet another special somebody about whom the rest of us knew nothing.

But we know now what happened next. We know that Allan died as he had lived, gunning his bike towards one of his many assignations.

Over the last few days we have seen so many people coming to pay their respects to Allan, and I am reminded of the words from the Gospel of John when Christ came to the friends of Lazarus and, just as did the surgeon to us on that terrible Monday morning, so he spake

"...unto them plainly and said Lazarus is dead."⁶

"Behold how he loved him."⁷

We know that Allan was no painted saint, we cannot set up an icon of "Edward of Hiroshima" and place our prayers before it, but we can and do pray that God may rest the soul of this remarkable man, our friend Edward Allan Jenkins.