I couldn’t believe my eyes. While riding the subway home one night, I turned to the obituary page and saw the picture of a familiar  sad, half-smiling face of a young man that I once knew. At first, it didn’t click. I knew the face but for a split second couldn’t place it. In disbelief,  I startled the other  straphangers  around me when I shouted out loud: “What!”  The teen-age son of an ex-girlfriend was dead. I must have stared at the picture and the name several times before it actually sank in.  The obit was glowing but vague on the cause of death. I suspected a drug overdose. Liam (not his real name) was a deeply depressed, troubled kid when I knew him, in and out of drug rehabs, arrested for minor offenses, unable to hold a job or get past high school.  His mother was very protective of him, overly so.  When he was asked to leave college in the first semester of his freshman year, she wouldn’t tell me why. There were secrets in this family and I was always an outsider. Still, he was likeable. Liam was bright, handsome and world weary with a wry sense of humor. There was a sadness to him that pervaded his attitude to life; and he could be self-destructive.  When he took my car for a joy-ride, he left a can of soda on the console. I don’t drink soda. He didn’t deny taking the car out for a spin with his girlfriend. If he had gotten into an accident there would have been hell to pay. He told me he was sorry but I thought:” So what”.  I told my girlfriend that: “your son doesn’t understand feelings, he only understands behavior”.  She was furious with me for judging him. I told him that he owed me $20 for the use of the car. He paid me back over time in rolled pennies. I was jealous of my ex’s attachment to him. There seemed to be no consequences to his behavior.  She always bailed him out–both literally and figuratively but she couldn’t save him from himself forever.  Still it was tragic to see that sad, half-smiling face stare back at me from that obit page.