My father sat at the table, his face registering a father’s concern. If he had something he needed to say—or a question to ask—he thought better of it. Or I cut him off, on my own at last. "Good night," I said, putting my foot on the first step of the back stairway leading to my room, unmoving for a moment, then shifting my weight heavily to climb.

"Good night, son," said my father.

This past Thanksgiving marked the thirty-third anniversary of Jax’s car accident and of Seger’s death. For a long time afterward, you could see scars of the wreck on the trunk of the maple tree they hit, written in what seemed like Sanskrit. It was hard to look at; but for the few marks, the tree itself seemed to flourish, carrying no memory of that night.

Over time, the enormous trunk healed itself, its bark without blemish, and then one day it was simply chainsawed to widen the sidewalk. In all those years that the tree had loomed there—blooming its gaudy leaves in the spring, losing them like discarded twenties in the fall—I’d pass by searching for evidence that the accident had actually happened, that it hadn’t just been a dream. My attitude was coldly forensic. I often thought to stop and touch the markings like an archaeologist, though never did. When the tree suddenly vanished—only pale sawdust littered the spot—there came this rush of feeling: sorrow, elation, guilt.

In the years after, Jax built a hectic, successful career in finance. Sometimes, when visiting home, I might drop in to find him hungover on a Sunday, on the couch beneath a blanket, watching old horror films. Eventually, some time after the rest of us, he married and had children. A few years back, when I told him I wanted to write something about the accident, he said, "Write the truth, then."

It took a long while, because as I found, the magnetic field around the dead really does repel memory at first. But once I let it all back in, I couldn’t shake Seger, the one who couldn’t speak at all, the one who was suddenly everywhere. One newspaper article from the time of the civil trial detailed the courtroom testimony of a financial expert who was asked to assess the amount of money Seger might have generated in his life. The expert said $1.3 million was a fair guess, which would amount to about $2.8 million today, but it seemed all the more tragic to reduce his life to a number like that. Give us any other number: YouTube videos sent or dogs owned, favors for neighbors or baby pictures e-mailed. Before the rock closed over the vault, I wish someone had speculated about what he’d found that night—God or no God—when he passed through the tree.

Perhaps we really are surrounded by the past, made prisoners of it. No matter how far we travel, how hard we try to forget, the scarred tree forever stands by the side of the road, if only in our minds. The only way to drive by is to set the past straight, once and for all, by remembering.

Talking to my brother, a lawyer now with kids of his own, I ask what he recalls about that night, and he says two things: (1) that the EMT from our ambulance service had told him something he couldn’t ever forget, that Seger had been found with a shard of glass in his eye; and (2) that I had originally planned to join Jax and the rest of them on that evening, prior to the party.

And maybe if I had, I would have missed the opportunity to write this down, as I have, which is the only way I can make sense of anything or realize ultimately that there’s no sense to be made of it: that once upon a time in a faraway town, we grew up—and some of us lived. And some of us tried to turn away but never quite could.

But most of all, if I’d been there that night, I couldn’t tell you now that Jax, my old friend, can still be a beautiful pain in the ass and the truest person I’ll know. If I were never to see him again, this would be my memory of him, of that year: the bucket full of blues, the encyclopedia without God, the energy of his wiry body flying, bowed in the sun, trying to remember why he ever wanted to leave this earth in the first place.

MICHAEL PATERNITI is a GQ correspondent. His collection of essays, Love and Other Ways of Dying, is out this month.