I Didn't Know You Could be Mad at the Dead (TW: Death, Suicide)

 

   

    

 When the news first came, I began to dance. And then the tears, and the unbridled screaming, and the shaking, and shouting. I was in the middle of Northern California in front of an apartment complex, sinking down against a garbage bin, holding onto my own wrists, writhing in emotional hell. And my dear friend picked me up, and put me in her car, and drove. And I laughed, I remember very distinctly laughing, taking a drink, and laughing. Laughing at the ridiculousness, that I had gone home for the fall, and that when I returned he would not be there. Behind him he left us a blood soaked carpet, and the image of a bullet through a tough man's skull. 

    I read somewhere, that pain and pleasure run along the same circuits in the brain, which is perhaps why I laughed. I felt dirty afterwards, what an awful thing to do, to laugh at death. Now I realize it was shock, and the only way to cope with infinite absence is to laugh at it. Later the tears really came, so forcefully that I choked, and under the fluorescent light, at three in the morning, I sat on the concrete picking at wood chips. I had put on three jackets, thinking that somehow if I physically felt warm, inside wouldn't feel so awful. 

    I spelt out "happy" with the wood at my feet. I had wanted for so long only to be happy, and I felt that on that Sunday night I almost could have been. I had written some music, I was going to play it, people were going to hear it, and yet I was robbed of the prospect of joy by a gun I had not even touched. It is difficult for me to write music now. Nothing I write seems to ever capture the grief of suicide. I guess no song should be that dangerous. 

    The morning after I had a close friend call me, he was angry, and I had not reached that stage of emotion yet. Possibly because my eyes were still swollen shut, and I was playing a funny little game called "Let's Pretend He's Not Dead". Possibly, because my friend had known him quite a bit longer than I had. Possibly... I didn't know we were allowed to be angry at the dead, it seemed pointless to me, but the longer the phone call lasted the more angry I became, the more I felt bitter, the more I blamed him for his own death and the aftermath, the more I blamed him for all of it. 

    I remember telling my friend that death always seemed so romantic to me. John Green had given me this vision that death was a gentle passing, the moving picture to an instrumental guitar song, aesthetically satisfying, and always occurred only in slow motion.  F. Scott Fitzgerald had gifted me the idea that death was simply a linen curtain, and pearls, and silk shirts, and rich men falling softly to their demise at the hands of a flower. Church had given me the thought that death was sacrifice, heroic, necessary. But death was none of these, I found. Death was immediate, sudden, a mess. A mess. 

    Here's the thing about death on TV- Death on television has a soundtrack. It's usually some soft vocal line or dramatic string quartet. Death in real life is insanely quiet. And as the blood spills, you expect someone to say something, you expect a narrator to jump in, and the screen fade black. But it doesn't, and all you hear is one less breath, and the audience is left staring at this godawful image. The credits never role, the scene doesn't transition to five years later, and the funeral is far from immediate. In fact, you never even make it to the funeral. The body isn't pretty, it's not a quiet passing where everyone gets to close their eyes, the eyes stay open. Terrible. It's not a slender, beautiful hand slipping to the bed side while the heart monitor flat lines in tune with the music- its a 6'3 man, two hundred pounds of dead weight thundering to the floor. It is the slow draining of a real life, life.  

    For a couple of hours, we thought he might live, thought maybe the bullet had missed his brain and somehow hit his jaw bone. It was wishful thinking. We knew it then, and we will always know, but when you can't be in the operating room, you try and think your way to life, far after you know it's left. 

    At some point during the night, everyone stopped talking, and I was alone. And I began to write letters to the people around me. I'll never send them, they are not very insightful, but I realized while writing them, I could never make anyone love another human. I could tell someone to cherish their friends, to tell the love interest you love them, to just kiss the human, and they would nod and smile, and agree. The fact is, it is all sentiment, it is all passive and blind agreement, until it isn't. But the "isn't" can only occur after tragedy. Unfortunately. 

   Learning how to breathe after he killed himself was strange. I would go days, happy (I thought), frequently enjoying life and it's little pleasures, baking cookies, going on walks - that's what a normal person would do, and then it would all come to a halt. Late at night my chest would begin to burn and I would sob until I felt my sternum crack- right down the middle. I would blame this emotion on my disappointment in myself, on my laziness, on me. These reasons, of course, were false. The fact was, that on the surface of my subconscious, lay a gun inflicted wound to the head of a man I had just spoken to. 

    Today, it is better. I think. Sometimes I will be in the grocery store and cry while I'm bagging broccoli. Sometimes, I will not be able to talk. Sometimes it is bad. Really bad. But, sometimes it is good.  I find myself talking more, and calling more, and smiling more. Valuing the human life more. Valuing what is important. Valuing myself.