So we end up finding a tattoo artist who will do it but not on the premises of the tattoo parlor, only if we went with him to his apartment. It was 1991, so that was not only unusual, but, as it turned out, illegal in the state of New Mexico. “Once sophomore year a bunch of us from the dorm drove down to Albuquerque in one guy’s old station wagon because one of us, Adrian, wanted to get a piercing. Who buys a commemorative T-shirt from juvie? He wore it mischievously in college, amused when people thought it was for the local highbrow movie house, Center for Contemporary Arts. When they bailed him out, he saw the place sold T-shirts with CCA, for ‘Corrections Corporation of America,’ on them, and he bought one. “When we started college, Mike was just 17, but he had already been to Santa Fe the year before, to stay in juvenile detention after an unplanned cross-country trip in a parent’s car. Even his life experiences sometimes bordered on the surreal. I guess what I want to say is that he was more unique than other people. Mike was an unusual person: witty, eccentric, offbeat, with eclectic tastes insatiable curiosity for the interesting things in the world. You can’t call them unique because everyone is unique, and nobody we love is replaceable. “Of the many people dear to us, most are ordinary people, some are unusual. Mike (left) with James (middle) and Frank (right) at St. My husband and dozens of Mike’s friends-he was that kind of guy, he had so many friends-flew to Maryland for the funeral. That he is at peace even as we are in chaos, shredded by his suicide. That dear, loved, sarcastic, brilliant Mike isn’t suffering any more, isn’t aching, isn’t unhappy. “Death is something that happens to other people,” my 16-year-old daughter said. We wished you were calling to cheer him up with your bad jokes. In December James got suddenly and unexpectedly sick. We wish we could turn back the clock and burst into your apartment that moment before you pulled the trigger and stop you from committing suicide. We wish you had picked up the phone instead of that gun. We want you to be the proud father who watches Zoe grow up, celebrates her college graduation, walks her down the aisle at her wedding. We ache for the hurt that you felt, the isolation and disconnection, if that’s what it was. “He wouldn’t have done that if he hadn’t been in agony.” “He must have been in so much pain,” I whispered, cradling my husband’s head in my arms. There had been layoffs at the Post when the economy took a dive. How could Mike-Mike-shoot himself in the head? What kind of unbearable heaviness was he feeling that led him to commit suicide, to kill the father of his only child, the friend of so many, the bright light that the world needed and wanted? They played video games together, tried out tech gadgets it was his job to review. He got married to a beautiful, vivacious, successful woman who had an older son from a previous marriage. After graduating he landed a coveted job as a journalist, reporting on the tech industry for the Washington Post. Mike and James went to St John’s College together. And when James went to visit him, just a few months before, Zoe helped pick out a present-a little plastic pony with a mane of golden hair-for James to bring back to our Leone. He had a eight-year-old daughter, the same age as our youngest. The soft-spoken unassuming blond guy with the offbeat sense of humor. Why would a man in his 40s with everything to live for shoot himself in the head? He jammed his forehead with his fingers as if he could find the answer there if he tapped hard enough. He sat at the table with his head in his hands. Why, why, why, James kept asking himself. All I could think was there must be some mistake. It was like someone turned the volume of my life to off. Nothing existed but the words my husband had just said: “Mike died.” My husband’s best friend committed suicide. Time stopped when James told me. But when my husband’s best friend Mike committed suicide, it didn’t make the headlines. When a friend commits suicide you can’t help but wish you could have done something to prevent it.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |