An unnecessary death

My cousin Danny killed himself yesterday. He was 33. His mom found him with part of his head missing the day before Mother’s Day. The day before his sister’s new baby was going to be christened.

The fourth or fifth of five siblings, the average size of Catholic families of our parents’ generation, I really only met Danny once or twice. Honestly, I hardly remember a thing about him – my parents whisked our branch of the family tree off the great American Southwest before he or his brother were born.

(Actually, there is one anecdote I can relate about Danny, one that certainly won’t make it into the official record. It was at his brother Chris’ ill-fated first wedding a few years back. Near the end of the reception, the photographer was trying to round up all of the cousins for an all-the-cousins shot. Danny was the Best Man and there was no way the photo could be taken without him, but he was seriously MIA. I mean, nobody knew where he was. The rest of us were assembled on the steps of the joint they had the reception in, a swanky, secluded place out in the woods. After at least a 15-minute search, Danny came walking sheepishly up the dirt road with only a shit-eaten grin and an apology for his absence. As he passed me to take his place next to his brother, I caught the unmistakable scent of freshly cooked cannibis and thought, “This is a cousin I could get to like.”)

There literally are no words of comfort for those he left behind. As the strict Catholics that his family are, they’re taught to believe that suicides go straight to hell. There’ll be no joyful reunion in the sweet bye and bye. That’s it. Danny’s gone.

My heart goes out to his mom, who found him. He had to have known that was a likely scenario. How could anyone be so cruel? As far as I know, he didn’t have any particular mommy issues. He left a note which the police were scheduled to share with them today.

But I’m willing to bet he wasn’t a good enough writer to erase the image in his mom’s eye of what he looked like when she discovered his body yesterday.

I’ve thought about suicide… all of us depressives have. Oddly, it used to give me the solace and strength to go on that my church-going relatives draw from their faith. Suicide and God are both the ultimate get-out-of-jail-free cards. Their presence means there’s always a way out, so I might as well soldier on another day and see what it brings.

I always used to tell myself, “Maybe tomorrow is the day I’ll finally get laid again.”

But the real reason I never pushed the button was I cared too much for the people who would survive me. My pain, I guess, never got bigger than the love I have for my family and my disinclination to destroy the entire rest of their lives. No matter my issues with her, I would never, ever do that to my mother. It’s the ultimate repudiation of your work as a parent, when your kid kills him or herself.

And now that I have a son of my own, the suicide option is no longer on the table, not even in a get-out-of-jail way. I don’t need to tell you what kind of lives the kids of suicides lead. Plus, I was born to raise this kid; I’m no longer interested in getting to the head of the check-out line, no matter how bad a day I’ve had.

Today, my aunt and uncle are suffering agonies I can’t even imagine. Like I said earlier, my mom and her four sibs believed in having big families. (When my parents discovered they couldn’t have kids the regular way, they went out and adopted four of us.). Danny’s parents had five kids; all three of the girls have dutifully fulfilled their parents’ fondest dreams, marrying successful, Catholic men and producing mass quantities of grandchildren.

The boys, not so much. Danny’s brother finally got married a few years back, late in life relative to the rest of the family. The marriage was kaput in less than a year. The brothers both took menial jobs (ie: blue-collar jobs, not the cool-titled jobs of their dad or their sisters’ husbands) and for a while even lived together in the same apartment.

I never heard a bad word spoken about either of the boys, but they were always brushed off with a couple sentences each at the end of the annual Christmas letter – which, to be fair, tended to enumerate accomplishments – and among the cousins, they rated near the bottom in terms of accruing the kind of accomplishments the family valued. Right there next to me at the bottom of the rankings.

The difference between me and Danny and his brother, I think, is that I decided at an early age it wasn’t worth giving a shit that I was failing to fit into the family model. For one thing, as my parents were less accomplished than their peers, the bar was pre-lowered for me, so I almost certainly had fewer expectations placed on me than Danny did on him. Add the fact that I distinguished myself as a hard-core fuck-up at a very early age, successfully lowering expectations to the point where as long as I didn’t end up an institutional man I was considered to be doing pretty good.

I started out without much expected of me to begin with, and then didn’t buy into the guilt when I couldn’t meet even that low bar. Honestly, I was one of the people who thought I was doing pretty good just by not being jailed or shanked in a bar fight.

And I’m passing the blessing of low expectations on to my own son, in the hope that they will serve him as well as they have me.

When people ask me how my son is, I tell them, “He’s happy. He’s doing his thing and his head is screwed on tight.” Everything else is just details.

As long as he stays happy, we’ve both hit our marks.

•

On a related note – and as long as I’m already sad – today marks ten years since Shel Silverstein was taken from us.

Shel was also pretty good at separating out what was important from what was just details, and he did it in a way that brought a smile to your lips and a tear to your eye. I defy you to remain stoic after watching the Uncle Shelby clip below, from The Johnny Cash Show, ca 1970.