The Brotherhood

I  have always believed that we walk through the fires of life for several reasons.  The first to teach us things about ourselves and others.  The second, to be able to help others when they walk through the same fires.  We cannot fully appreciate the pain and suffering of another person unless we too have felt it's sting and levels of agony.  Whether it is healthy issues, financial difficulties or the loss of loved ones, we cannot empathize with someone else unless we have felt their despair.  Sympathy is pointless, mere words designed to comfort both the other party and ourselves.  Empathy, on the other hand, is knowledge beyond question.  Empathetic words have value and they come from a place littered with a debris called experience.  Trust me , the person suffering knows the difference.

A year and a few months ( I think that's right, I still dont have a firm grip on timelines) after Logan's suicide (as determined by law officials and medical examiners) I was functional again.  My life had direction, I was moving forward and had more focus.  I worked and cared for my family and personally, I think I did it well, all things considered.  I had endured the second set of holidays without Logan and while he remained the ghost in the room at family gatherings, we did alright.  The Christmas break from work was nice and much needed.  I tend to stay home during that time, emerging for trips to the grocery store. Home is theraputic for me.  It is my shelter from life's storms.

When I returned to work afterwards, I emailed a coworker, Michael,  that worked at another campus. Cheerfully, I inquired about the holidays and asked if Santa had been good to him.  His reply left me stunned.  Michael explained to me that his baby brother, a contract worker in Iraq,  had committed suicide during the holidays.  I felt my stomach sink and things got a bit blurry.

It reminded me of the time shortly after Logan's death, only a year earlier, that I was helping a student in the office.  She was visibly upset.  I was always one of the first adults to see a child at school. I could see if they were having a good day or not.  I could also see if there was a serious problem and when that happened, I would get them back to their counselor instead of letting them try to go to class with a burden they could not carry.  On this day, I asked her if she was ok.  She said "No, my best friend committed suicide last night".  I remember trying to fill out her pass to class.  But I couldn't see the words on the paper.  My coworker was standing next to me, I looked at her and said "can you finish this for me please?". I instructed the girl to wait for me inside the office, that I would be right back.   I got up, walked out of my office and into the back interior of the vault where I could be alone.  I couldn't breathe.  My mind was racing and I remember telling myself  this isnt happening to me.  This is not Logan.. This isnt me that had a friend commit suicide last night.  This isnt me, this is her, this is her, this is her.  For several minutes I stayed in there, in that vault and cried, mentally trying to seperate myself from this girl's situation.  I then composed myself and breathed deeply.  I wiped my tears, met the girl and took her back to her counselor.

When we are traumatized, we remain easily traumatized.  It takes very little to send us back to that dark place, that place of chaos and pain.  The good thing is that, with time,  we dont stay there for weeks and months.  The roller coaster still runs but we are out of the dips much faster and back on top where we can breathe.

Now here was Michael. His brother was gone.  His devastation evident.  His world had come crashing down, it was imploding and chaos had taken over.  For several months we talked.  I shared with him my loss and he told me that no one understood how he felt like I did.  Sadly we both shared the same kind of  horrible loss.  We talked about how we had lost people before to illness and accident and how bad that was to endure.  We also talked about being a suicide survivor and how much longer it took to find our way out of that darkness.

I did what I could to help Michael.  But just like me, one traumatic experience was followed by another and instead of finding his way through it, he crumbled. He had to leave his job and for the most part disappeared.I would contact him and have brief conversations but he had retreated to a safe place to heal.

Today, Michael was on my mind.  So I sent him a message to see how things were going.  We began talking via phone messages and finally I got him to send me an email.  I hope that he will let me do what I can to help him as we share the most horrendous of brotherhoods.  We belong to the same awful club of suicide survivors.  That elite group of people who never wanted to be there, never wanted to know the criteria for entering and never ever wanted a lifetime membership.  But if we are to be good stewards of our fellow man, then we have to help each other out. We have to offer comfort when we can and a hand up to those that have stumbled.

I hope Michael will be receptive to my suggestions to put the focus on himself now.  To eat foods that make him strong instead of weak.  To take walks to exercise both his body and his mental demons.  To make plans for his future and leave what was, in the past.  His "what was" wont go anywhere, it just wont be able to trip him up quite so easily.   I know I can only do so much but I certainly want to give  him what I needed when I needed it most.  Hes been on an island far too long.  I'd like to try to be the ship he sees on the horizon. Even if he waives me to pass, I will have known that I tried.  Thats all any of us can do.






































I

Wake up! Wake up!

I woke up very early this morning with a memory that had been long resting in some recess of my mind. I awoke thinking about the deputy sheriff sitting in his lawn chair on the railroad tracks. In my mind's eye I could see him. I could even see the color of the chair, one of those metal chairs with the woven patterned prints for the seat and back. I could see the railroad tracks, the white gravel laying beneath the rusty colored metal. I could see the trees in the background.

Why was he on my mind?

I never knew much about Deputy Sheriff, only that he was a decorated officer in the county where my nephew, Logan, lived and died. I learned that Deputy Sheriff was an avid hunter and often hunted the woods near those railroad tracks. Local papers described him an experienced outdoors man and the people that knew him could not understand how this could have happened. According to local publications, there was to be an investigation into the incident.

Sometime in the spring after Logan died, after we had survived our first holiday under duress, after my brother Ray had secured custody of his only surviving child Rissa, after the intense fog of grief had only slightly lightened, we had put hope for justice in Deputy Sheriff.

I had lost count of the number of emails we had sent to various agencies, news outlets, social groups and even government agencies in hopes that someone would find the abuse of a child a crime. It seemed that no one really cared. Oh sure there were consistent expressions of sorrow and sympathy, but no where did anyone say "Hey, this isn't right, this is a crime. Someone needs to go to jail". Those were words we longed for. We desperately needed to somehow right this wrong.

It's odd how grief will throw you around like that suitcase in those old Samsonite commercials from back when I was a kid. I guess grief is the gorilla and the gorilla gets bored. There is just no proper way to describe how it makes you feel, how it leads you down one path, how it keeps you hungry for answers and thirsty for understanding. Grief is the intense August sun beating down on your soul. Before long you stagger through your days, drenched in your pain and loss.
Your only rest comes with sleep and that never goes on long enough.

I remember receiving the email from Ray about Deputy Sheriff. It was short and to the point. Ray said that he had heard from his attorney. Deputy Sheriff had been killed by a train while on a hunting trip with his father. Immediately we began searching the Internet for information regarding his death.

It was the big mystery in that small town where Deputy Sheriff had lived and died. Reports from the people driving the train indicated that Deputy Sheriff was seated in his lawn chair on the railroad tracks, he appeared to be sleeping. The man on the train blew the whistle several times but Deputy Sheriff never responded. The train ran over Deputy Sheriff killing him instantly along with Hope and Justice. We learned that Deputy Sheriff was only days away from presenting Logan's case to a Grand Jury.

We mourned for Deputy Sheriff and his family. What a horrible thing to happen to what appeared by all accounts to be a good, decent, honest man. I mourned for him, the family that loved him and for all those that would never know his dedication and service.

I mourned for Hope and Justice. I mourned for Logan. By now, my ability to mourn was just a numb mourning that felt like pain but did not hurt. Maybe after all we had been through, it did not hurt because it wasn't a surprise. Or maybe it didn't hurt because we still couldn't feel anything. I remember it being the exhale of resignation, too tired to plan, too damaged to fight, too wounded to beg one more person to do the right thing. We needed to heal. We needed to just heal.

Slowly and without saying a word, my family emotionally let go of Logan's hand and let him go.