Grief

I've had a hard time with this subject this year. I have talked with several people about this, so, if you have heard this before, I apologize. I process my feelings by talking. Darin calls it verbal diarrhea. This is why I keep talking about grief. I just can't figure it out. I can't wrap my little brain around the concept and its implications. So, here is my oft repeated story.

My good friend, Eric, hanged himself when we were 15. Eric and I had grown up in the same small church. I have a picture of Eric and I sitting on our mother's laps when we are about 6 months old, not too long after he was adopted. The church we attended met on Sunday morning, Sunday evening and Wednesday night, so we saw each other frequently. We also went to the same middle school. In middle school, both of began to rebel especially hard. We both did some really stupid stuff. (Ever tried smoking banana peels, grass clippings, peanut shells, etc, in an attempt to get high? Eric had.) Eric was always trying to come up with some way to get high off everyday items. He would pop any pill that was given to him. (remember folks, this is in middle school. We didn't have access to much.) On more than one occasion, he was given laxatives. He did nearly anything to get attention. He always wore Polo brand clothes, but not by choice. The only exception were two Grateful Dead shirts. I highly doubt he had ever actually heard The Dead, but the shirts were tie-dye and he knew it was stoner music. His sister needle pointed him a belt with dancing bears on it. They buried him in that belt.

I had sat next to Eric at church that Sunday night. We sat in the back row together. I would brood and write in my journal while he doodled and wrote perverted names and addresses on the cards left in the pews for visitors. By this time, I was a sophomore at Lafayette, while he was still a freshman at Dunbar, due to being held back in eighth grade. Nothing extraordinary happened during the church service. We hung out outside and watched the kids play. There was one little girl, Madie, that would only go to Eric. She wouldn't let anyone else touch her. He had her sitting on a low tree branch and was bouncing the branch around to make her giggle. Eric left with his parents and went to Krogers to buy lunch meat and cheese because he wanted to pack his lunch for school that week. He got home around eight. I'm not sure what happened in those next three hours. I was on the phone with a friend around 11:30. I was not supposed to be on the phone that late. I got a beep. It was a man from church wanting to talk to my dad. I knew something was amiss, as it was too late for him to be calling. Either something bad had happened or someone wanted to be baptized. My dad got off the phone and said that Eric had tried to hang himself and that they were headed to the hospital. I laughed and thought of what a dumb ass he was to try to get attention that way. I rolled my eyes and went to bed without giving it another thought.

When I woke up in the morning, I found my mom crying in the kitchen. She told me that Eric had died. I know I started crying right away, but was still in shock. I was able to get myself dressed and ready for school. Once I got to school, I went to my favorite teacher, Mrs. Foose, and told her what had happened. She gave me a hug and I knew that it really sucked, but didn't cry. During lunch, I told my friends in drumline that committing suicide was about the dumbest thing you could ever do. I was more angry than sad at this point. His visitation was on Wednesday night. I arrived to find my good friend, Cole, outside smoking. I ran up to him and we shared what is easily one of the best hugs of my life. The hug swallowed me whole and I could feel the same grief I was feeling inside Cole, too. It was so powerful and full of love. They had an open casket visitation. As all dead people colored with make-up and pumped full of preservatives do, he looked orange and fake. They were able to pull his collared shirt up high enough to cover the marks on his neck. His casket was chock full of knick knacks, cigarettes, joints, notes, you name it, that his peers wanted him to have. I put in my a ball chain necklace with a Grateful Dead charm in with his body.

The next day, at his funeral, there were so many people from Dunbar there that Cole and I had to sit in the very back room and watch his funeral on a TV screen. This made me so mad that people who had known him at Dunbar, most likely only in passing, had the privilege to see his funeral through their own eyes, not through some soulless TV screen. That I had known him since we were infants, and I was delegated to the back. Eric had recently started taking guitar lessons. The most recent song he had been learning was John Lennon's, Beautiful Boy. His guitar teacher played it and it was heartbreaking. (Six years later, a week after Denali was born, Darin played his radio show especially for me. He played songs about parenthood and babies and all the good stuff that comes with procreation. One of the songs he played was Beautiful Boy. I sat and wept, grieving with my whole body, for all the mother's who have lost a child.) The Funeral moved on to the Lexington Cemetery, where they buried him on a hillside overlooking a pond. While they buried him, I wondered what would happen to all the accoutrements we had tossed in the casket. I still wonder about those things every time I visit his grave.

This post has gone on longer than I had planned.I haven't even gotten to my purpose of this post. I've written things here that I haven't thought about in nearly a decade. The literary diarrhea was more forceful that I had expected it to be. I have to prepare for a March Madness performance tonight, so I'm going to hop off and continue this post, sooner than later.