The hardest part of this blog is to not sound like a broken record. Since October, I basically have cycled through four major emotions. Obviously sadness: I think we are all saddened by the loss of somebody so very special. Anger, and why not? I am angry a lot at David for the mess he left behind and how severely this has impacted so many. Emptiness: This constant feeling of something missing from my daily life that has no replacement now, or likely ever. And uncertainty for what life is going to be like moving forward while I try to re-learn just about everything I thought I knew.
I can only imagine this is similar to the mental strain that a person who has been paralyzed goes through as they try to reconfigure their brain to make the motor skills work again. You are acutely familiar with the actions you want to take, but for some reason, the limbs aren’t responding.
It becomes overwhelming—not depression, per se, but a lack of enthusiasm for something you used to like doing. It requires all your will to give even a half-hearted attempt at things you used to love so much. I sat on the boat on Friday and sailed a roughly 140 mile trip from Newport to NYC. When I was in a Newport, a flood of emotions overcame me as I walked by familiar locations where David and I used to hang out during the summer, and I found yet another thing that he and I could enjoy together. There was a lot of the four emotions cycling with every step I took in that town.
I wanted to hate the restaurants, the bars, the asphalt itself for having ever let a single footfall of David’s shoes touch its surface.
I took a couple walks in Central Park on a weekday by myself and thought of all the times he called me at work from there while he was sitting on a rock or just trying to collect his thoughts. I found myself looking at different rocks and wondering, “Did my brother sit on that very one and grapple with his will to live?” I tried to take in the various scenes of the tourists, or the blooms of spring, and wondered to myself if he ever even noticed how amazing any of it all was. Or was he all consumed by his inability to see beyond his nose? See beyond to all the wonderful things there are to experience, and how that list is nearly infinite.
I took a walk by Boat Basin and thought of the countless times we spent there drinking with our friends in the industry, celebrating a new job or promotion. Not realizing that several months later, I would be living just a few blocks from it.
I watched the cyclists on the outer loop zooming by on a beautiful spring weekend day as they weaved in and out of the crossing pedestrian traffic. I thought of all the times he and I did the exact same thing and how much we enjoyed our rides together. I haven’t been on my bike since David and I went for our last ride together. I walk by a bike store and think about how I would like to invest in a new road bike but end up not going in because David and I were talking about buying bikes together.
I drive his car through CT and think to myself, “It shouldn’t be me behind the wheel of this particular car… it should be me in the passenger seat, toying with the playlist.”
I was in his apartment yesterday, replacing the door the firemen kicked down because they couldn’t get to him in the bathroom. I think to myself, “I shouldn’t be doing this kind of repair… we should be working on his kitchen, or adding something to the apartment for him that would compliment his new cabinets.” And if I did need to help him replace the door, it shouldn’t have been because the firemen needed to kick it in to be able to take his lifeless body out of the apartment that he worked so hard to get.
It’s the sacrifice we make when we decide to love somebody that exposes us to the greatest venerability as a human being. There was a line from the movie Vanilla Sky, a movie both David and I liked for very different reasons. Jason Lee is explaining that you can’t really experience sweet without having known the bitter. So I guess it would apply in the same sense that we can’t really know what it means to be alive until a life has been taken from us. Well, I appreciate this life and opportunity I have been given. But it has come at an exceptionally great cost.
There are more times than I would like to admit when I just hope beyond all hopes that my phone will ring, and it will be David. That when I am in his apartment he will walk in, and none of this will have ever happened. That this was all a giant nightmare in which I woke up to the comforting smile and hug from my brother. It’s a pipe-dream. The reality is always; there is no UNDO button when you decide to take the course of action my brother did that Saturday morning.
In suicide, there are only countless causalities both living and dead. Those who died, die—they miss every opportunity that was out there to have found the means to come out of the funk and to heal and live a very normal and healthy life. Then there are those who live on—the walking dead: the people whose lives are eternally changed with the giant holes in their hearts. Whose every experience of something familiar usually includes a “remember when David _______?” For those who keep on living, you are challenged to come out of your paralysis by doing the things that hurt the most over and over again until the pain subsides and the scars start to heal.
I don’t want to sound like a broken record with my posts, but the fact is that I am finding it is only through repetition that I am able to walk once again.
