Twenty years ago, I would hang out with this family for days on end.
Jeff Jones (he goes by Geoff Wolfe today) was my fellow Doors freak, and I remember many pleasant afternoon’s and evenings in their back yard. I was there for July 4 1991, which I remember because someone slammed into my car and took off that night. The car, a 1981 Mercury Marquis, never ran right again. I got pretty smashed that night.
The next year, we celebrated the 4th by blowing up a mannequin with M-80s.
I remember their children, Josh and Sarah, running around the house and yard.
We had a mutual friend in Bob Biondo, a kid who must have weighed in excess of 400 pounds. He had long, curly hair and always wore a cap and trench coat to hide his girth. He supplied me with a lot of weed and cigarettes and he was another mainstay in the Revere basement.
At some point in the early 90s I decided I was getting too grown up to hang around with these people. So I stopped coming around.
I moved to Lynnfield and made sure Biondo didn’t know where I lived. I simply stopped calling the Jones house.
What I didn’t know at the time was that I was beginning a deep slide into depression and addiction. I cut myself off from a lot of people and started to isolate myself.
Thanks to Facebook, I recently reconnected with the Jones family.
Yesterday, I received word that Sarah died.
As a parent, I shudder violently as I think of what Deb and Geoff are going through.
Fortunately, they have a strong Faith. As Deb said on her Facebook page yesterday:
“For those of you grieving … don’t! My daughter is at peace in the arms of her Lord. No more worries, no more pain. Remember the wonderful times you had with her. She was a very special person. Our lives will never be the same, but as for Sarah, she is fine.”
They can use a lot of prayers right now, so if you can spare some that would be appreciated.
Since Duncan’s favorite color is pink, I get pretty pissed when I see stories about the high-and-mighty going nuts because they mistake a color for a gender or sexual orientation.
The latest example is this J. Crew ad, where a mom is painting her son’s toe-nails hot pink:
People have been going absolutely crazy over this, suggesting that the boy will be scarred for life and need thousands of dollars of counseling when he gets older.
And then there’s the fear that — shudder — the kid will grow up to be gay. American society will decay around the edges, and we’ll all be dope-slapped for this on Judgement Day.
I always knew nail polish was nothing but trouble, a bottle of sin dropped on our laps by Satan himself.
“Yeah, well, it may be fun and games now, Jenna, but at least put some money aside for psychotherapy for the kid—and maybe a little for others who’ll be affected by your ‘innocent’ pleasure,” Dr. Keith Ablow wrote in a Fox News op-ed. “If you have no problem with the J. Crew ad, how about one in which a little boy models a sundress? What could possibly be the problem with that?”
Erin Brown of the Media Research Center took the criticism a step further — after being sure to remind readers that J. Crew is a fashion favorite of First Lady Michelle Obama — accusing the company of exploiting young Beckett to advance the cause of “liberal, transgendered identity politics.”
Good fucking grief.
There are more reasoned comments in that article, stuff that I agree with:
Sarah Manley, who set off a similar firestorm last Halloween after posting photos of her young son dressed up as his unconventional idol: Daphne from “Scooby Doo,” said of the J.Crew ad, “If the roles had been reversed and the photo…had been of a little girl playing in the mud with trucks, nobody would have batted an eye.”
“So go back and look at that picture in the J.Crew ad, will you? What do you see? Do you see pink nail polish on a boy? Or do you see a little boy named Beckett, with beautiful blond curls, and a mom who looks like she is impossibly in love with her kid, in the very best way? Because that’s what I see.”
That’s what I see, too.
This is one of those issues where Duncan has taught me a lot.
He has a pink winter hat and a pink knitted coin pouch. When a priest saw him wearing the hat last year, a look of concern came over him. “Well, I guess there’s still time,” he said.
One Sunday, Duncan showed the school principal his coin pouch. “That’s an interesting color,” she said. The pouch was stuffed with coins Duncan couldn’t wait to put in the poor box.
I once asked Duncan why pink is his favorite color. His answer: “Because girls like pink. And I like girls.” Innocent words from a 7-year-old boy.
And yet there are those who try to tell me this is dangerous. He could grow up gay.
This is how you start a child down the path of social anxiety, pain and dysfunction. You take something as innocent as a color choice and start suggesting there’s something wrong with him.
When I was a kid, I got hassled over the more old-fashioned stuff, like being overweight. I also kept believing in Santa Clause longer than the other kids my age. Being fat meant being damaged, unworthy of the same respect everyone else got. In high school, I used to watch teachers belittle students who dressed like hippes. The kids were drug-injecting wastoids as far as some of the teachers were concerned. I knew some who were, but I knew others who were not.
Make a kid feel stupid over how they look or what they wear and after awhile they’re probably going to start believing they are damaged goods.
Don’t get me wrong. I think the pink fear crowd have their hearts in the right place. They just want children to be happy and grow into “normal” and happy adults.
But their thinking is flawed.
Here’s my take on the J. Crew ad: It looks like a typical fashion ad: over the top, depicting people with overly big smiles. But it’s harmless.
Hell, I remember painting my own finger nails red as a teenager because I wanted to look like people in the glam metal bands that were all the rage in the 1980s. It was harmless. And trust me, it did nothing to dampen my enthusiasm for girls. I was having no luck with the opposite sex in high school, mind you, but nail polish had nothing to do with that.
As for Duncan, he can like whatever color he wants to like. If you have a problem with that, you can come talk to the boy’s ugly, still overweight Dad.
I’ll probably tell you you’re being shallow and judgemental. I might even tell you you’re being a dickhead.
I don’t remember Tammy Digan from back in the day, but that doesn’t surprise me. I was mostly a loner back then. Except for a few close friends, I kept to myself. But I remember Zane.
Here’s what she said in the comment section of that post:
Yesterday I woke up as I do any other day, however my mood was different. I found myself missing Zane very deeply. The way I felt, was as if he has just passed within the last few weeks. I cried and cried for him. It was as if he were calling out to me. Finally I decided to pay him a visit.
When I arrived at the cemetary I parked in my usual spot and immediately began speaking to him as I walked to his grave. For whatever reason, I could not find him. Finally, it was starting to get cold as the sun was beginning to set. I was at the very back of the cemetary and had decided to make one last search and I would go in and out of each row this time. I had been here many times before, so I could not understand what the problem was, other than my blured vision from the tears.
As I began my quest, I told Zane that this would be my last pass through because it was getting too cold out and I was beginning to lose hope on finding him and perhaps he did not want to be found and only remembered on this day. As I took the next corner, there was his headstone, just as I remembered it. Zane and I had a relatively lengthy conversation and a lot of tears were shed.
Zane passed on April 8, 1988.
He was one of the most honest and kind people I have ever known. He had an amazing ability to make you smile. You could not help but to love him. Thank you for you post, it has helped me to not have to mourn his loss alone.
Even though it has been so long, I think this is one loss that will bring me to tears until the day I join him.
Tammy Digan
I know where she’s coming from. When another friend, Sean Marley, took his life eight years after Zane’s death, I visited his grave constantly.
I was very angry with him for years after his death. I swore at his gravestone a lot. I spat on the grass in front of it once. Most of the time, I talked to him, though in hindsight I was really just talking to myself, repeating all the worries in my head that really had nothing to do with Sean. My brain would spin on its stem over fears that I’d never measure up and love people the way you’re supposed to. I guess I was just venting to him like I did when he was alive.
I’m often asked how I’ve been able to find happiness after his suicide and my brother’s death. It was a long road, to be sure. But a lot has happened since then.
With Michael and Sean, I’m not sure I ever really recovered. To this day, I’m cleaning up from the long cycles of depression and addiction that followed me through the years.
Along the way, good things happened to fill in the black holes. I married the love of my life. We had two beautiful children. My career hummed along nicely for the most part.
In a strange way, Peter’s death, terrible and depressing as it was, marked the beginning of a long, hard path to recovery. It was my behavior in the months after his death that made me realize something was seriously wrong with me. It’s almost as if Peter’s spirit pushed me into dealing with things.
Peter always was a pushy motherfucker.
I’ve never been able to piece together a general timeline of the grieving process. It turns out we’re not supposed to know about such things. That would be cheating.
I do know that IT GETS BETTER.
Understanding that as I do, I’ve discovered a few things about getting through the grieving process. Here’s what I’d suggest to those going through it now:
–Take a moment to appreciate what’s STILL around you. Your spouse. Your kids. Your friends. If the death you just suffered should teach you anything, it’s that you never know how long the other loves of your life will be around. Don’t waste the time you have with them, and, for goodness sake:
–Don’t sit around looking at people you love and worrying yourself into an anxiety attack over the fact that God could take them from you at any moment. God holds all the cards, so it’s pointless to even think about it. Just be there for people, and let them be there for you.
–Take care of yourself. You can comfort yourself with all the drugs, alcohol, sex and food there is to have. But take it from me, giving in to addictions is nothing but slow suicide. You can’t move past grief and see the beauty of what’s left if you’re too busy trying to kill yourself. True, I learned a ton about the beauty of life from having been an addict, but that doesn’t mean I’d ever wish that experience on others. If there’s a better way to cope, do that instead.
–Embrace things that are bigger than you. Nothing has helped me get past grief more than doing service to others. It sounds like so much bullshit, but it’s not. When I’m helping out in the church food pantry or going to Overeater’s Anonymous meetings and guiding addicts who ask for my help, I’m always reminded that my own life could be much worse. Or, to put it another way, I’m reminded how my own life is so much better than I realize or deserve.
This isn’t a science.
It’s just what I’ve learned from my own walk through the valley of darkness.
She reviews two books about grief — “History of a Suicide: My Sister’s Unfinished Life” by Jill Bialosky, and Joyce Carol Oates’ “A Widow’s Story.” She finds a lot more value from the former than the latter for the simple reason that Bialosky does something useful with her grief and gives the reader a map for moving on. Oates, on the other hand, wallows in her grief throughout her book without taking it to the next, necessary level.
Of “History of Suicide,” Pols writes:
At what point does an individual’s grief move from the chaos of misery to a vessel of wisdom worth passing along? In 1990, Jill Bialosky’s half sister Kim committed suicide, asphyxiating herself in the garage of the Cleveland house where they’d grown up. She was 21, beautiful and tenderhearted, and Bialosky was left heartbroken and haunted by the riddle of Kim’s inexplicable decision. A book editor, novelist and poet, Bialosky took nearly 20 years to process this history into something she felt ready to publish. The result is her searing memoir, History of a Suicide: My Sister’s Unfinished Life. In it, Bialosky serves as detective, analyzing police and autopsy reports, reading Kim’s journals and developing a psychological profile of her. Pursued by the survivor’s “fear of disgrace,” Bialosky struggles to answer the unbearable question — Could I have stopped her? — and to illuminate the brief life of her sister, a girl cherished by her mother and siblings but broken by her father’s absence.
With Kim’s story at its heart, History of a Suicide probes larger issues, like the possibility of a genetic susceptibility to suicide, and examines the question of how any young person can really know he or she wants to die. In an age when youth suicide is spoken of as an epidemic, Bialosky’s memoir feels extraordinarily useful. Her language is plain (“Suicide should never happen to anyone. I want you to know as much as I know. This is the reason I am writing this book”) but enveloping. There is a remarkable lack of self-pity in these pages, even as the author recounts more tragedy on the heels of Kim’s death: her loss of two infants at birth.
She contrasts that to “A Widow’s Story” this way:
The careful, mature craft of Bialosky’s memoir stands in stark contrast to Joyce Carol Oates’ A Widow’s Story, which arrives three years to the month after the death of her beloved husband of 47 years, Raymond Smith, at 77. Reeling from the loss, Joyce Smith — that is how she sees herself, not as the well-known author but as Ray’s wife — falls apart, even contemplating suicide. The book reflects that: it is shockingly raw and messy, filled with weirdly exclamatory, heavily italicized writing and teeming with such fresh hysteria that one feels the urge to slip it a sedative. “I haven’t been able to comprehend my experiences in any coherent way,” Oates writes in early March, a month after Ray’s death. In August, when the book ends, we still feel that incoherence. By then she had met a new man, to whom she is now married. The depth or length of someone’s grief should never be judged — and few could begrudge Oates the joy of finding fresh love after 70 — but for the reader, still caught in her depression, such a quick turnaround is jarring.
If only Oates had waited, if not on the writing then at least on the editing. Both memoirs are filled with truths of human suffering, but while Bialosky’s offers a source of solace and understanding for the bereaved, Oates piles her grief onto the page and walks away — a reminder that sharing does not always mean giving.
Sharing does not always mean giving.
That is so true.
When I write about the bad stuff I’ve been through, I always try to frame it around some core lessons I’ve learned and how life today is so much better than it was during the darker periods I write about. I always try to share for the sake of suggesting a better way forward.
Do I ever fail to do that? I’m sure I do, especially when writing about another suicide that’s haunted me for 14-plus years. It can be easy to spend just a little too much time wallowing in that one. But in recent months I’ve had plenty of reason to take joy in my memories of him — and in the other friends I have thanks to him. If there was no hope to give, writing this blog would be pointless.
Why be part of that endless, mournful sound if you can avoid it? At the same time, you can’t bury the feelings that come with adversity and pretend it’s not there.
There’s a balance to be had, and Bialosky finds it in her book.
Say what you will about Mister Rogers. His speech and mannerisms may stop being cool after you hit puberty, but the lessons he taught are timeless and ageless.
My friend Olivia Gatti shared this quote from Mr. Rogers on Facebook awhile back:
When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say, “Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.” To this day, especially in times of disaster, I remember my mother’s words, and I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers–so many caring people in this world.
The man was so right.
I suspect Olivia had the earthquake and tsunamis in Japan on her mind when she decided to share, and it certainly fits. There’s been so much tragedy in the last decade, from 9-11 to the tsunamis of late 2004 to this latest event, and for many children — especially those with emotional disorders — it can be enough to terrorize to the core, no matter how far away they are from the given disaster.
The fear meant a lot of things. Working myself into a stupor over the safety of my wife and children. An obsession with cleanliness, which was interesting since depression always meant my personal hygiene took a dive. It also meant a fear of world events. When that Nostradamus movie “The Man Who Saw Tomorrow” came out on HBO in the early 1980s, I was terrified by the “future” scenes.
Later, when Iraq invaded Kuwait, I thought the scene from above was playing out and it left me in a huge depression, one where I stayed in my basement with the lights off.
Similar emotions took hold on Sept. 11, 2001. Of course, those emotions took hold on everyone that day.
It fed a lot of my addictive behavior in adulthood and blackened parts of my childhood that might have otherwise been happy — even with the bad things that happened. Bad things happen to everyone. That’s life. But some people can maintain a certain level of happiness despite it.
Mr. Rogers learned a powerful lesson from his mother. I wish I had it in my head to focus on the helpers growing up. In hindsight, they were always there:
–My friends, who have always helped me make sense of things, made me laugh and done all the other things a person needs to get through the day.
–Many of the people in my faith community, who showed me how to accept God’s Grace, even if I still suck at returning the favor.
With the bigger events like what happened in Japan, it’s so easy to see only the calamity, death and sadness. It’s easy to get fixated on whether such a thing could happen where we live.
But when you look at it the way Mr. Roger’s mother suggested, it becomes a different picture altogether. The bad stuff is still there, but you also see that no matter what happens, there will always be enough kind souls to help the rest of us through to the other side.
When you can see the good in people even during the darkest of hours, it restores your faith in humanity.
I tend to get a lot of mail from people who read this blog, particularly the stuff about the rougher parts of my life. God Bless ’em, because they’re good people who want to buck me up. But I think they misunderstand where I’m coming from sometimes.
There are days when my posts cross over to darker territory, especially when a wave of depression or OCD moment hits. I also do a lot of soul searching here, which is part of what I started this for. Some see those posts and tell me I’m way too hard on myself.
When too much of this happens, I need to come on here and tell you why you don’t need to worry about me or express sympathy. This time, I got a nice, shiny five-point manifesto to make my point:
1.) If I write about something bad that happened to me or something I’m feeling bad about, it’s never, ever a cry for pity. I approach my experiences from the point of view that EVERYONE has bad stuff happen to them and that EVERYONE screws up. I’m nobody special. But many times I need to expose my raw feelings to make a point. That’s what writers do.
2.) This blog is all about me making an example of myself. The way I see it, I’ve learned a lot of lessons and developed a lot of coping skills every time I’ve failed. If I don’t admit to my own failings to show where I used to be and where I’m going, the reader won’t walk away with anything useful.
3.) When sharing a bad mood or experience, the goal is to tell others they’re not alone. A lot of people with depression and addiction suffer in silence, thinking they’re different from everyone else in a bad way. The more people come clean about their own struggles, the more those sufferers can see that they’re not so hopeless and strange after all. In other words, some of the stuff readers try to buck me up over are based on my attempts to buck other people up.
4.) Never think for a moment that I don’t love who I am and what I have. It’s easy to read the darker posts and see a guy who loathes himself and curses his lot in life. But these posts aren’t meant to be that way. I still have my struggles and always need to be better than I am, but I also appreciate who I am, where I’ve been and what I’ve learned. And I know when I look at my wife and children that I’m THE luckiest guy on the planet.
5.) Writing all this stuff down is excellent therapy for me, too. Some people may be taken aback by some of the stuff I come clean about here. But in doing so I clear my own mind of the obsessive thinking that can hold me back. Then I can move on to the next thing. That doesn’t mean I don’t get locked into OCD moments, but spilling it here makes things better.
So you see, my friends, there’s no need for sympathy. I’m doing just fine.
But I am grateful for your kindness and good intentions.
My dear friend Joy, who readers know by now as the widow of my late friend Sean Marley, sent me a note today — a message from the distant past.
Mood music:
[spotify:track:2GMC1BnQle6WRstUGUs3mc]
She was looking through some of Sean’s diaries and wanted to share something he wrote about me 20 years ago:
“Bill is turning 20. He is such a fantastic human being. He feels so much and cares about the world and its goings on.”
It’s weird to see. One reason is that I tend to remember the more fucked-up part of me as a 20-year-old. The other is that seeing his words, so many years after he died, is kind of haunting. Sadly, I sometimes have trouble remembering what his voice sounded like.
Thanks for showing me that, Joy. It meant a lot.
I knew Sean kept diaries. I remember watching him write in them as The Cure, T-Rex or Riot (not Quiet Riot) played in the background. I never asked him what he was writing about, though sometimes he told me anyway.
A part of me badly wants to see those diaries. I want to see what was really going through his mind. Not to write about it. I’m sure there’s stuff in there he wouldn’t want to share with the outside world if he were here. Most people keep diaries for themselves. I’m an anomaly.
But another part of me is scared to death of what I might find. I’m not worried about what’s in there about me. To be honest, I don’t know what about it scares me. Maybe it’s just the idea of diving back into the past with someone you can’t interact with anymore.
It’s all a moot point, in any event.
Those notebooks don’t belong to me, and some stories probably aren’t meant to be told.
Consider this a case of me talking to myself, left to my obsessive thoughts.
If you have a best friend — I’m sure you all do — just be there for them. Listen to what’s on their mind, no matter how tired you are. Let your friend know he-she is loved.
If that friend has deep troubles, you may not be able to change the outcome.
But you’ll know you did your best and you’ll know what was on their mind.
And, perhaps, you won’t sit around years later wondering what that friend was writing in his-her diaries as the clock started running to run out.
I was going to continue my tirade about people in AA and OA who take the program too far, but I find myself thinking about friends who are hurting. It’s the kind of hurt that’s justified. But after awhile, it stops being helpful.
Hurt can be a helpful thing at the beginning of a traumatic experience. In a whacked sort of way, it’s a survival tool. If you’ve lost someone or your marriage is crumbling, for example, the hurt is actually like a bizarre shot of morphine and adrenaline.
It keeps you numb enough to be around people, and just self-righteousness enough to walk and talk.
In a sick sort of way, hurt helped me survive during some of the worst moments of my life, including the death of Michael, Sean and Peter. Hurt also fueled my survival instincts when my parents split up, my mother was being abusive and my emotional health was coming apart early last decade.
Henry Rollins actually brought up this phenomena in one of his spoken-word performances, where he talks about the kid hiding in his black-walled room, writing on black paper and yelling, “Here in my room… I reign supreme!”
Teenagers love to feel hurt. It gives them a reason to not listen to their parents or teachers. It gives them something to talk about. I’m not trying to belittle the real, crippling pain kids have to endure all too often. I’m talking about the typical emotions of a rebellious teen. Somewhere in there, there are usually hurt feelings to rage over. Rage isn’t an energy we should hang onto. But sometimes, rageful energy is better than no energy at all.
The hurt that springs from losing someone you love is a lot more complicated and hits you like a knife to the gut, and it takes much longer to fade.
Hell, I’m still not totally over the deaths of my brother and two friends.
I bring all this up because an old friend from the neighborhood I grew up in expressed the hurt she still feels over the death of a dear friend who lost a blistering battle with drug addiction.
She thinks she could have done more to help her friend, and that feeling of failure hurts deep. The word she used was “sting.”
I felt the same way after one friend’s suicide, but at some point I had to drop the hurt. It’s easier said than done. I guess you could say I was able to pull it off my neck and lock it in a metal box under the stairs in the garage.
When the hurt weighs you down so you can’t move, it’s gotta come off.
For me, therapy and a recovery program for mental illness and addiction helped a lot, though my answers aren’t necessarily going to work for the next person.
This old friend lives on the other side of the country and appears to be doing very well for herself. I’m glad to see that.
Hopefully, she’ll wake up someday and realize she probably couldn’t have done much more to save her friend; that addiction has a way of closing a person off from the help friends and family try to offer.
And when that person gives up in the crushing onrush of depression, there’s nothing anyone can do.
There’s a lot of good in my life today. I’ll never take it for granted like I did back then.
Have I led a tragic life? No fucking way.
I’ve lost a lot of people I cared for and my body has been through the meat grinder. But that can never take away the blessings.
And it’s not over yet.
To understand this, just think about your own life. You’ve no doubt experienced sickness and death, family dysfunction and career ups and downs.
If you haven’t, you will.
In between the rough patches, I fell in love with and married the best gal on Earth, had two precious children who keep me laughing and loving, I’ve enjoyed a lot of success in my career, traveled to a lot of cool places and found God.
That stuff doesn’t suck.
Then there’s the joy I feel every day in recovery. All the great friends I have, doing a job I love and having the OCD under control.
Would I want to go through the bad stuff again? Of course not. But the weird truth is that I’m not sure I’d change the past, either. It’s easy for someone to wish they had a lost loved one back in their life and that they were less touched by illness.
But without having gone through these things, would I be where I’m at today?
Twenty-seven years ago today, my brother, Michael S. Brenner, died of an asthma attack at age 17. I can’t blame his death on the demons I’d battle in the years that followed. But it left deep scars all the same.
Mood music:
I think the end came for him at 8:20 p.m., though I could be mistaken.
That day a trend began where I would befriend people a few years older than me. A couple of them would become best friends and die prematurely themselves. It was also the day that sparked a lifelong fear of loss.
It’s been so long since Michael was with us that it’s sometimes hard to remember the exact features of his face. But here’s what I do remember:
We fought a lot. One New Year’s Eve about 31 years ago, when the family was out at a restaurant, he said something to piss me off and I picked up the fork beside me and chucked it at him. Various family members have insisted over the years that it was a steak knife, but I’m pretty sure it was a fork. Another time we were in the back of my father’s van and he said something to raise my hackles. I flipped him the middle finger. He grabbed the finger and snapped the bone.
We were also both sick much of the time. He had his asthma attacks, which frequently got so bad he would be hospitalized. I had my Chron’s Disease and was often hospitalized myself. It must have been terrible for our parents. I know it was, but had to become a parent myself before I could truly appreciate what they went through.
He lifted weights at a gym down the street from our house that was torn down years ago to make way for new developments. If not for the asthma, he would have been in perfect shape. He certainly had the muscles.
He was going to be a plumber. That’s what he went to school for, anyway. During one of his hospital stays, he got pissed at one of the nurses. He somehow got a hold of some of his plumbing tools and switched the pipes in the bathroom sink so hot water would come out when you selected cold.
He was always there for a family member in trouble. If I was being bullied, he often came to the rescue. And when he did, he was fierce.
That last day was perfect for the most part. I remember a sun-kissed winter day. I was immature for a 13-year-old and remember reveling in the toys I got on Christmas two weeks before. The tree in my mother’s house was still up, though the decorations had been removed.
My mother and I think my sister took off to run an errand. My father’s house was only a five-minute walk from my mother’s, and when they drove by, an ambulance was outside the house. I’m told Michael walked to the ambulance himself, and he was rushed to Lynn Hospital, which was torn down long ago to make way for a Super Stop & Shop. I sometimes wonder if he died where the deli counter now stands or if it was where the cereal is now kept.
While I was at my mother’s waiting to hear from someone, a movie was on in which a congressional candidate played by Dudley Moore befriended a woman played by Mary Tyler Moore and her terminally ill daughter, who was about 13. At the end of the movie, the young girl succumbs to her cancer on a train.
That freaked me out, and I went to my mother’s room to bury my head in a pillow. To this day, I refuse to watch that movie.
It was in that room that my mother, father and sister informed me my brother was dead.
I spent the remainder of my teenage years trying to be him. I befriended his friends. I enrolled at his gym, Fitness World. That lasted about a week.
I started listening to his records. Def Leppard was a favorite of his, hence the mood music above.
I even wore his leather jacket for a time, even though it was about three sizes too tight. I couldn’t zip the thing. I looked like an idiot wearing it, but I didn’t care. It was part of him, and I was hell-bent on taking over his persona.
But then there could only be one Michael Brenner. I eventually grew up and realized that. Then I spent a bunch of years trying to be just like Michael’s friend and our neighbor, Sean Marley. But there was only one Sean Marley. Unfortunately, people tend to remember him for how he died rather than how he lived.
I eventually had to learn how to become my own person. I did it, but it was pretty fucking messy. There’s only one Bill Brenner, and he can be a scary sight to behold.
The years have softened the pain, though I still have some regrets.
I regret that I often have trouble remembering what his face looked like. Fortunately, I found this photo while rummaging through my father’s warehouse last summer:
It’s a good image, but it’s in black and white. I still have trouble picturing him in color.
I miss him, and find it strange that he was just a kid himself when he died. He seemed so much older to me at the time. To a 13-year-old, he was older and wiser.
At the wake of a friend’s mom right after Thanksgiving, I found myself thinking of Michael and others who died too soon.
In a bizarre game of mental math, I started thinking about how long it took me to bounce back from each death. It’s a stupid game to play, because there’s no science or arithmetic that applies. The death of a grandparent is part of the natural order of things. The death of a sibling or close friend, not so much. Unless, perhaps, everyone is well into their senior years. Even then, you can’t put a measuring stick on grief.
But I tried doing it anyway.
With Michael and Sean, I’m not sure I ever really recovered. To this day, I’m cleaning up from the long cycles of depression and addiction that followed me through the years.
Along the way, good things happened to fill in the black holes. I married the love of my life. We had two beautiful children. My career hummed along nicely for the most part.
As you might expect, I failed to emerge with a general timeline of the grieving process. It turns out we’re not supposed to know about such things. That would be cheating.
I do know that it gets better.
Understanding that as I do, I have the following advice for those trying to get through the grieving process:
–Take a moment to appreciate what’s STILL around you. Your spouse. Your kids. Your friends. If the death you just suffered should teach you anything, it’s that you never know how long the other loves of your life will be around. Don’t waste the time you have with them, and, for goodness sake:
–Don’t sit around looking at people you love and worrying yourself into an anxiety attack over the fact that God could take them from you at any moment. God holds all the cards, so it’s pointless to even think about it. Just be there for people, and let them be there for you.
–Take care of yourself. You can comfort yourself with all the drugs, alcohol, sex and food there is to have. But take it from me, giving in to addictions is nothing but slow suicide. You can’t move past grief and see the beauty of what’s left if you’re too busy trying to kill yourself. True, I learned a ton about the beauty of life from having been an addict, but that doesn’t mean I’d ever wish that experience on others. If there’s a better way to cope, do that instead.
–Embrace things that are bigger than you. Nothing has helped me get past grief more than doing service to others. It sounds like so much bullshit, but it’s not. When I’m helping out in the church food pantry or going to Overeater’s Anonymous meetings and guiding addicts who ask for my help, I’m always reminded that my own life could be much worse. Or, to put it another way, I’m reminded how my own life is so much better than I realize or deserve.
Like I said: This isn’t a science.
It’s just what I’ve learned from my own walk through the valley of darkness.
I’ve learned that life is a gift to be cherished and used wisely.
