UPDATE: I won't go into why this title is appropriate, neither will I change it. I hope you understand why i may have deleted some things. Sorry.
I don't even know how to begin this. I am so angry and sad all I know to do is to keep typing until something makes sense.
I guess I should begin by saying I have a son who suffers from bipolar disorder. He is 22 years old and he refuses medication or therapy of any kind. Like many who suffer from this disease, he believes it's a feature, not a bug.
We also have a family friend, his best friend, who killed himself last Friday. He was just 20 years old, and he thought he was all alone and was sad about breaking up with his girlfriend. Typical story, right? There's a twist.
Please follow me over the fold to learn of what happened to my son and our family in the past week and what he and we learned from it.
And no, I won't take recipes! Next diary, I promise, will be about the Poor Folks Cookbook Project.
My youngest son is the lead singer in a local rock band, which is very popular in our small town outside of Minneapolis. As a gifted and talented musician and songwriter, he sometimes uses his manic or depressive episodes to write music, and sort of create his own type of therapy.
The result of this is some disturbing and dark lyrics, sure to be a hit with young people who are also troubled.
What he didn't know was one of those troubled kids was someone in his own band, who is now tragically not with us anymore. Was it the lyrics' fault? I don't think so.
But I also don't think that band will ever play any of those songs ever again.
Back to last Sunday. At 3 AM we got a call from our son who was hysterical. We assumed he was suicidal again, and tried to get him to come to our house. We'll call his friend Jeff. He kept shouting "JEFF!" into the phone and we couldn't understand much more.
He did come to our house and managed to say he thought Jeff was dead, and that he heard he had killed himself. He wanted to go over to the house where this happened, so we agreed, and my wife insisted I drive.
When we got there, the police were there, but we walked into the house anyway. My son quickly asked the people in the house what had happened, and they confirmed Jeff was dead. That's all we knew at that point. I noticed the house looked like a frat had rented the place for a weeklong binge, and wondered where the parents were.
My son insisted we go find Jeff's parents, so we drove over there and woke them up. He told them just to get in the car, don't bother with shoes or a coat - it's Jeff. The drive wasn't far in terms of distance, but it was the second longest car ride I had ever endured. The longest ride was the ride back to their house after they identified the body.
One parent asked where we were going and my son said to "Dave's". I looked in the rear view mirror and realized they knew something about Dave that I didn't, because at that moment they knew their son was dead.
"Dave" apparently is one of those parents who lets his kids, and their friends, do absolutely anything in his house: do drugs, drink underage, play hooky form school, or have sex, as long as it's in the 'safe' environment of his home. The kids think he's great. He's 47 years old and he emotionally about age 16. Jeff's parents knew this, and knew that if their son was at Dave's it was bad.
I knew nothing about Dave that night, though I now know my son has spent many a night drinking to the point of passing out there in the past, as well as doing all manner of drugs. All while he was in high school and we were looking for him. Never got a call, never heard from this supposed adult that our son was alive or dead.
On the Friday before he was found, Jeff had gone to Dave's to party. Sometime between Friday morning and 3:00 Sunday morning, Jeff died in Dave's house. At 2:30 in the morning of Sunday, a girl was cold and went downstairs to look for a blanket. She opened the closet and found Jeff, hanging from the clothes rod, sitting in a chair, two inches from sitting down.
Jeff was apparently playing a game, not trying to kill himself. The game is to ry to ALMOST die, without actually dying. You see, the kids in the band are fascinated with death. This past week I learned that Jeff has tried choking himself with belts, or other various forms of near death, only to save himself when he passed out, by letting go of the noose or other instrument. He wasn't the only one. two other band members admitted to doing similar things, and having a suicide pact. These are people in their early 20's, not junior high.
In this case Jeff just apparently got too drunk to save himself. And there was no one responsible enough in the house to even wonder where he was for almost two days.
Now the twist. On Saturday, the whole band went to Dave's to help the bass player celebrate his 21st birthday. Jeff's car was already there, but the band thought he took off for someplace to eat, didn't think anything of it. So they partied while their friend was dead in the basement too. Jeff was also jealous of some flirting between his girlfriend and my son - normal 20 year old stuff.
My son doesn't process information the way the rest of us do - he blamed - blames - himself for all of it. He thinks his song lyrics caused Jeff's death. He thinks he could have looked downstairs for Jeff (Jeff was dead before ANY of them showed up). He thinks he betrayed his friend and caused his death. He thinks Jeff was like Curt Cobain and will be remembered forever - immortalized. All of these thoughts my son was expressing are wrong but the one that bothers me the most is the idol worship. It started with my son, talking about Jeff when we got home. Then there was a memorial. The memorial featured an open casket (this was grotesque - think of someone hanging for 36 hours and then dressing him up to look normal) featuring band pictures, and band songs, band this and band that. It was as if the young man was a cartoon character. They even buried him in his motorcycle jacket and white t shirt, with his ray-bans tucked into the pocket.
He deserves to be remembered as a person, whose life was cut short due to stupidity and ignorance, and as a life lesson for the rest of us.
The real real tragedy is that this town didn't and won't learn that lesson. My son has - the hardest way imaginable.
After we got home from dropping Jeff's parents off, we got our son to agree to stay with us - make our house a place of peace and refuge. Play video games, watch DVDs, play Yatzee, but stay away from drinking. After all, we said, grief plus drinking is why Jeff is dead.
We inflated three air mattresses and bought popcorn and chips, and our son started inviting friends over. In between crying and freaking out, we had a chance to listen and talk over the next four days. Our son was a total mess at first, but over three and four days of talking and staying away from liquor and drugs, he was processing as well as he could be expected to.
People started showing up from his childhood, and eventually I think I saw every kid from the old neighborhood. Jeff's girlfriend started sleeping over the second night. If anything, she was worse off than our son. She would just shake and cry, not speak, the whole first day.
They all refused medical care or grief counseling, so we as parents were pressed to do this as amateurs. Well, I am a cognitive psychologist by training, but I am not a grief counselor and am not qualified for this heavy of a dose of counseling. So we just listened and tried not to make any kind of judgment about what we were hearing.
Much of this was bittersweet because I hadn't realized how much I missed my kids' childhood until this moment.
The wake and then the funeral was a small town affair, with everyone in town attending. They even had to switch churches just to accommodate the crowd.
The band made up the pall bearer team, and right after the funeral on Friday, they went and played a show in a bar in Minneapolis. It had been previously scheduled, and Jeff's dad said that was the best way to honor Jeff. I found it ghoulish. These kids still couldn't speak a sentence without breaking down in tears, and they're supposed to go on stage without him? The same day as the funeral? To their credit, they pulled it off, in front of about 500 people, one of the most amazing performances by anyone I've ever witnessed.
They didn't sing or play ONE morbid song. When they ran out of originals which were positive, they did covers - one of which was Ain't No Sunshine, by Bill Withers. This is a hard rock band and they did it in such a haunting way, the audience almost forgot to react at fist. It was silent almost a whole five seconds before they erupted.
What's the lesson here?
I think it's that you should show love every day to your loved ones. And that you shouldn't put your kids on a pedestal, lest they believe the hype. And that if you are a parent of young adults or teens, don't let them drink or do drugs in your home - you are not their friend, you are a parent. "Dave" will shortly be losing all of his earthly possessions, courtesy of Jeff's parents. Dave is lucky that is all that's happening. Oh, and suicide isn't a game, OK kids? Now if I can only get my kid into therapy.