It was almost a year ago that I got the phone call from my fiancee (now my wife). I hadn't woken up to the earlier phone call. So I said a sleepy "Hello, dear."
"Honey, it's Jon. He was found dead..."
I didn't really hear the rest of what she had to say. I collapsed, swearing and sobbing.
I later checked my voicemail, and found the same message from my younger brother. He had been found dead in the park, near the railroad trestle. We didn't know then whether he had jumped or been pushed, although we strongly suspected the former. He'd hit the ground hard enough to destroy his legs and spine. The forensic inspection showed he had probably died, if not instantly, at most a few seconds afterward. Chronically struggling with schizophrenia, depression, and unresolved issues of sexuality, I think he had finally decided that he'd had enough and wanted to quit. And so he did.
He was, technically my half-brother, but we had never really cared about the "half" part. Later in his life, he would often confide in me - fairly disturbing things, at times. Hallucinations (although he didn't always recognize them as such) and delusions that he experienced were often the subject of these little conversations, but sometimes it was just about his problems with loneliness, side effects of medication, and his inability to find and keep a job.
Naturally it hurt.
My father was his stepfather - as Brad Paisley sang, he was "the dad he didn't have to be". It hit him hard, because he had informally adopted Jon as his own child and done his best to take care of him, the way any father should help his son.
My mother, and Jon's father, naturally took it much harder.
After Jon's dad and my mother split up, I don't know much about what happened to his dad, except that he remarried (to a wonderful woman) and had a few more (awesome) kids. She struggled with severe depression, but Jon - at the time, her only child - gave her something to live for. Something to keep striving for - to provide for her son, if nothing else.
And now he was gone.
I've said in an earlier diary that the howling of a big dog is the second saddest sound I have ever heard. The saddest I have ever heard is the sound of a mother whose first-born son, the one who kept her alive and gave her a reason to live, is dead. It's a groaning sound, the kind of noise you might expect if you could twist a person from the inside out, and then it breaks into sobs. I heard it for a few nights after he died. I hope to never, ever hear it again, the mourning of a parent for a child, if I live to be a hundred and twenty years old. In the same way that a person being sick near you can trigger nausea in you, so too the cries of someone so wrapped in grief that undermines her identity will twist and crush the heart of anyone who hears them.
IF I can give you an example, from the world of art...
In high school, I was part of the choir, which was divided into two - there was the full choir, and a smaller, more elite group. I didn't have the right kind of voice for that, but I loved to listen to them, especially because some of my good friends were part of it.
They once performed, and recorded, a rendition of Thomas Weelkes's song "When David Heard", which puts to music an abbreviated version of the verses from Samuel II ("The king asked the messenger: is all well with the young Absalom? And the messenger said: it is with the youth as with the enemies of my lord the King, and all who arise against you to do ill. Then David was overwhelmed, and went to his chamber over the gate, and wept; and thus he said while he walked: My son, Absalom, my son, my son, Absalom! Would that I had died in your stead, Absalom, my son, my son!") You can view it on YouTube. The lyrics are somewhat different from the verses ("When David heard that Absalom was slain, he went down to his chamber over the gate, and wept: and thus he said: 'O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom. Would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son!") but it gets the point across...
Listen to this, the point that it goes from "he wept" to "and thus he said": the following few seconds of music are the critical part.
My son, my son, Absalom!
Now I've seen that grief. I live with my grief as well as dealing with the consequences of my parents' grief.
I don't think it makes me a better person. In a way, I think it walls me off from others because I have to struggle to convey any emotion in speech, even to my wife. But when I see the photos in the news of people wailing and sobbing over the caskets or shrouded bodies of people they loved, I no longer say, "Come on, I understand that you're sad, but stop hamming it up for the cameras!"
Instead I say: Ah. I understand. Your son. And you are David to his Absalom.