She knew he was dead, but I convinced her he wasn't.
It was a mid-summer day when I snapped a shot of the lunch my company had provided us: hot dogs with mac and cheese. I fired the picture off to my mother for a laugh, “This is how they improve company moral!” She immediately responded with a call.
She asked where I was, and I replied, "Lunch. What a joke right?" and began to laugh. She did not return my chuckle. Instead, she rather quietly said, “How many people are around you right now?”
I felt my entire self take up the volume of the room. Something was horribly wrong. She knew being surrounded by the complex and often interfering energy of the general workforce would be sucked inside me once she delivered the news that would shatter my existence.
I began to run upstairs to my office but only made it to the stairwell before she said it, "Your brother's body was found in a park nearby. PJ is dead.” Her voice held steady, but I could hear my father wailing tears in the background. It was the loudest lie I had ever been told.
Except it wasn't a lie. It was true. But not to me. It wouldn't sink in until I saw his lifeless body at the funeral home two days later, dressed in a little white t-shirt found in his backpack and half-covered by an old blanket.
Our mother was a terminal care nurse. We were all well-versed and comfortable with death. She knew he was dead, but I convinced her he wasn't. We discussed it at length the night before, at the very moment he was dying. She had a feeling he was gone.
At the same time, I felt nothing but peace for him, happiness even, and a sense that he was exactly where he belonged.
We were both right. I trust my intuition.
Though here, in this moment, staring at my baby brother’s lifeless body, I felt broken and cursed everything I knew about myself. Broken isn’t even enough. I felt like every particle of myself had separated from the mystical bonds that held them together and move the vessel that is my body through this dream that is the earth.
The particles were scattered. My heart beat differently. My skin was a different texture. My eyes changed color. Even the way I chewed food changed.
I couldn’t be touched. It was too painful. The feeling of limbs wrapped around me made my skin feel cracked, like it would crumble and blow away in the wind. Worse than the desperately empathetic touch of other humans was the pity in the eyes of people who could not imagine what we were going through. They felt lucky to not be me. I could see in their eyes, through my pain, that they somehow felt better off, thankful for who they were. There are few things in life worse than being pitied.
There is a darkness that covers you like a blanket as the light goes out from your eyes. At first it can feel good to be so angry, so full of rage, to curse God, the Angels, to scorch the earth with your wrath. The more energy I gave this darkness, the closer I came to succumbing to its insatiable grasp on my soul.
I went to the ocean to heal. The water has always calmed me. I found myself looking at the waves falling and crashing, falling and crashing, falling and crashing. I walked closer and closer to the water’s edge. I kept walking until I found myself in the midst of the waves, the sea dragging me angrily out to a death that I truly believed would bring me closer to my brother.
He didn’t deserve to be alone. I had to go to him, find out what happened and continue our adventures together.
The waves crashed upon me mercilessly, until I was so far and so battered. I felt his hand grab me, pull me up from the waves and throw me back on the shore so hard it knocked the wind out of me. As I lay on the beach gasping for breath, taking inventory of my body, I realized I had never been in the water at all.
As I started to hallucinate, I had the good sense to Face-time my parents and apparently began to silently cry. Showing them the ocean, showing them my silent tears, I started crawling on the sand as they screamed at me to turn around and walk away from the ocean, to walk toward to pier. “You can’t swim!,” they screamed. “Paul, she can’t swim! Why are you doing this? Please don’t do this!” I picked up my phone, told them I loved them and continued walking toward the pier, turning my back to the release a death by sea would have provided.
A woman asked if I’d like a picture of myself, an odd thing to be confronted with right after you fantasize about your death. I let her.
I look at this photo often with numb appreciation. I’m the oldest child. It was my duty to protect him. Yet, I turned my back on him five months prior, after his shoulder surgery.
He developed a deep love affair with the prescription medicine intended to heal him. That was the cause of his demise.
This is what people don’t understand about Western medicine. Well, this and everything else about it. It makes no sense to treat pain with poison. More pain. More poison. More pain. More poison. Try a different label. Try a different strength. Trap a decent person in a cycle of snake oil salesman promises from big pharmacy and the doctors under their thumb.
The police told us he had taken his own life. This would prove to be true and false. He had willingly taken the medicines he was prescribed. The combination slowed his heart to a stop, killed his brain and ultimately shut his body down. By his own hand, feeding his mouth the pills he was told he needed to live, he died.
The autopsy, done twice, would later prove it was an accident. There were no levels of intentional overdose. “Accidental Overdose” was stamped on the bottom of the 18 pages detailing the weight of his organs, the "remarkable" condition of his body and labeling each of his tattoos.
This is the true face of prescription drug abuse and overdose: handsome, young, kind and physically fit. The boy next door. The boy who, in preschool, was reprimanded for helping a little girl zip up her jacket so frequently that she never learned to do it herself. The boy who turned down the captain status on his high school football team because he wasn’t unanimously voted in and didn’t feel he should force his leadership on teammates who weren’t yet convinced. The man who would rub lotion on his grandmother’s hands, which were aged and hurt from the dry wind of winter, on the days he brought her groceries because the food at her nursing facility wasn’t up to snuff. The best man at his sisters same-sex wedding, an unheard of event in our small town. The man who was often found sitting in the living room with his then-housebound mother, just holding her hand.
His death shocked so many.
It’s a story no one wants to tell. It’s happening everywhere. And if it’s happening to you, you are not alone.
