My cousin Chris killed himself two years ago today.
It really started hitting me in the middle of last week. Sure, not a day goes by that it doesn’t float to the front of my mind… and every (rare) time I see his daughter I am stunned by how much she resembles him… and every Friday the 13th I remember that he killed himself on a Friday the 13th. It’s 6:02 PM as I write this, and I realize that he didn’t shoot himself in the heart until he went to bed that night… what was going through his mind? Did he know all day that he was going to do it?
Usually when I think about him I experience one of two emotions: sadness or guilt– SADNESS that his life was so difficult and tragic, sadness about the family situations that he left behind; GUILT that he and I are were wired much the same way, and that the only reason I am driving my new car to my well-paying job as part of my happy suburban lifestyle is that I was born to parents who were at a semi-stable point in their lives, while he was not.
But this year it has finally sunk in, and the predominant emotion I am feeling is LOSS. emptiness. a void. He would be 33 now. What would he be like? What conversations would we have had? What could I have learned from him? How would his daughter’s life be different?
I’ll never know, because he’s gone.
Filed under: family, life coming at me fast, Uncategorized
