Shaking again as I write. I know this one is going to be difficult for me to get out and with some of the pm's I received I know this is going to be equally difficult to read. Apologies in advance. PLEASE don't feel you have to read this one.
People have been asking me what my hangup with going to IC is. I have a million and one excuses. This thread is the real reason. This is my biggest demon and I don't want to face it. Now that I have cracked the surface with my other threads, this is starting to come out of me in dreams, and now my daily thoughts. Yesterday I had to hide in our bedroom closet so that my W wouldn't see me cry when I was thinking of my brother while getting ready for work. The real reason I don't want to go to IC is that I'm afraid this is going to turn me into an emotional mess and I don't want that. I've kept it in check for the most part for 25 years. I'm supposed to be everyone's rock. I do not want to be an emotional mess. That's just not me. I don't want to be turned into a blubbering a**hole. And yet, here I am. An emotional mess. My W says I have PTSD from this part of my story. My PCP is starting to think so too after spiking high blood pressure two weeks ago at my annual physical right after I started all of this. My bp is all over the place depending on the day as my PCP is starting to monitor me. Some days I'm perfect. Other days I'm not. I gave my PCP the cliff notes version of my story and his first words were maybe I do have some PTSD and to get into IC. Ok. Enough already. Every. Single. Person. says IC. After this I'll be on my way.
A lot of what I have to say in this thread are things that I've never told anyone. I have mentioned a few bits and pieces of this part of the story to a few select individuals over the years, but never have I spelled out all the details to everyone. Not even myself. I may not let W see this thread until she's in a good place or not having to deal with three kids tugging at her every second. Maybe this weekend.
Not sure where to start or what to say to get it out. I guess I'll start with stating that I do not blame what I'm about to write on my mother, father, or the A, or the aftermath of the A. Sure, I suppose the toxic environment that we were all living in probably helped to "disguise" what was going on. But I don't think the A had any sort of direct impact on what I have to say next.
For those of you who read the first part of my story you know that my brother committed suicide. Here's what you don't know. Before the A, when I was 14 I almost committed suicide myself. I remember taking my father's shotgun and putting in my mouth. I didn't load it. I wanted to see how it felt. I guess I was testing the waters to see if I could actually do it. I remember not feeling all that much about it except that it felt cold and hard in my mouth and that a shiver had run down my spine. I also remember I felt that I could do it. Over the next few weeks I made the decision that I was going to do it. It was like throwing a switch inside me, but in a good way. I felt relieved. Even more than that I felt peaceful. I had "let go". I felt very calm. It was a precise and deliberate decision that made everything else go away. Now I just had to plan it out. I had to say my goodbyes (without actually saying goodbye). Over the course of the next two weeks I slowly got the chance to spend a little bit of time with each person I wanted to say good bye to. I'm not really sure how to explain what saying goodbye felt like. I have no words for that part of it. Other than I was at peace with everything. I got to spend some time with my grandparents and my friends. I said my silent goodbye's. I then planned on a Fri afternoon after school. That week, just a few days before, a girl in my class hung herself. I got to see the fallout. I saw her father through a window come to the school. I saw the fallout with my classmates. I saw the fallout with her family. I then decided that couldn't do that to other people. I called it off. I picked my baggage back up and carried on. I told no one of this except my W many, many years later and even then not with this detail. Now all of you know and I want to stick my head in the sand.
Oct 1994. My 21st birthday. LTGF#2 from part 2 of my story threw a surprise birthday party for me. She made sure my brother was there. In fact, my brother and I weren't very close because if you remember from the first part of my story, I had "checked out". I didn't want any part of my family. LTGF#2 having come from a broken home herself was close to her sister. Many times if my brother was around, LTGF#2 would initiate a conversation with him and have me join it. Looking back I could see what she was trying to do and I thank her for that. Of course she invited him to my surprise party. My parent's weren't there but all my friends were and so was he. It was a great party and I was officially surprised. I had no idea. I also had no idea what my brother was doing at that party. In retrospect I do now and it plays back in my head like an old black and white movie. I remember where he sat, who he spoke with, and who he spent extra time with. Me. He was silently saying his goodbyes. I should have known that's what he was doing. He was saying goodbye without saying goodbye. If anyone should have been able to spot that it should have been me. I had been there. Done that. I can see it so clearly now. He was peaceful. It wasn't what he was saying but how he was saying it. I can hardly live with myself for not seeing it.
The day after my 21st birthday I left to go to another city 2 states away to visit a friend for the week. My brother waited until I left and shot himself in the head with my father's shotgun. I was out on the town in a major city that night so no one found me until the next morning. No cell phones back then. Ironically I went to the movies that night and saw Pulp Fiction. If you've seen that movie you remember the back seat of the car scene. That was fresh in my head through this entire experience once I found out. My buddies mother found me and told me to call home immediately. My dad answered and I knew right away what had happened. I could hear my mother wailing in the background so I knew it was my brother. My father couldn't even speak. He didn't have to. Said I would be home right away and caught the next plane back home. The immediate weeks afterwards play like a movie. They aren't real. Remember those details that I got from my mother's diary that I wish I didn't have? I have those details about my brother's death as well. My uncle (father's brother) had come over to the house and they didn't know I was around eaves dropping while my father was venting. I heard the details of the condition of my brothers body after he killed himself in his bedroom. I don't know how to share the full story without the details. Gives you a good idea of what's in my head.
WARNING!!! Skip the next paragraph if you don't want these details!!! WARNING!!!
My brother somehow had passed over the regular shells and used a double magnum load in the 12 gauge. Apparently may father used to take out small trees with them when he was younger and hunted. There was literally nothing left of him from the shoulders up. The recoil of shotgun was so great that it had broken all of the fingers on his right hand. The police took so much evidence out of his bedroom, anything that had major biohazard contamination, that my dad had to stop them from taking the entire room. His brains were all over everything. My brother also was very sickly and on a lot of meds. There were five small piles of pill bottles around his body. He was making a statement. He showed that he could have killed himself by using any combination of those drugs but instead he chose the shotgun. In the weeks following, if I wanted to get anything to remember him by, I had to literally scrape his brains, blood, or pieces of bone off of it. Sometimes all three. There was yellow crime scene tape across his bedroom door for a few days that my dad had to take down. Back then, they didn't have special service clean up crews, or crime scene repair crews, so my father and I did much of the work ourselves. Most of the major evidence was already cleaned up by the police and taken away in bags, but we still had to patch up all the buckshot in the ceiling and rip out the carpeting, bleach and repaint the walls, put in a new floor, etc. We tried to return that room to some semblance of normalcy and it may have looked normal when we were finished, but in our minds that room will always look like hell.
Why did he do it and what was that statement I mentioned in the above paragraph? I don't want to give too many details on the statement piece of what he was trying to say since it drew a lot of media attention at the time. The local papers, NBC, ABC, and CBS were all camped out on our front lawn and the phone was ringing off the hook. We even left the phone off the hook for a few days. Bottom line is that there was an incident that happened at the school and my brother was being used as a pawn by someone in the administration. Media was tipped off by someone and the situation exploded. Literally. Thank god social media and the internet didn't exist back then. Local news television and calls from national media wanting interviews was enough. I couldn't make this shit up if I wanted to. He not only did it because of the incident at school, but also because he was tired of being sick all the time, not being allowed to do certain things, and apparently had issues with our mother (I only mention my mother because of an alleged suicide note that I never saw). The incident at school pushed him over the edge. He made a deliberate choice to end it and became peaceful once he made that decision. I can see it clearly now. It was his choice and there was not going to be a cry for help. Sure he went out violent, but that was an expression of his anger. At least I know he was at peace with himself...like I was when I made that same choice seven years before him.
In the following weeks at some point we got his suicide note back. I remember it being in a plastic bag with a large orange sticker that said "Caution Biohazard Contaminated Evidence" In fact I'm looking at that giant sticker right now as I write this. In the weeks leading up to my brother's death he came to me and said he wanted me to teach him about music. Either guitar or bass. We never got there, but I peeled that sticker off the evidence bag and plastered it to my Bass VI guitar case (baritone guitar). When I took that guitar to gigs and rehearsals it's like I'm taking a peace of him with me. It's a very sad sounding instrument which I think is how he would speak if he could. Sorry, t/j there. Back to the note. I used to have it memorized. I think over the years I buried it so deep and repressed it all. I now can't remember a single word of it and that makes me sad. I remember hearing talk of a second letter too. There was supposedly a second one that was addressed from him to my mother and the content supposedly wasn't "pretty". Apparently my aunt (same aunt that was double dating with my mom and OM) intercepted the letter and got rid of it. I would really like to have know what was in that one. But never saw it so not sure if it really existed or not. Nothing would surprise me anymore.
I've thought about my brother every single day at least once for all of these years. A lot of flashbacks come to me at odd moments when I'm alone. Especially while driving. In the car, in the shower, dreams, wherever. These last few days they are becoming more and more prominent in my head. Also over the years, I don't know what it is about war movies, but I have had to bite my tongue and choke emotions down or I almost start to cry. Not sure what that is all about but I think it's connected to this somehow? A connection of brotherhood and then you lose your brother (comrade)? Of course there's more to the every day life stuff but I could be here forever if I include all of it. I could go into how, including my brother, I lost five people in my life that I was close to in a two year time period. For my grandparents it was their time. The other three all too young. I'm sure you've had enough of this thread if you've made it this far. I certainly have.
I don't want anyone who reads this to worry about me. Really. I have not had any of those thoughts in a very long time. I haven't even had any thoughts of suicide since BEFORE my brother died. I'm a lucky guy and appreciate what I have. From what I've gone through and to now see where my own family is makes me appreciate life all the more.
I do believe that my brother gifted me the ability to self analyze after he died. I believe he also gave me the gift of strength and humility. After all, no body died today. It was a good day. I've tried to adopt that as my disposition.
I apologize if any part of any of my story seems overly dramatic. I really don't mean it to be. It plays out like a sick movie that's about someone else when I look at it. There are still many other facets to my story but between these four threads, that's the bulk of it. I'm going to have to put SI down for a few days for my own sanity. I'm not running away, but I have to hide this last piece from W until at least the weekend when she can absorb it. I'm going to let her know I'm taking a break from SI until then. Plus I want to go numb for a few days. I want to disassociate and check out for a few days. This was an awful lot for me in a short period of time to just vomit out here on SI. I will seek IC early next week and start to find someone where I can dump off all 4 of these f'n threads (minus the comments). I have a feeling I'm going to be giving someone a whole mess of business. Before I go I will bump up the other threads and let them all sit together as a package for anyone who wants to read them. I'm going to leave it all out on the field. I'll check back in a few days.
My apologies if I have offended anyone along the way or made anyone sick. I'm sick. I certainly didn't want to be dramatic, but wanted to state everything more as a matter of fact. But I look back through my writing and see a really bad dramatic movie. Sorry. Thanks again to whomever listened.
yop out.
I'm so sorry kiddo. I understand how you were feeling. I only wish I had understood what you were saying that day you were silently saying goodbye. I SHOULD HAVE KNOWN THAT'S WHAT YOU WERE DOING. I was your big brother and I should have protected you. I will never forgive myself for missing that.