This isn't a very pleasant story. I'm sorry. Please stop now if you're sensitive.
Sixteen years old. I was working out five times a week and had just begun experimenting with anabolic steroids. I also began experimenting with women and took on my first girlfriend, who was more than just "do you want to go steady?"
I enjoyed the experiment so far. I had someone to talk to, someone to focus all these crazy teenage emotions on. Someone I could hold up as proof that I wasn't alone, even though I still felt very alone.
School let us out on Wednesday for Thanksgiving, in case we had to travel, and Friday off, too, so we could drive home. The dentist for my shiny new girlfriend wanted her to have her wisdom teeth taken out on Wednesday so, by Monday, she could go back to school.
With her wisdom teeth out, she wouldn't be able to partake of much of the Thanksgiving feast. She mostly took painkillers and remained in bed. I was allowed to visit after my family finished their dinner, as long as we kept the door open. My girlfriend wore the prettiest nightgown and robe she could find, but the sides of her face were swollen like I'd punched her.
This was my first real test as a boyfriend. I had to be compassionate and responsible but also respectful and gentlemanly and still somehow romantic, which I had no real experience in. It was a challenge.
I sat and talked on the foot of her bed, with her family a few steps away in the living room. We held hands and talked about passions we didn't understand. A body passed by quietly in the hall. "Hey, Daddy." She said but got no reply. The door to his bedroom closed, then locked. We didn't talk for fear he'd hear us trying to be romantic.
Pop.
I'd heard that sound before. My brother accidentally discharged his .22 once in his room while getting ready to clean it. I recognized the smell.
A mother's cry. She called his name over and over and banged her fists on the locked door that wouldn't budge. In an immediate crisis, the wheels in my mind spin, but find no purchase. Another consciousness takes over my body that somehow has a plan of how to respond.
"Let me," I said and guided her to the side. I shook the doorknob and pushed with no effect. Although still drugged and very confused, my girlfriend stood at the door to her bedroom.
"Get back," I said and pushed the door again. "Stay back," I said to both of them, with fear but mostly panic in their eyes. My body had a plan.
I planted my feet shoulder-width apart and drew my open hands back, level with my shoulders. After spinning up as much resolve as I could, I focused my eyes on a spot on the door and slammed my open hands there as hard as I could. The privacy lock in the door handle snapped, and the door burst open. Nobody moved.
Inside, I could see his legs sticking out of the bathroom door inside the bedroom.
"Stay there," I said. Her mother froze, but my girlfriend made a step to see inside herself. "STAY THERE!" I said. And she did.
I'd met this man maybe three times. We shared maybe fifty words together. A puddle of black-red grew on the bathroom floor. An expanding circle of life and death. One arm was twisted back in a strange way holding a pistol. I won't tell you the rest of what I saw. For years, I had no visual memory of some of it. My brain was merciful to my mind, I suppose. Eventually, it all came back to me, though. A horrible image saved for a day when I could handle it, I suppose.
The police left around midnight. I drove home to get a change of clothes, as I'd promised to spend the night on the sofa in my girlfriend's living room. My mother and father were still up in the den waiting for me. "Will you call my friends and tell them what happened? I don't really know how to do this." I asked.
"Of course." Mother said. After that, nobody really said anything. I expected them to have something brilliant to say that would help me navigate these strange and treacherous waters, but all they could do was be there, which is what I was about to do. I was going to my girlfriend's house to sit in her living room and say I was going to sleep, but not sleep, and just sort of be there as if my body would somehow fill the hole in their lives long enough to arrange a more permanent patch. It took a while, but they did arrange a more permanent patch, and I could extricate myself from this trial without causing any further damage.
My mother insisted that I see a psychologist. She'd done this before. He was a pretty good guy; by then, we'd become pretty good friends. He was instrumental in helping me resolve recurring panic attacks in my twenties, but beyond that, I don't think he was ever really able to heal me. That I did myself. Sometimes well. Sometimes poorly.
For the next twenty-five years, my mother would ask at thanksgiving if I was ok. I was ok, generally. I felt no pain or panic or regret. All I felt was cold and empty, but that's better than pain. Eventually, as other deaths passed and other losses were sustained, that coldness spread to Christmas and Halloween, and eventually, I quit celebrating the holidays altogether. It was a season of loss, and I chose to endure rather than celebrate.
This week will be the first thanksgiving I've celebrated since before some of you were born. I'm at peace with the past and look forward to the celebration. I am, in time and in deed, thankful.
