For I am my own damn God.

On August 11th, 2014 Robin Williams, a man known lovingly by millions for his unparalleled comedic ability, took his own life at the age of 63. I was 19 years old at the time, and for the most part never really concerned myself with the lives, or deaths, of celebrities. The death of Robin Williams, however, stabbed at my gut like a greasy dive bar meal and 17 too many Tecate cervezas. I’d grown up watching this man stand in front of crowds numbering in the thousands as he masterfully guided their imaginations into depths that only he could unearth. This divine ability, along with Hollywood’s better days, culminated in films that grip one's attention by the shoulders, ceasing the worries of the day by headbutting you in the face with humor.

Now, I’m certainly no comedic genius, but I caught reflections of myself in Robin Williams, both in the adventurous humor as well as within the glimpses of bleak desperation that one feels for reasons they don’t exactly know. It’s as if you’re saddled up with a garbage roommate (your brain) who just won’t do their God damned dishes (isn’t giving you that silky, succulent dopamine), but you don’t want to break your lease, at least not yet. Who knows, maybe one sunny day you’ll wake up and your roommate will stop being a studded twat and pitch in a little bit.

It was as if I was watching another class clown in action, his sole objective giving the boot to shitty roommates and hunkering down in their place, giving so many a relief that he himself so desperately needed. In doing so perhaps he, like myself felt a fraction of these burdens discarded, only never as quickly as the burdens replaced their co-conspirators. Maybe, like myself, he felt a small relief in knowing he kept another soul from the horrid feelings he knows all too well…

I’d thought I’d known hurt. From losing grandparents at an early age, to being a young boy seeing the body of an even younger boy on the side of a forested, two-lane highway. His body, destroyed by a passing vehicle as he strayed mere feet from his mother and the car that had failed at the worst time, being loaded away into an ambulance as my father’s truck puttered, now at a crawl, towards the coastal town that we’d frequently return to throughout my childhood.

However, as I’ve grown older, I understand that the emotions these stirred in my young mind are not pain. At least, not true pain. I’m now a man, and within days, perhaps as long as a week from the time that I write these words, I’ll be a father. And I’ve seen true pain.

The first time I’d seen this kind of pain was in September of 2018, and I happened to be in an Airbnb nestled in that very same coastal city I’d traveled to so many times with my parents and younger brother. This time however I was in the exhilaration of growing love with my girlfriend, now my wife, and a gaggle of her friends there to celebrate my wife’s birthday. A bunch of kids in our early twenties, all a year or two older than myself, drinking, eating, partying and passing out on the nearby shores of the pacific ocean. It was fun.

One of these mornings I awoke, a hangover that might as well been a thunderstorm raging inside of my skull, to my phone ringing. How long it was ringing or the number of calls I’d missed I can’t recall, but I’ll never forget the sound of my mother’s voice as I placed the cell to my ear. My mother’s sobs immediate and her voice broken, she told me the events that had transpired late the night before in Montana, where the majority of our stateside family resides.

A boy whose mind, twisted by some sort of need for violence that’s woven into mankind like a damning red thread, had decided that he wanted to take his own life. In some sort of perverse psychosis, maybe out of fear, maybe he didn’t wish to exit life alone, or maybe simply because he’d filled his belly and head with ill-gotten liquor, he didn’t want to exit this life alone. I don’t know and I may never know. Drunk, he proceeded to grab the keys to his parents' car, the death of a stranger drenched in the flammable scent of whiskey leaving his mouth, his mother calling the police as she begged her son to abandon his abhorrent plans.

The boy’s first attempt to kill, and be killed, failed as he swerved his mother’s car at an oncoming truck on the local highway. Both cars in motion, the stranger in the truck veered as the erratic car deflected down the truck's side. As anyone in their right mind would do the stranger pulled over. The boy didn’t, his feet demanding the car continue at over a hundred miles per hour.

Not much further down the local highway a beautiful young woman, her best friend riding shotgun, sat idle as the young woman, only weeks from her 21st birthday and beloved by the kids she taught at the local YMCA, waited for the traffic light to tell her it was safe to proceed. They were probably having a good time, speaking of cute boys, their plans for the future, or listening to the latest hit song as the drunken boy’s headlights grew in the distance.

He once again, as if a kamikaze pilot, steered the several tonnes of painted metal at the stopped car, colliding with his naive target on the driver’s side. The boy lived as drunk drivers usually do, their bodies limber like that of a toddler. The beautiful young woman did not…

She was a good person, the kind that humanity has just enough of to keep mankind from plunging our giant blue planet from collective evisceration. Yet, fate can sometimes prove itself uncaring and unflinching in its decisions, the boy handcuffed to a hospital bed as his pelvis mended itself, and the friend in the passenger seat thankfully alive; albeit her arms in casts and ribs shattered. The beautiful young woman now laying, her flesh ruined and lifeless, on a freezing table in the county morgue.

This beautiful young woman was my cousin, the youngest of the kids on my father’s side (my mother doesn’t have much family, and no siblings). She and her older sister are the daughters of the woman that will always be my father’s little sister, and they took the place of the sisters that my brother and I would never have had otherwise. Like tectonic plates awakening under an ocean, forming its surface into destructive waves, true pain followed…

Years later, the mention of my cousin's name brings tears to the eyes of my parents, even my father, a strong man of good nature now at the age of sixty. He’d gotten on a flight to Montana the very next day, and as far as I know was the only familiar person to see her on that cold table, his heart likely sinking and his head weightless.

My aunt and uncle, the ones you’d consider the “cool” ones, closed themselves off from the world, their grief beyond imagination. One drunken boy in need of dire help upended their entire world, turning any parent's most catastrophic fears into a waking nightmare. There is no healing, not entirely, from this kind of trauma. There are bad days and better days, the loss of their baby girl a weight on their shoulders that is forever there. Sometimes only a painful weight, other times a weight unbearable as if a mountain was dropped from above.

I’ve seen other suicide attempts since. One August day a year later, I’d brought my laundry to my parents (avoiding the shared laundry at my apartment and giving me time to hang out with them), and as I was loading the soaked clothes into the dryer, I heard screaming down the street through the open garage door. As I darted from the open door and into the street I could see a woman in her late sixties standing in her yard, her hands to her face as she screamed words like “he shot himself! Why!? He shot himself!” Her son, a man probably in his forties and living with her, sat slumped in a lawn chair against the door of her garage; most of his head was simply gone, a shotgun at his feet and his plaid shirt drenched in gore.

Around the same time, my best friend in childhood had been battling his own demons, writing letters to his mother; the woman who fed me during sleepovers and runs a dog grooming service in her garage that we still take our dogs to, and his father; the man who coached us in little league baseball and football. He wrote one to his younger brother; now in the marines, perhaps in hopes of solving his grief by joining a brotherhood, and another letter for his wife; her birthday now the anniversary of the day that he took his own life. All of them now carrying the weight of frigid mountains left in his wake.

There have been others in my life, and none have brought any good into our world. Only mountains that can’t be moved, only pain multiplied a millionfold. It doesn’t remove one’s pain, it only gives that pain a means to unleash itself onto others, a parasite with no means of removal. If you have thoughts of creating these horrid mountains, talk to someone. Anyone. Not everyone will listen, but the right people will, and they will care. Today we see more and more mountains left behind by my generation, and not being a religious man I still pray that those hurting find a shoulder that lifts them rather than a mountain.

The darkest of nights give rise to the most splendid of sun-kissed days. Hold fast and look to the horizon, a sun will always arise; just hold fast.

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