Please Pick Up, June 14, 2013

“Eddie, this is Jon.”  It is February 2012, maybe.

“Can I call you back in a few minutes?  I’m in a quintet rehearsal.”

“No.  Please. I really need to talk now.”

I could already feel the need to hide the conversation that was about to follow because, with rare exception, the to-be-hidden kind was all we ever had.  Our conversations were always either too intimate, scary, or just superficial.

“I’m heading upstairs.”  “OK, what is it?”

“Steve is dead.”

Silence.

“How?  When?”  I’m so sorry was not my first response, but it did come, eventually.  I had already gone into cool professional mode.  Jon was upset, crying.

“The police found him in a hotel room in Columbus.  He drove there last night and killed himself.”  He said he would never go to jail.

Memories from the evening before rushed into my head.  Steve had been in the hospital.  He must have cut off the monitoring device on his ankle and left.  The numbers on my Caller ID yesterday were unfamiliar, but I knew it was him by the second call.  I absolutely knew it, but I didn’t pick up the phone.  When I listened to the message, it was Steve’s voice:  “Hey Ed, I know you don’t pick up when you don’t recognize the number, but it’s me.  I’m calling from a friend’s place.  Please pick up when I call again.”  But he did not call again.

When I spoke to Jon a few hours later, I told him to call his mother because mothers always know what to do.  To call his mother!  I never comforted him.  I sent Chris, his boy, a sorrowful text.  A text!  Attending the April memorial service that Jon had organized was out of the question.  Fear quashed that.  They were out of my life.

Then my mind broke. (Didn't it?)

“Would you like to come work for me?”  It was some time later, though I don’t know when exactly.  I was high.

“Is that you, Steve?”  No answer from my computer screen.  “Yes!”  Tears streamed down my face.  I sobbed.

So began a months-long journey down the rabbit-hole focused on remembering the past and imagining a shared future.

[stop, renegotiate]

What if I had answered the phone? 

ringing

“Steve?”

“Ed, I’m going away, but wanted to call to say good-bye.”

“Please don’t do what I know you intend to do.”   I would plead with him to reconsider, to drive back to Atlanta, to get help, to make right this thing that had gone so wrong.  I would wail some sort of metacry to all the dads in my life not to do any of those things that are now done.

He then might say something along these lines, but in his own words:

I know I’d only hurt you

I know I’d only make you cry

I’m not the one you’re needing

I love you, goodbye

I hope someday you can find some way to understand

I’m only doing this for you

I don’t really wanna go but deep in my heart I know

This is the kindest thing to do*

The words would ring true in my heart - even the part about “doing this only for me.”  Suicide is never done for anyone else, but the words formed in his desperate mind were meant to be caring and helpful.  I would accept this and forgive.

I would understand that the ability to hold two very different perceptions, often in direct conflict, is where release and absolution lie:  I love you, goodbye.

The connection lost, the line silent, Steve would continue on his way west, bypassing Columbus in pursuit of the setting sun.  I trust that he found his way.  Maybe he really was a creature of the night.

______

Post scriptum:  Obviously, it did not happen this way.  I do not know exactly what happened, though it surely involved a coroner, a hearse, a cremation, and a memorial service.  Memory is selective and seductive and in some moments, illusory,  the product of what I needed to survive, whole.  

Additional Note:  Jon, in the story above, committed suicide one year later, in February 2013. 

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*From I Love You, Goodbye, by Céline Dion.