Tag: Death

Categories
Dogs

The Water is So Wide

I watched the end of Jacob’s Ladder and the end of The Accidental Tourist.

Both films, at their heart, are about fathers and sons.  Death, coming to terms with death.  Letting go.  Dying.  Returning to the empty house.  Taking the taxi through Paris.  Allowing ones self to love again after being ‘shut down’.

Unconditional love.

It’s been a fucking tough two years.   The Big Dog, The Cancer, The Penguin.

Not necessarily in that order.

I think about her everyday, her tangled bloody body.  Waiting for her to die after the lethal injection.  Carrying her home to the grave we dug for her in the garden.   Now she is just skin and bones under the rock, hidden so the coyote couldn’t dig her up and eat her.  Laying there with her collar on, wrapped in my shirt, laying by my shoes.

Waiting patiently for us to join her.

I just couldn’t stop crying.  Apologizing.  She was innocent!

As I write the Little Dog is dreaming.  Yelping in his sleep.

It’s been tough to concentrate, to make anything happen, to imagine any sort of future.   I need all my wits about me to make things happen.  I don’t have the energy.

If by chance I look in the mirror, I don’t recognize the man staring back at me.

Who cares?

I don’t really know who I am.  Drifting inconsolably since she was killed.  Inconsolable when I saw the truth about him.  Me reflected in him.  The grueling hospital.  Private desire that it would kill me.

That the doctor would say, “Mr. Roy, you have six months to live.”  He didn’t.

I let myself believe that it was all over and frankly, I was furious that all my body wanted to do was teach me a lesson.

Then I got involved with him.  He was nothing.  A sick, lost man.  I thought I could help.  He was nothing.  He wasn’t the one.  Like crumpled paper.  Like chewed gum.  A crude, inelegant parasite come to suck my blood.

Then I got involved with him.  I was nothing.  A sick, lost man.  He thought he could help.  I was nothing.  He wasn’t the one.

I was never going to be good enough for him.  For anyone.  Let’s face it.

Letting life and its dangerous current drag me across this angry ocean.  Untethered.

It feels like I am finally waking up from the past two years.  Waking up, yet desiring, desperately to sleep.  I don’t want to wake up.  Why in hells name is there any reason to be awake?

There is no child waiting to deliver me from madness.  There is no innocent boy to take my hand and lead me to a better place.   There is no Big Dog because I was a bad owner.  There is no lover because I am a bad lover.

I did not leave the house today.  I filled another can with weeds.  Compulsively weeding the garden.  I close my eyes and all I can see are weeds.  Panicking that there is one last weed to pull…and I may have missed it.

Categories
Rant

Suicide Note

No, I don’t want to kill myself.

There have been times recently when I have seriously thought about suicide but life always delivers so much more than death ever could.    Why would I want an endless night when I have the glorious day?

This too will pass.  A tiny rule that reminds me daily that life is worth living.  That love, lust, hate and anger all have a certain shelf life and it’s only a matter of time before relief is found or misery returns.

U.S. Suicide Statistics

1.3% of all deaths are from suicide.

On average, one suicide occurs every 16 minutes.

Suicide is the eleventh leading cause of death for all Americans.

Suicide is the third leading cause of death for young people aged 15-24 year olds.
(1st = accidents, 2nd = homicide)

Suicide is the second leading cause of death for 25-34 year olds.

Suicide is the second leading cause of death among college students.

More males die from suicide than females.
(4 male deaths by suicide for each female death by suicide.)

More people die from suicide than from homicide.
(Suicide ranks as the 11th leading cause of death; Homicide ranks 13th.)

There were over 800,000 suicide attempts in 2010

Sobering statistics.

When I was a kid things were so confusing, so traumatic I made two attempts at taking my own life.  Once with a knife and secondly with pills.  I failed to complete my mission on both occasions.  Thankfully.

When I had my breakdown during my mid twenties I met young people, at the Henderson Hospital, who seemed determined that life was not worth living and had made far more serious attempts at ending things than I had.

Sarah’s story, particularly, sticks in my mind. I may have written about her before but let me refresh your memory.

Sarah was a young, pretty blond girl who had been serially abused (sexually and physically) by both her parents, foster parents and finally by her adopted father.

By the time I met her she was a husk of what she should have been.

She trusted no one.  Why would she?

Every day at the hospital we would congregate for an obligatory house meeting.   Sarah was missing.  I was sent (by the nursing staff) to her room to find her. When I opened the door I was met with a blood bath.

There was blood everywhere, on the sheets, the floor, sprayed on the ceiling and the walls.

Sarah saw me and said sweetly, “I’ll be down in a minute.”  She was pathetically dabbing with a blood sodden rag at the mess on the walls.  “I just want to clear this up.”  She smiled at me.  Softly.  She had severed an artery in her wrist and as fast as she mopped up the blood more spurted out.

I grabbed her wrist and called out for help.  Screamed for help.  Eventually someone arrived.  We were hustled (still holding her as a human tourniquet) into a car and to the local ER.

By the time we got to the hospital I was welded onto her and had to be surgically removed from the congealed, bloody wound.

I have no idea what happened to Sarah.  Perhaps she succeeded and did indeed kill herself.  I have no idea.  She didn’t come back from the emergency room.

I don’t remember ever asking about her.  Out of sight, out of mind.

Those who threaten suicide are frightening people.  A disregard for their own life could very easily become a disregard for yours.  A suicide is a murder.  A murderer may kill you too.

During the past decade of sobriety I have met many men and women (mostly men) who managed to kill themselves.  It always amazed me that even sobriety could not save them.

Death seems so alluring to some people.   There is nothing alluring about death: a premature death is just absurd to me.   We are dead all too soon and for those of us who do not believe in heaven we may as well find heaven on earth.

Anyway, I am too much of a coward to kill myself.  Too much of a coward to drink or take drugs.  Too much of a coward to be successful.  Too much of a coward to say no…to open letters…to say goodbye.

I have learned to live with depression (without drugs) mental illness (without therapy) inertia (without fear) and love (without conclusion).  Some people cannot face the power of life itself.  The beauty, the grandeur, the mystery seem so threatening to them and end up dead by their own hand.

Perhaps they cannot/will not respect this extraordinary world, this abundant place.

Recently, as documented here, I have felt vulnerable and sad.  I felt (falsely) as if life could only be lived in a certain way…with a lover at my side.  On those occasions I am blinded to what I have and drawn to those things I do not have.

These past weeks since the great ‘closure’ my eyes are open, I am bathed in light.  The night is no longer a terrible and foreign place.   The day begins without yearning nor ends with tears.

God damn it…

This too will pass.

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Categories
Fashion

Sebastian Horsley RIP (though unlikely)

Not sad about Sebastian.  Not sad about anything.  Loads of messages from friends re. Sebastian.  I had long chat with PH this morning about the trip home and how amazing it is that we survived at all.

I have been miserable about turning 50 in three weeks but better to be turning 50 than turning in my grave.

It was such a tonic chatting with my darling PH, she has always been there for me.  Always.  Anyway, that’s just the way I need to start my day with a bit of loving validation.  Suddenly I feel like I can cope with ANYTHING.

Held here in sunny LA aspic.   Suspended in solid jelly.  I can see out and they can see in but I’m waiting for the jelly to melt around me.

Last night’s dinner with friends was delicious.  We played a few games of backgammon after.  When John realized he wasn’t going to beat me he ran off leaving his wife to try her luck.  Nope, she didn’t win.

My diet means that I can wear clothes I have not worn for a few years.  Last night I wore a pair of crisply pressed silk Prada pants and my Comme cardi.  Lovely.

From the 26th floor I stared out over LA as dusk fell.  The car lights on Sunset Blvd snaking for miles East, white and red.   A huge black cloud from the west hastening the night.

Really making an effort to get out of the house.   I am not sitting indoors for 12 days.   Interminably long days.  Perhaps I should just take the car and drive across the USA?   Actually, that isn’t such a bad idea.

I could stop off in Nashville and see Joan!  How about it Joan?

Very exciting European prospects ahead.  I am particularly looking forward to seeing my friends and walking the streets.  July is always such a glorious month in London.  Did I tell you that I ran into Orlando Bloom at breakfast the other day?  Now, he is a sweetheart.  Sat next to Alanis Morrisette at Cholada on PCH.  That’s the extent of my starry life here in LA.

I am so happy she called.  So happy.

Categories
Dogs Gay Hollywood Queer

Say Hello, Wave Goodbye

I needed to stay in home alone tonight.  I feel sad.  Sad about Kristian, sad about my friends who died this year and sad that once again I am on my own:  the vacuum left behind after a wonderful weekend with a great friend.

I have always had and certainly will continue to have a serious problem with goodbye.  Saying goodbye permanently or even temporarily brings up huge feelings of loss, vulnerability and then the anger-the anger overwhelms me.

The genesis of these feelings: I was ripped from my mother’s breast and put up for adoption.  These are primal fears of life and death.   The most profoundly affecting goodbye after my mother’s abandonment was the death of my Darling Big Dog.

When my dog was violently killed the resulting anguish unleashed a torrent of sadness, a great wave of misery that may have resulted from not ever having said goodbye-ever to anyone I loved.  I did not go to my grandfather’s funeral nor my grandmother’s.   I have rigorously avoided any ritual goodbye and for that I am a lesser man.

Whenever I leave a party I just slip away as if saying goodbye will somehow humiliate me.

The same feelings overcome me now after the deaths of three friends in as many months.  Yet the very act of writing about them lends me immediate solace.

The end of relationships causes me unrelenting heartache.

Stoically accepting the end of a relationship?  No, not for me.  Nearly all of the relationships I have had have ended badly.  I never, it seems, get to write that scene in the movie of my life where two people say a dignified goodbye.

The end of my relationship with Joe ended thus:  I knew that I was going to leave but it took me 2 years to end it and when I finally did I tried to do it with tenderness and compassion but he was so angry that he made my life miserable for a full year after I left him-ending up in court fighting over property.

In my mad head I forget that I have choices, the choice to remember that the past no longer runs the show, choices to say goodbye without the reenactment of traumatic and ruinous scenarios.

Today I waved goodbye to a new friend who has come to mean a great deal to me.  Whether there is any romantic future between us is really not up to me-unless I behave in such a way that he would never want to see me again.   This morning I began to get angry, angry that he was leaving but knew that it was for the best.

Even though I was only momentarily angry-until I could identify what was going on in my mad head and break the cycle of abandonment and despair by telling him that I would miss him, that I was feeling sad, that I had no mechanism for making those feelings go away…and by telling him the truth I was freed from behaviors that would alienate him from me forever.

I will say goodbye to Kristian this week, say my heartfelt adieu.   His death has brought up all sorts of STUFF.   I sorted out pictures of us today and will post them as soon as I can.

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