Earlier this evening I heard that a childhood friend I’ve known since I was 5 or 6 has died.
His name was Tim.
He shot himself.
And I’m numb.
Actually that’s not totally accurate. I’ve gone through many of the stages of grief. And here I am spewing this shit out on my crappy blog that nobody reads. But that’s ok. I feel I need to write this, for whatever reason. Soundtrack: Alice in Chains – Dirt (listen via Youtube here).
What I’m about to write isn’t about the facts per se, but about my memory. I’m sure the details here are as foggy as my 40 year old (and currently drunk) mind is at the moment.
About my friend; he was a guy who had boundless energy (often to the point of fidgety or twitchy mannerisms), laughter (he had a distinct bark of a laugh which was infectious), and was the one guy at the party with the jokes (even if they weren’t always as funny as he thought they were). He loved to quote Steve Martin (was the guy who gave me a copy of Let’s Get Small and Wild and Crazy Guy on a dubbed cassette when I was much younger than I am today). He had a sparkle in his eye. Often mischievous. Never with malice. Loved rock music. Loved cars. Has 3 older siblings, and a mother who was the secretary in my small town high school back in the day. Something the group of us friends used to our advantage when it came to the rare spring day where we all decided to skip school and drive to the beach for the hell of it. Don’t tell the principal (shhh). We, the aforementioned group of friends) spent a lot of time being goofy, and probably often thought we were far more hilarious than we really were. But we also didn’t care because we were a close group of friends who went through our highs and lows together. That’s what friends were for.
The tragedy of all this is that for the past couple decades he’s been in trouble, mostly (maybe entirely) from his own personal demons. In my mind that began right about the time most young people make that transition from forgivable teenage hooliganism into slightly less forgivable post-teenage hooliganism. He’d suffered a pretty bad seizure during a period where he was just starting to drink heavily and get into some harder drugs. What he did after that is what probably caused us to drift apart: he didn’t clean up and sort himself out. He continued his journey down the rabbit hole to see how deep it went. As the rest of us formerly-close-nit group of friends we all were moving on in some way or another (marriage, college, careers, and all that stuff), he was in a pretty bad spiral towards the bottom. And one that we were all powerless to stop. He slowly but surely seemed to descend into madness to a point where I at least ceased to recognize him from the friend I’d known previously.
Believe me when I tell you that over the past few hours I’ve gone through the “if only I’d…” scenarios. Over the years I’d received the late night drunken calls, I’d seen him recover slightly only to sink deeper. Watched from afar his Marriage. Divorce. Addiction. Recovery. Relapse.
What’s worse is that I now feel, and always will I suppose, that I didn’t do enough. That there was something more I could, no should, have done. Even though every logical fiber in my body screams at me that there was nothing I could have done.
Part of my sense of guilt is that feeling where in order to have moved forward in my own life, in order to succeed (in life, love, career, family, happiness), I needed to “cut my losses” from my past life and press on. That’s how I feel about it. And it doesn’t feel great.
But another part of me knows, deep down, that nothing I could have done would have saved him. He was beyond my help, and those of many other long-time friends who likewise tried to help over the years. We all were there to listen, talk, encourage, push, etc, that might have helped him. But none of us could.
What’s left with me now is a slightly pissed-off feeling. Partly at my friend. Partly at myself. Partly at nobody in particular.
Hell, I have no idea how to feel about this right now.
I feel awful for his family. His siblings and parents. For those friends who he’d kept closer than I over these past few years.
R.I.P. Tim. You deserve the rest after all of this pain. Even if it actually was mostly self-made.
Fucker.
I love you.
