Stung Awake in the Night

Both my daughters woke up in the middle of the night. The baby fussing, needing to nurse. The four-year-old an hour later, couldn’t sleep. I never fell back asleep, starting from 3:30. Being awake in the night is grating and boring. The creep of morning induces anxiety of how exhausting things promise to be in the day to come.

I try not to look at my phone in those hours. A kernel of optimism allows the twelfth Hail Mary will be the one that does the trick. The monotony will sooth my brain to stillness. I will be rested when my daughter’s alarm clock light switches from yellow to green. But after three hours shifting, stretching, and turning to one side to avoid a sore left arm that had miraculously received a shot it took all the available resources to modern science to make, I gave in and picked up my phone.

My wife and I had a run of years being afraid of our phones. Besides what news you might find at any moment, we had personally fielded more than a handful of phone calls and texts with devastating news. Personal trauma of close friends. Illness and injury of family members. The deaths of our fathers. Yet still we often forgot to be concerned when benignly picking up our devices to check-out and scroll for a bit.

On this night, in the smallest hours, it was a string of text messages to a muted group thread of my closest friends. An old friend from my days in Austin had taken his life. He had moved to Brooklyn just before I left as well, so it had been short of a decade since we had last seen each other. It was of no matter. My memories of those times are clear, and he was an integral part of the most meaningful community of friends I was so fortunate to find there.

The immediate reaction is confusion, every time, no matter what. The brain cannot compute massive trauma in real time. There is a stillness. Detachment. Then neurons begin to build pathways back to entrenched schemas. Attempt to build context. Search the database of personal history of time to place where this moment and event fit.

Then situational calculations begin. Rapid and in succession. The brain considers who found out, in what order, and how did word get to you. Who else knows? What were the details of the scene? When precisely was the decision made, or when did the heart stop beating, or when did the lungs exhale and not reinflate?

Then, emotions. People. Loved ones and friends. How are they right this moment? Where are they? What will they do? Are they as devastated as you are or more so? Are they as devastated as you were when you were at your most devastated? Which other situation have you experienced that is most comparable to this scenario on behalf of each person you know who must now know?

Then reflection. Remember the good times? Remember how good the times were? How is it possible we are so far past those times? Could we go back to those good times? Maybe if we rewind just a bit, we can get back to those times and this won’t be the time we have to consider right now, anymore, or ever again.

Then despair. How is this possible? Is it possible? How? How so?

How.

Here’s how. Here’s what must have happened.

What must have happened was.

What must have been happening was.

This must be what happened.

I wonder if anyone knows what happened. Is there someone I can ask? Will the doctor know? Can a doctor know?

Now what?

Now what do I do with my day? With my time? My life? The same thing I was going to do. Something different?

The day my dad died, my brother called. I was at work on a conference call and muted him. He texted and said to call right away. I did and he told me they found dad and that’s all he had to say. It was barely two months after my wedding, the last time I saw him.

When I went back to my desk, the floor was mostly empty, and I looked for someone of some kind of authority to tell. I guess I would need to go home for the day? Maybe figure out how to get back from Seattle to north Texas? Couldn’t rightly say. Maybe I should just finish up the conference call.

The executive admin is who I found and told. I said, “No, I’m fine. It’s alright.”

She looked at me sternly and said, “You’re in shock. You need to find a safe way home.”

When it was my father-in-law, I was in a work training and my wife called to tell me. Similarly, she said, “It’s ok. I’m ok. Go ahead and finish your training and I’ll see you when you get back.” The only reason I knew to say, “You’re in shock,” is because someone said it to me less than three years earlier. I told her I was headed back.

We cannot manage it. Our brains and our hearts — they’re too fragile. We develop mechanisms. Callouses. And yet, the processes are remarkably alike, no matter how many times it happens.

Our friend’s name was Scott. He was one of the loveliest men I ever knew. He was sweet and beautiful and charitable and honest. His passing is tragic in its own right and also to each person it affects. My time of knowing him was tied to a moment and place that exemplified our youthfulness, hope, optimism, and self-discovery. It was not a time without hardship, but it teemed with community and fellowship and vulnerability. My pain is tied to the pain of those I knew well then and recall in pictures of familiar faces, gathered in love and sharing. And in the loss of that youthful optimism. In the decay that occurs in between those moments and the ones that lead to this.

It is hard to consider how alone someone must feel in that moment. How anyone who knows them well wishes so earnestly they could have been there to let them know how not alone they are, how supported and loved.

And yet it’s impossible to take away. The moment cannot be snatched back. And we cannot begin to know what their real and deepest struggles were. Those closest to them will have theories, and over time, each person will cobble together the explanation they can most comprehend.

One of my closest friends died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound when we were fifteen. The circumstances surrounding the night of his death made for a sufficient narrative once all involved parties were clued in and an explanation could be mapped out. But no matter the data points, it cannot be solved.

We cannot comprehend death. Its finality. We cannot. And we cannot accept that we cannot. The finiteness of life is incomprehensible. Some dream of an afterlife or life that’s to come. Some say there is no such thing and they have accepted life in its singularity. Either way, our brains have no context for what it means to no longer exist.

We tell stories so our memories or memories of others live on. Lessons can be passed along. Names carry through time. It’s an effort to stem the tide of an end we do not understand.

We long for explanation and understanding. We search the stars and soil and scriptures. Suicide is the hardest to grasp, maybe, because we have to square our own lack of surety about death with the ability to walk into it willingly. And the willingly part is tricky. It’s unlikely the case. It’s the outcome of despair. Or resignation. Or anger.

It all scares us. The world scares us. And we’re caught in between the being scared. And the only way to not be scared is to not look or not exist. Or believe in something. And wonder — is there a difference?