How should you feel when you learn that someone you love has tried, deliberately, to die? Has nearly died. Has cut himself and taken bottles of pills and waited patiently and hoped he would die.
You can’t feel angry, quite. You can’t feel overly relieved, either, when he fails – and feels the failure as another failure. You can only feel deeply, deeply sad.
This song is wrapped up, for me, in the weather of those few days.
Just before Thanksgiving, the sky was a steel gray that lightened, in the morning, to an enamel white and muted to soggy black in the evening. The trees were bare and seemed to seep ice.
My mother, sister, and I listened to a song about a suicide, driving through ugly Kansas City on an ugly night thinking about a suicide. It’s hard for me to drive through Kansas City now, when it rains. It’s also hard for me to hear this song.
“Lord knows when the cold wind blows it’ll turn your head around.”
After that night spent waiting at the hospital, we spent some time at home, and then (at night again) drove to visit him in the mental ward. He had jaundice and would barely look at us. Despite his intentions, his stubborn liver had saved him.
He was my little brother. We always were–and still are, I think–very alike. Both intelligent, imaginative, and rather hard-headed.
He’d gone through several phases over the years. A cowboy phase, a criminal phase. He’d lost a fiancée and isolated himself. But he’d call me sometimes, late at night, and we’d talk about our troubled Midwestern family and other, loftier things. He’d tell me he’d been listening to a lot of ‘70s folk music.
“Sweet dreams and flying machines in pieces on the ground”
I almost want to thank him now. And, by thank him, I mean fall on my knees and kiss his feet. Because he didn’t die.
He has a month-old son now and a wonderful wife. I get to see the sharp jut of his jaw and hear his wry jokes and know that he’s still with us. Just like on that night, with that sweet lovely song on the radio, we clung to that phrase–he’s still with us–and waited, listening to soft guitar.
Note: working draft from a longer work about music, men, and memory.
Holly Sinclair 