And now for the painful honesty
Jan. 21st, 2005 03:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
flamingswordI had flatlined three times before Larry died. This is the anniversary of the end of my childhood, and the backstory is quite enormous, but it begins here: I had ceased breathing and had no heart beat three separate times before it happened to my brother. Not until the age of twelve, years later, did it occur to me that I had been able to do something that Larry couldn't. Admission that you are stronger than you wanted to be is the end of being a child, and that happened on the anniversary of his death, in 1993.
It was a Friday that day, too. This is the date of his death, and the reason 1988 had no year comparable to it, so happy because everyone had lived through it, and I've never had a whole year like it since. So: on Friday, January twenty-first of 1989, Rocky Carter came over to spend the night with his two best friends, Larry and Heidi Hickman. He was ten. Larry was almost ten. I was eight and a half. The halves were still important back then. We played outside in the cool weather until a bit past dark. Rocky was always making big pronouncements about things, and he said that the three of us were like the stars in Orion's Belt. And then he and Larry teased that I was the dim one that was just a bit off. I can never look at Orion's Belt without that flash of memory, the bittersweet sense of some things being more eternal than others.
I can see what came before so clearly. I look into the past at the little self who's going to live through all of this and wonder how I made it through. She looks so unprepared, scrawny and weatherbeaten with a gap between her two front teeth that will take years to grow straight. So will her soul, because tonight is where it breaks. (Forgive me the melodrama, but this is how it felt. How it still feels, sometimes.)
We went in and ate and watched the Twilight Zone with the lights off, and then watched American Gladiator and I drifted off to sleep with my head on a pillow inside a plastic milk crate. At some point Larry must have made me get up and go to bed. But I don't remember it.
At this point conjecture and other people's memories have to fill in a lot. Some time in the night a leak in the heater let out a lot of natural gas containing carbon monoxide. ( http://www.emedicine.com/EMERG/topic817.htm ) At around six in the morning Rocky's parents came to pick him up to go to church because they were Seventh Day Adventist. Rocky didn't feel well, but they figured we'd stayed up really late. They finally figured out how sick he really was when he still couldn't fully wake up after church let out at around ten. They called mom from the hospital, saying Rocky was sick, and Mom came in to check on us.
I remember looking at the ceiling and not being able to move anything but my head. I don't remember throwing up or getting scratched by the cats, but that happened, too. According to Mom, Rocky had slept on the bottom bunk and I had been on the top bunk. Larry was on the floor. When I heard Mom, I started moaning and trying to talk, but nothing would come out. She pulled me off the top bunk and I must have fallen to the ground. I saw Larry and he was a funny color and the room smelled like death and I knew. That's the only thing I remember clearly about the whole morning, scratchy carpet against me, Larry laying mostly face down on the floor, Larry looking so pale above and dark red below where the blood had pooled in his skin. I remember the sick ache that started that moment and everyone who's lost a piece of their world knows it.
The story goes on from there, Mom washing me off, paramedics showing up, getting me to a hospital, but I don't remember it or care about it.
I have fragmentary memories of the hospital. They gave me a barbie doll and I spent an hour ignoring it and playing with the giant metallic green bow they had put on it's head. I remember things not making any sense, and I can't remember any words between Larry being dead and the day of his funeral, as though for a few days I had been struck dumb. Some part of me had gone blind and couldn't tell the difference.
For me, the story really starts up again a few hours before the funeral. Terror and pain have a way of drawing us back to the present when nothing else can. My horror of curling irons comes from being burned after they promised me I wouldn't be. Why did they think it was so important, anyway? Why look beautiful when the only person you want to react is going to have his eyes sewn shut? What did my aunt think it would do other than to make me hysterical and have to hide in a closet? When children lose someone, they need things to remain as much the same as possible. Curling my hair was made into a giant ordeal that still looms entirely out of proportion to it's proper context. All you little girls with dead brothers: I don't blame you for not having curled hair. I don't blame you for running off to get anywhere but away from all those sympathetic eyes. You can be a horrible brat, and I will reassure you that the world has not lost it's order by being a horrible brat right back to you. You can count on me. I can be an absolute rock of self-centered dependability.
Because I didn't have one, I became one. Sometimes you have to be the thing you cannot save, take it into you, make it part of you so it never gets lost from the world. I was never introspective before, or mechanically apt, or a hundred things I made myself be, as though I could somehow be both of us. Because that is what's so wrong with death. That's why it hurts so much. The world is made less by every person it loses. I don't know who John Donne lost, but the first time I ever heard the quote about 'for whom the bell tolls' I had already been there. It didn't sound that deep to me. Existential angst isn't something you're supposed to start in on until high school, but I got a head start. :T
Ten days later when I got back to school, everyone had heard about Larry from Ben and Marty who lived nearby and rode the bus with us. The people who would talk to me were being so careful and nice, and I wished they wouldn't, but to ask them to stop I would have to admit that something was wrong. When you're a kid, you think your powers of denial really can change the world. You believe wholeheartedly in the magic of never letting it be real and believing that you're going to wake up like Dorothy Gale and it will all have been a fevered dream, gone on waking. But the sick ache is there, and you know that if nothing else is real, that is real, and it says that something is wrong and can't be fixed.
Rocky went to a private school, for the Seventh Day Adventist kids. It was a really good school, but I didn't get to see him much for about a month after it happened. I think I may have been in love with him, before, a bit of puppy love. He was always so full of life and crazy ideas. I know that after, he was the only thing that made me feel normal, and I would stick to him like a second shadow or a hungry lamprey. He wasn't the same, but he was familiar. I wasn't the same. I was quiet, something I had never been. I think his parents freaked out about my behavior but they never said anything to me directly.
I wanted to scream. At everyone. Inside my head things were disjointed, and it felt exactly like the part of The Sandman series in the Kindly Ones where Lyta Hall is walking around crazy. There's a lot of noise but there's a quiet place, too, that nothing reaches. Nothing really touches you in the head, it can't reach you there. And the more the world goes on around you, the more you go up there and just sit behind your eyes, and watch the world happen. It's just like television. None of it's really real, and you can cry at the sad parts and talk back to the screen and that's okay because it's just a story on TV, not something that's really happening to you. Mom and Mike fight a lot, and you're being put into special classes for the really smart kids, and you notice one day that you used to see a lot more of people who were only your friends, but now you only hang around people who knew him, too, like you need constant proof that he was real. And you mostly just watch them live their lives, and god, how creepy must that have been for them? To be followed around and stared at. No wonder Rocky's parents freaked out and they moved away suddenly without telling you. No wonder you lost your damn mind.
There's a long period of emotional disturbance that goes on in the next few years, but it's nothing unheard of- violent tendencies, irrational behaviour, not being able to tell the difference between real and imaginary, all that sort of thing. I'm not kidding when I say that I was insane. But I never got committed and I wouldn't let myself be medicated. I was as normal around my mom as I knew how to be. I faked it for her so she would have something left. She and Mike were affected too, and after their marriage fell apart, me and Aunt Rhoda were all she had. I knew that something was horribly wrong with me, but again: saying anything was going to make it all real, and then the world would end.
I started coming back into the world a couple times, only to screw things up so badly trying to connect with people that I would pull away again in guilt and horror. I owe my sanity to crazy people. How I wound up in the PSA classes for the basketcases is not a mystery to me, but Jillian Sutton is my saviour. If it weren't for someone so oblivious to social etiquette and so thoroughly medicated, I might still be hiding up there somewhere, or in an institution, or dead. Probably dead. I was occasionally very scary when people pushed too hard. And sometimes violent. I had to take my ability to be violent offline for a few years after I got back, to make sure that it never happened by accident again. It's both beautiful and ugly, knowing exactly what you're capable of when the chips are down. And boy, were they down. And strewn around another city entirely. I had two years of Jill to hunt down my scattered chips, and thank the gentle gods that it was enough to get me past the reconnection phase.
And then came high school.
But that story will have to wait for another day.
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no subject
Date: 2005-01-22 05:40 am (UTC)I'd say I know what you feel, but I don't. My experience was different in a lot of ways. But oddly enough, it's comforting knowing that we've both been dead before, too.
There are some things that children should never deal with. There are other things that people should not be sheltered from. Sometimes, they're the same thing.
Really, all that matters is that you did survive. And for that, I am grateful.
Yeah . . .
Date: 2005-01-23 09:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-01-22 03:10 pm (UTC)always
Date: 2005-01-23 09:15 pm (UTC)Re: always
Date: 2005-01-27 03:17 am (UTC)Re: always
Date: 2005-01-27 03:35 pm (UTC)Re: always
Date: 2005-01-27 03:39 pm (UTC)Then again, I also think we should get you to Austin, or me to there...I still need to meet Doug. :-) And convince him that I'm not evil. ;-)
It's rockey
Date: 2006-07-12 08:31 pm (UTC)I like you will never forget my mom as she came in and said he was dead, all the paramedics coming in, the police, well I know it happened but specifics are gone. I don't remember much about the hospital except I heard you were across the way in a chamber. I prayed for you so hard then. I barely remember the funeral or even seeing you there.
I am still full of my crazy thoughts and notions. We were very intertwined and I have regretted every minute of not being with you. Alas we now know who the dim star was.
I don't know how you will take this, It's really hard on me and brings a lot of stuff back. All I know is it is about damn time for me to find you again!
I went crazy for awhile myself. Unfortunately I was committed, to Charter, and milwood CPC. I don't believe I ever got violent (except towards myself) I did become very depressed and disconnected. I owe my life as I said to catching on fire and becoming a phoenix.
I am sorry I had to leave. I might have been in love with you too then. We of course weren't quite the same but there was our bond, and always will be one. I'm glad we moved past it and I am posting this to you (well I hope anyway, I don't know how to work livejournel) just to let you know my memory of what happened. I was actually there.