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Into our family after the suicide of my son
On April 4, 1968, Robert F. Kennedy was running for president. That evening he was scheduled to make a campaign stop a largely forgotten, desperately poor African American neighborhood in Indianapolis, Indiana. Before he arrived, his aides broke the news to him that earlier that evening a sniper at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis Tennessee had taked deadly aim at civil rights leader Martin Luther King. Kennedy's aides, knowing the crowd as unaware of King's death and might react angrily to the news,urged the senator to cancel his appearance. Kennedy, instead, improvised one of the greatest speeches ever delivered and that evening Indianapolis became one of the few major cities not to be engulfed in flames.
In that speech, Kennedy quoted the Roman poet Aeschylus who wrote:
Even in our sleep, pain cannot forget
falls drop by drop upon the heart,
until, in our own despair,
against our will,
comes wisdom
through the awful grace of God.
Today we pray fervently for that day when our grief might yield to the wisdom through the awful grace of God. We await the day when our eyes might once more be dry, our hearts no longer heavy but light with joy, our minds not clouded with darkness but filled with hopeful dreams of the future. Right now, that moment seem so painfully far away.
I have always relyed on the magic of words. I write books and give speeches. I rely on words to inspire, to motivate, to calm and to enrage. This morning words fail me. I can't seem to find the magic words that will undo the terrible events of this week, that will give my sister peace of mind,and will make our family whole once again.
Danny was the first baby I ever held and I ache for his loss. What we have lived through is grotesque and obscene. i want to calm a grieving mother, but I realize that I am not calm myself. Instead, I am angry, filled with rage because a mother should have to bury her son, because I was not supposed to speak at my nephew's funeral, but he was supposed to crack jokes at my expense during mine.
You made a terrible,terrible mistake Danny. You imagined that you were alone, without friends and without a lifeline. I wish you could have witnessed the heartbreak your death has caused.I wish you could have seen the tears, heard us ask over and over again that unanswerable question, "WHY?"
Like to many people in the world, you felt bankrupt, but you were blind to the treasure lying at your feet. All around you were people who loved you and who would have done anything to purchase you one more breath of life. They have come by the dozens to my sisters house,and to the viewing last night, and to the service this morning-grieving friends and family who feel that a light in their soul has forever dimmed.
The Apostle Paul knew something about the magic of words, but also thee tragic limitations. As he writes in his First Letter to the Corinthians,"Though I speak with the tongue of men and angels, and have not charity,I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal." With charity, with forgiveness,comes wisdom and with wisdom comes the awful grace of God. Once we set aside our anger at this young man's death,we realize that Danny's terrible end is just a small piece of a too short, but often joyful life. Once I get past the terrible final act, I remember Danny's infectious laugh, his smile and his beautiful eyes. I remember his unmistakable, friendly East Texas drawl. I remember Danny as a wrestling fanatic, then as a roper, and then as a tattoo-addicted, ear-lobe gauged, body modifying,walking work of art.
One image of Danny remains etched in my mind. I remember watching him once in an elementary school play.The teacher cast him as a tree. danny stood there on the back of the stage with his silly paper costume. When the cue came,he stretched his arms which were made up like branches, his angel face beaming. That was Danny, content to be in the background yet somehow still commanding attention. He loved to give and to receive and his appetite in all things was veracious. If one tattoo was good, a hundred were better.Through it all, Danny was sui-generis, one of a kind. No one was going to tell him who he was, what he was going to look like or what he was going to be. As some of you know,Danny likes to dip snuff. Marie,David, Jeremy and many of Danny's friends tried to get him to stop that nasty habit. Once Danny was grounded for what seemed like a life sentence after David and Marie caught him dipping. The day that Danny's punishment ended, Marie and David found a snuff can in Danny's car. Determined to end that nonsense, David marched Danny to every tobacco dealer in Hunt County, told the merchant's in no uncertain terms that Danny was underage, and that if he was sold chewing tobacco in their store again, they would have to deal with the law. Danny turned beet red. He still kept dipping. He did so even when Jeremy and his friend Steven began putting Tabasco on his tobacco, and even cologne. They would watch Danny dip and he would keep a straight face, determined not to sweat or wretch in front of his would be reformers. That was was Danny. For good or bad, he was a free and unshakably independent spirit.
Danny's presence continues to be felt, both as a heavy shadow and as a light. Learning disability aside, my nephew loved to pull pranks on his co-workers and figured out how to program the cash registers at the Kroger's so they would chime simultaneously after he left each morning. No one was ever able to figure how he did this or how to stop the registers from ringing. The Wednesday after his death, the registers tolled again, Danny's last extended middle finger at convention.
Yet, he had us all fooled. He gave the perfect imitation of a happy-go-lucky free spirit, untouched by the ordinary pressures of life. For him tomorrow and its obligations never seen=med to exist. I still think that for much of his life he did fell joy and hope. Yet inside, dependency and fear lay coiled like a snake. there was a dark corner of his soul none of us ever saw and all his family are torturing their souls trying to recall the tell-tale signs of his future doom that we somehow missed.
That's a fools errand born of narcissism. Depression is a great deceiver, turning honey to gall and rendering friends and family invisible. None of us was so big or important that we could cut through the thick private haze of despair that clouded Danny's mind in those last days. Danny was a creature of impulse, whether he was implanting a stud in his face, running a red light adding another tattoo to the canvas of his body, or, at the end, surrendering to a lightening moment of panic. The spontaneity that made Danny exciting also proved his tragic undoing.
We loved Danny. We can no longer tell him that directly. In the lonely moments when I want to speak to him again,to go back in time and prevent his suicide, I ask if there was any point to his suffering and his senseless, too-early death. Towards that end, I have turned to Viktor Frankl, the Austrian founder of logotherapy, a school of psychology that emphasizes humanity's seeming intrinsic need to create meaning in the face of suffering.
The Nazis seized Frankl, who was Jewish, in 1942 and transported him, his wife and his parents to the Theresianstadt concentration camp. The SS later moved Frankl to Auschwitz and then to Dachau. sitting under the chimney's belching the gray snow of human ashes, Frankl observed that those camp inmates who found their torment meaningless were the most likely to seek a quick exit by grabbing the electric fence surrounding the camps. Those who found small, even trivial purpose in their ordeal greatly improved their chances at survival. As he noted in his classic, post-was book "Man in Search for Meaning";
If a prisoner felt that he could no longer endure the realities of camp life, he found a way out in his mental life-an invaluable opportunity to dwell in the spiritual domain, the one that the SS were unable to destroy. Spiritual life strengthened the prisoner, helped him adapt, and to thereby improved his chances of survival.
To Frankel, the meanings people attach to life that allow them to survive don't have to answer fundamental questions, such as why we suffer and die. They don't have to be the philosophical equivalent of quantum physics. "For me the meaning of life differ's from man to man, from day to day and from hour to hour," Frankl noted. " What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person's life at a given moment." Frankl survived the camps so he could see his wife face-to-face again,if for nothing else then an act of defiance aimed at his Nazi torturers.
By the time the was ended, his wife has died at the Bergen-Belsen camp, but the therapist summoned his courage and lived on,devoting himself to the study of suicide prevention and depression and honing techniques that came to be known as the "Third Viennese of Psychotherapy."
Frankl's life and suffering was not meaningless and neither was my nephew Danny's. If I can find meaning in Danny's terrible end, it that we can never allow ourselves the self-indulgent luxury of imagining that we are alone. As the song says,"We're one, but we're not the same . WE've got to carry each other, carry each other." Our lives are worth so much more than any material things we might possess. We will never again see someone like danny, but we will guarantee his legacy if we pledge to watch other our mutual love, support, honesty, and most of all, our shared determination to survive.
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