by
Caroline Horwitz
Unexpected
Fact: If you have dinner with your uncle on Saturday, and he jokes, eats
heartily, and makes future plans with you and your relatives, it doesn’t mean
he won’t be dead by his own hand on Tuesday.
The body in the coffin didn’t look any
different from the man I had known.
I hadn’t felt that way at his wife’s
calling hours five months before, or at either of my grandparents’ a decade
ago. Those bodies looked fake and heavily coated with makeup—wax figures of
those people I knew so well. But their deaths had been caused by cancer,
emphysema, and congestive heart failure. They hadn’t looked like themselves for
some time, their appearances ravaged by their gradual expirations. My uncle’s
suicide lasted only as long it took a 9mm Glock to send a bullet from one side
of his head to the other.
I was shocked to learn his calling hours
would feature an open casket given the nature of the death, but the funeral
home director assured my family that a closed casket wouldn’t be necessary.
“Of course, we’ll have to turn it the
opposite way against the wall,” he said, “to show the left side of his face
instead of the right.”
To hide the entry wound.
My mother and I were the first ones at
the funeral home. I’d never seen the body of a gunshot victim and expected
serious damage. The movies seemed to indicate that huge portions of the skull
would be blown off. But there was Jim, handsome as ever, perhaps just resting
on those blinding-white pillows.
If I looked a little closer at his face,
though, I could make out the edges of gauzy bandages on either side of his head
and a hint of puckered, dried scabs peeking from beneath them.
He started drinking again right after
his wife Amy died. He promised her on her literal deathbed that he wouldn’t.
She endured over twenty years of his drunken episodes, and the emotional and
sometimes physical abuse that came with them, only to be cancer-stricken a year
after he finally got clean and started therapy.
A shadow of the perky, glamorous woman
she used to be, she begged him to maintain sobriety.
“You can’t go back to drinking when I’m
gone, no matter how sad you are,” Amy said. “Promise me.”
“I won’t,” he said. “I’m done with
that.”
But he did, and he didn’t try to hide
it either. Just weeks after her funeral, his refrigerator was stocked with
twenty-four-can packs of Coors Light. Some of his siblings wanted to confront
him about it. Others wanted to leave it alone, feeling they weren’t in the
position to tell a grieving widower not to have a few beers if it made him feel
better. My mother was livid at them more than at him.
“When he drinks in front of us, he’s
pleading for us to say something!” I heard her cry to one of my aunts or uncles
over the phone. “He wants to know that we care enough about him to stop it.”
He was nonchalant when she addressed
it. “I’m being careful,” he said.
It was easy to tell when he had been
drinking. He was loud and red and giddy and said nonsensical things, often
concerning dead celebrities. T.S. Eliot and Johnny Weissmuller were particular
favorites. Countless times we heard him claim that Eliot was almost illiterate
and his wife was the writer behind most of his work, and that Weissmuller was
closely related to our family.
“We could trace it, I bet!” he’d say,
voice booming. “If we really wanted to.” Eyes unblinking shards of blue so
bloodshot they might be terrifying, if not for that irrepressible glee.
The Glock 17 is one of the
best-selling handguns in the world. Jim only owned his a few years, seemingly purchasing
it for work-related purposes. As a security guard, he earned more per hour any
time he wore it.
That gun disturbed my mother as soon as
she learned of Amy’s diagnosis with advanced skin cancer.
“She’s everything to him,” she told
me. “I’m worried what he’ll do.”
I don’t know how many days passed
after Amy’s funeral before my mom attempted to convince Jim to give up the gun.
Not many.
“Please let me take it for a little
while,” she implored him. “You can have it back later, but I just don’t think
it should be in your house right now.”
He refused. “I’m not going to do
anything stupid,” he said.
It wasn’t an explicit promise not to
kill himself, I suppose.
He was the seventh of twelve children,
my mother the eighth. Though a year apart in age, they were in the same class
throughout school since Jim was held back in first grade.
“He was always self-conscious about
that, I think,” my mom said.
She had great affection for him despite
having little in common. She was well-behaved and studious, reading the
newspaper every day by fourth grade. He had little use for rules and little
fear of authority, crumpling notes from teachers and swiping his parents’
cigarettes.
Shortly after Jim was born, my
grandmother suffered a nervous breakdown. It was so severe that she became
catatonic, remaining in the hospital for months while my infant uncle was cared
for by a nursemaid. Could this have been the catalyst for his tragic life, my
mom wondered?
“A newborn baby needs to be around its
mother,” she said. “Mother always said he noticed everything.”
Jim earned a bachelor’s degree in
marketing but opted for manual labor after working an office job for less than
a year. Working in factories and operating cranes guaranteed he wouldn’t have
to wear business attire forty hours a week.
“I’m not taking another job that makes
me wear a monkey suit,” he said.
He met his wife in one of these
factories. She was a seventeen-year-old small-town beauty queen. He was
thirty-one. When he picked her up for their first date, her father sat on the
front porch of their rural home, a shotgun in his lap.
“He didn’t understand,” my uncle said
years later. “Dying was the last thing I was afraid of.”
When I was a child, he was my favorite
uncle of the six. He was the fun one, the charming one, the leather jacket-wearing,
motorcycle-riding black sheep. By the time I was eighteen months old, I’d shout
his name upon hearing the rev of any motorcycle engine. Perhaps there was some
draw besides his cool-guy persona. He was the only uncle to never have
children, and I had no father.
He was hardly a substitute, though. As
I grew older, his visits with everyone grew more sporadic. He was hard to
contact, sometimes avoiding family functions for almost a year despite living
less than an hour away.
He
had somehow managed, despite his best efforts, to be the fittest of the twelve
siblings. He drank, smoked tobacco and marijuana, ate greasy food on a regular
basis, and hardly exercised. But he was trim, muscular, and healthy, unlike
many of my more-disciplined aunts and uncles who still struggled with their
weight and a myriad of health problems.
A month after Amy’s death, my mom asked
how he was feeling.
“I’m cursed with good health,” he told
her, with no trace of humor.
Jim spent a summer of college in the seventies
working at a cattle slaughterhouse. He hated it.
“They could smell the blood,” he said. “They
knew they were next.”
I never knew what position he worked. I
didn’t want to ask. He didn’t kill them; that much I knew. He was farther down
the line. Close enough to hear the cows’ panicked lowing, though, before each
was silenced with a shot to the head from a captive bolt pistol.
Was there any pain?
At dinner three nights prior, I sat
across from him at my aunt’s dining room table. I faced a man who, that night
at least, was cheerful and sober and knew he was seeing us for the last time.
I combed through my memory hunting for
any possible foreshadowing comment, but there was none. He fooled us all.
Most suicides seem to be accompanied
by a resounding survivors’ cry of Why?
Not so with our family. You want reasons? Take your pick: lost his wife; flawed
husband to her; no children; alcoholic; history of depression. The query that
prickled beneath our skins was far more uncomfortable: Why now?
Five months. It seemed an odd amount of
time. Too late to be an immediate reaction to losing Amy and too soon to have
fully sampled life without her and decided against it. There was no
significance in the date he chose—no anniversaries or birthdays or milestones
of any sort. The reason was a simple and surprising one.
Dependent upon a variety of factors, headstones
require different amounts of time to produce, inscribe, deliver, and affix upon
a grave. Amy’s took five months.
It arrived the week before he killed
himself. The last piece of the puzzle, as it were. The last task he wanted to
see to completion for her.
His body and gun were found in the woods
adjacent to the cemetery. A pink rose, Amy’s favorite, lay on the new
headstone.
The police found no note of any kind
when they searched Jim’s house—my childhood home. He and Amy had planned to buy
it from my mother after she moved out of town. Almost right after they moved
in, though, Amy received her diagnosis. They couldn’t afford the purchase
anymore, so the title remained under my mother’s name and she let them live
there for free.
The house was immaculate. His two small
dogs, like children to him, were in their crates as they always were when he
was out. He knew it wouldn’t take the family long to find them. I imagine they
were the only ones to receive a goodbye.
The coroner’s report found no alcohol in
his bloodstream. Why would it? He didn’t need to be drunk for this.
Every step of the bullet’s journey is measured
and chronicled in the report as the “hemorrhagic pathway.” It’s a trail,
really. A trail that passes through tissue and muscle and bone and lobe,
leaving rhyming verbs in its wake: Lacerate. Macerate. Perforate.
“I
should have gotten that gun,” my mother said after the funeral.
“You tried,” I said. “It wouldn’t have
mattered. It’s what he had, so it’s what he used.”
“Jimmy,” she whispered.
I hung my long-sleeved black dress back
in the closet. I’d only worn it once before, five months ago.
“He just didn’t want to be here anymore,”
I said.
It was all I could think to tell her.
And it occurred to me that it could very well be the truth.
Caroline
Horwitz’s essays have
appeared in publications such as Animal, Forge Journal, Lowestoft
Chronicle, Mothers Always Write, and The Summerset Review,
among others. Her work has been nominated for the 2015 Best of the Net
Anthology and listed as a notable entry in The Best American Essays 2014.
She has an MFA in creative nonfiction from Chatham University and lives in Las
Vegas with her husband and son.
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