I need to confess two things that have altered the course of my life and provided me with a lifetime of profound sadness and failure. I offer this confession not with any expectation of receiving sympathy, kindness or divine forgiveness, none of which I want, but rather for the sole purpose that others might learn from my mistakes and in some small way, benefit.
1. When I was 13, I persuaded my best friend to drop a cement block (the kind used to hold a deck joist) off a freeway overpass near our town. We hauled it there one evening in a wagon which he used when he went to the grocery store for his mema, with whom he lived. He towed the wagon behind his bike and I rode on his handlebars because I didn't have a bike of my own. We both lifted the block to the railing and waited for just the right car. Instead, we decided to drop it on a semi-truck we saw coming in the distance.
As the truck got closer, I chickened out and ran toward his bike, but neither said nor did anything in those final seconds to prevent or even discourage my friend from letting go. Just before he let go of the block the truck driver saw him and swerved. The block fell to the concrete roadway below, directly into the path the truck was on before it swerved. In the next lane over, in the path of the truck, was a small sedan driven by a young mother.
Inside were her two children, a boy, 7 months, and a girl, 4 years. The truck lost control, tipped over on the car and killed both children. The mother survived with few physical injuries, as did the truck driver. However, the mother committed suicide about two years later, on the anniversary of her husband's death in Vietnam. He was a cargo plane pilot and was shot down a couple weeks before this incident. She was on her way to the air base near our town, where he was stationed, when the accident happened. She was apparently headed there to handle some details concerning her husband's death. It was reported that he never got to meet his son because his wife was pregnant when his last tour began. But for me, the son would be 46 years old now and his sister would be 49.
2. When I was 23 I had a girlfriend I loved more than life itself. She was beautiful inside and out, happy, generous, brilliant, faithful and loyalists and so loving to everyone, especially me. She was far more than I could ever have dreamt of or deserved.
But I despised myself and everything about me. I never let go of what I had done and there were many other things that had happened to me early in life that fed into this lifelong spiral of self-loathing. I was introduced to alcohol around the time we met, though I tried hard not to drink when we were together because I didn't like the way it made me feel inside and I didn't trust myself. I always felt like I had a toxic level of rage just below the suface and I feared alcohol would be the key that unlocked the cage and let the demons loose.
One night she came home from class early. I will never forget how happy she was to be home with me. Unfortunately, I had been laid off from my job several days earlier but still hadn't summoned the courage to tell her. I felt everything crashing in on me at once and tried to console, or numb, myself with very cheap vodka that evening before she came home. I lost track of time. She came home early specifically to share with me what should have been the best news of our young lives together. She was pregnant. The light of happiness and pride in her eyes as she told me haunts me to this day.
Something inside me snapped and I went into what I can describe only as a primal rage. I threw her to the floor and began kicking her abdomen as hard and fast as I could, losing balance several times and falling myself. I continued to kick her even as she vomited streams of blood and could no longer scream or cry or even whimper. Only my blacking out finally ended it and likely saved her life.
When I awoke several hours later she had somehow gotten to the bathroom. She couldn't, or wouldn't, talk. I took her in my arms to our car and drove her to the hospital. In time, we were informed she was no longer pregnant and she underwent surgery to fix much of the damage I had caused and, it was hoped, preserve her ability to become pregnant again in the future.
She never told anyone what I had done to her, as far as i know, but they knew. And they knew that I knew. About two months later, she visited family for the weekend. We had been trying to resume some sense of normalcy and I hadn't touched alcohol since that night, which was all she asked of me. But I knew she deserved far better than anything I could ever offer her so the weeked she was gone I packed a few books and clothes and one picture of her--my favorite picture--which has never left my presence, and I never looked back. I felt almost heroic at the time, as if I was saving her life by breaking her heart. I see things much more starkly now, after so many years, but I really thought I was, for the first time in my small, worthless life, doing something courageous, something difficult, painful, sacrificial, heroic. That was 35 years ago and not a single day has gone by that I haven't thought of her. Some memories have faded, but not the intensity of my love for her or my sorrow for what I did to her.
So that is four deaths, at least, that I have caused in my life. But karma is a peculiar thing and it does not allow us to hide or defer our just rewards. This I know because in the last 16 months I have lost my beautiful daughter, my wife of 26 years, my young granddaughter and two sisters. All but one sister died unexpectedly and tragically. With each of their deaths went a large part of my reason for living. My wife and daughter and granddaughter each, as they entered my life, gave me a reason I did not previously have to live. Now they are gone and with them all motivation for me to continue with my lifelong struggle with pain, emptiness and isolation.
So this is my farewell. We've never met, but for me, tonight, would you please hug someone you love, or make a call to that old friend you have been putting off for too long. Smile at a stranger, make love to your girl like she's the only woman on earth, play a board game with your child, make dinner for a sick neighbor. Do something more than surf for porn. For me. Just once.
Farewell, friends.
