i carry your heart with me

(i carry it in my heart)

Five years now since Jason checked out and I can still see that day in technicolor slo-mo. The call coming in, informing me that after so many prior attempts, this time he’d actually done it. Me howling. All of us, I think, not so much surprised as we were shocked. I remember going in the backyard and pounding three beers, back-to-back, all nonalcoholic, going through the motions of getting drunk to blot out this horrible truth but in the end still sober and raw and miserable. 

I remember going to retrieve two of his four dogs. Luna, his beloved service dog, who was into her teens already, so skinny, so fragile, so clearly aware he was gone. I didn’t think she’d survive her grief but she did, living several more years. And Polly Jean, who proved far too much for me, who was out of control. Who once tried to kill Luna and that was more than I could take. So I sent her away, which is not a thing I am prone to do. 

I remember blasting Nick Cave, consuming, descending, enveloping myself in his darker songs until a friend of J’s told me to stop. She made me switch to the Clash, his other favorite, because things were already too sad. So I blasted the Clash instead and I can’t say that helped so much as it hurt just a little less. 

Though I am a godless heathen, I am still a big fan of Signs from the Great Beyond. These exist in abundance for me. If they are my imagination, then I am grateful for an imagination that can still connect me to the ones I miss the most. And if I am feeling connected, and if that feeling comes across as real, then it is real as far as I’m concerned.

The first two times Jason showed up palpably happened moments apart. I led his memorial service here at the ranch and that was the biggest, rowdiest party I ever hosted out here. As I spoke the final words of the official service, a heavy breeze blew in from nowhere and Jason’s cowboy hat, which I’d hung on the post of the chapel porch, suddenly blew across the yard. I laughed at this gift from him, the knowledge he was here.

I put that hat on and went to the Molly Ivins Pavilion for the reception. Someone handed me a bouquet of flowers and Carol snapped a photo. Despite her eye, her years of experience as a photographer, she did not notice as she framed this shot what we all saw later. The light splashed across my face looked like a peacock in profile. Have you ever seen one of those yard signs in South Austin that say Peacocks Welcome Here? That was Jason’s doing, all those signs, part of his silly Peacock Liberation Front, a whimsical “organization” he created to make fun of the rich guy in Bouldin who wouldn’t stop bitching to the city that he was fed up with the neighborhood peacocks on his lawn. 

But the most amazing visit came six months after he was gone. J’s daughter was staying with me for a few days. I went outside to do my morning chores. I found a cardinal bashing its way around the feed shed. I swung open both doors and spoke encouraging words to coax him out. No luck. 

Though by then I’d been sober nearly twenty years, I knew it was classic alcoholic thinking that prompted my next move. This type of thinking goes as follows: we drunks will do the same thing over and over, expecting different results. Even though I knew it was futile and foolish, I told myself that I would climb up on the workbench and reach out to the bird, gently catch him, gently release him. 

To my surprise, the bird looked right at me and did not so much as flutter. Despite his panicky wall smashing mere moments before, now he let me cup him in my hands. I carried him inside and said to J’s daughter, “Look, your dad came to visit us.”

Beyond these Big Visits, there are perpetual reminders, smaller but no less significant that surround me. I keep a portrait of Joe Strummer above my bed, my Punk Rock Guardian Angel, my Patron Saint of Fight the Good Fight. J kept above his bed a piece of art I had commissioned for him. That work included Strummer, too, and also Johnny Cash, Nick Cave, and Luna his dog. I only discovered he kept this gift so close when we went to clean out his house. I had vowed to be stoic in this task but seeing that piece in its place of honor broke me. But before I could cry too long or too hard, with no assistance from those of us sorting his things, J’s stereo came on of its own accord.

Every year I watch June slide into July and I know This Day is coming. And I know I will be very sad (again, still). I don’t brace myself for it so much as I open up to the messages that keep coming in, always louder as the date approaches. This year, as ever, Jason did not disappoint me. 

The frequency shifted last Friday. Toro, my beloved co-worker, who bikes to work, discovered that, for the fourth time in as many weeks, he had a flat tire, likely related to this Inferno Blanket we are enduring. I offered him a ride home and he gladly accepted. As he got in the truck, apropos of nothing, he struck up a conversation about Grinderman. 

Grinderman, if you don’t know, was a Nick Cave band formed in 2006. When J and I were really digging into our friendship in 2013, it was music over which we bonded deepest and it was J who turned me onto NC. Ever a dedicated student, I downloaded most every record I could, but I always found Grinderman too harsh for my ears to embrace. Still, the albums remained on my phone and there have been more than a few occasions when I’ve turned on my truck to have Bluetooth, with no input from me, start blasting Grinderman in the cab. 

And so, of all the bands Toro could mention, I was delighted that he chose this one, proof that the veil was thinning as it does every mid-July. Another message from J. Back at the ranch that evening the cardinals started showing up. I said, “Hello Jason” to them all. 

Last night, drifting off, I wondered what this day would bring. Typically I spend J’s anniversary with his mother and we visit the places he loved. Last year, not for the first time, we hung out with Mig, J’s favorite tattoo artist, and I got another memorial tattoo. This year, I’m happy to know J’s mom is on a road trip, never truly able to escape the death of her beloved child, but at least she’s far away from where the shit went down. 

Nick Cave has a magnificent newsletter called The Red Hand Files, prompted by his own never ending grief, a grief that started when one of his sons died and compounded further when, a couple of years later, he lost a second son. As far as I can tell, the newsletter is not sent on a set schedule, but rather anytime its author is ready to communicate. 

Sure enough, this morning within five minutes of surfacing from slumber’s beautiful gift of oblivion into the space of remembering the significance of this sad date, the latest installment arrived. Of course it did. And not only that, but the message could not have better suited the heaviness of this day. As with nearly all of the RHF, this was in the Q&A format. As with many of the reader-submitted questions, the querent related a tragedy and asked for advice coping. 

And, as he always does, Nick Cave responded eloquently, this eloquence we know tragically informed by his own profound losses. His response (read the whole thing here) included the following:

I say this with a much conflicted heart, but it seems clear to me that the heartbreaks that routinely befall us – personally, societally or universally – are, in fact, the necessary gifts of change. These painful upheavals always provide us with the option for self-destruction or for transcendence. Heartbreak can be the engine of obliteration or growth. The choice is ours.

You are being called to remake yourself, to not be the self-absorbed individual you were…True growth comes when we accept the mantle of that which we feel is beyond us. If you can grasp it…you’ll be able to look back on this…from the perspective of a version of yourself you never knew was possible.

Thinking of Jason on this terrible anniversary, I reflect on what time has done to my grief. I never was visited by anger at my friend, though I know this is a not uncommon and entirely acceptable response to suicide. I feel now like I felt the day I got the call, when the truth of the matter was crystal clear already: My sweet friend tried every possible measure he could to deal with his broken mind, including electroshock therapy. It sucks beyond suck that he couldn’t hack it anymore, but as someone who also deals daily with extreme mental health challenges, I truly understand.

Jason’s regrettable departure also cemented something for me. I will never kill myself. I have endured suicidal ideation probably since my adolescence. It’s been such a part of me for so long that I actually cannot pinpoint the place in time it first appeared. So often this has been my mind’s go-to response in the face of crises, thinking how all of this would stop hurting if I would stop being. 

Unlike Jason, I never moved past ideation and into the place of attempting. Still, I know, clearly, what it’s like to have a brain that is so mis-wired it turns to death dreams for relief. Observing the ongoing aftermath of his ceasing to exist, the pain we all still carry—this knowledge is what I use to counter any dark thoughts that visit me now. I wait out the darkness. I am grateful I have been fortunate enough to manage my chronic depression through therapy, meditation, and, as needed, medication that works for me the way it did not work for him. I am also grateful to note that as I have grown older, the voices trying to convince me that being gone is the way to go have diminished exponentially. And that the rare times they do start chattering now, I see them for what they are. I ask for help immediately. 

If you have a mind that beckons you to the darkness on the regular, despite what you might be thinking, you truly are not alone. I also know that’s impossible to believe when you are In It. But I am going to ask you this—in the name of Nick Cave, in honor of J’s memory, and as a personal favor to me—even if it feels like the most pointless exercise ever, please force yourself to tell someone you’re in The Scary Place. 988 is the new mental health hotline. You can message me. You can tell a stranger on the street. 

Somebody cares. Many of us care. You feel completely alone in the darkness. I know. I do. But you are not alone. 

Jason I miss you every damn day. 

NOTES:

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