"Life's Only Life With You In This Song"

"Life's only life with you in this song." - Flogging Molly
"The sun is gone, but I have a light." - Nirvana
"That last kiss I'll cherish, until we meet again. Time makes it harder, I wish I could remember. But I'll keep your memory, you'll visit me in my sleep. My darlin',  who knew?" - Pink

There's so many more quotes I could post.

It's been nine days since my brother Scotty was taken from us. I'm not going to say "taken by the Lord" or "gone to his reward" or anything like that, for reasons I'll illustrate in a moment. I'm coming out of the shock phase. I'm angry, I hurt. I don't cry every time I see his picture anymore - maybe once out of every three times. I get a boulder in my throat every day when his Facebook account automatically posts his horoscope to my news feed, but, it's not making me lose it completely. I'm crying at random, but I'm coming to terms with it. I think. I don't know.

It would have been difficult no matter which sibling I lost, since obviously the stupid fucking universe (there's the anger) saw fit to subtract another member of our family for whatever stupid reason. It hurt when we lost Grandma and Grandpa and Aunt Cheryl. Terribly. The thing is, though, that they had all been sick for a while. Grandma battled Alzheimer's for years before it took her. Grandpa just got sick with one thing after another. Aunt Cheryl had lymphoma. She rallied after my dad's heroic donation of stem cells, but it came back. I guess what I'm trying to say is that, while it was horrible and sad, there was more advance warning, I suppose.

And yeah, I just re-read what I've typed so far, and it sounds horribly selfish to me, but I am going to try not to care. I'm so far out to sea on how to cope with this, I'm attempting to blog through my grief, and all I can do is write what I know and what's in my heart. So feel free to click away. I'm sorry if this comes off badly. That being said....

Scotty's loss hit me in a way that Grandma and Grandpa and Aunt Cheryl's did not. It was so sudden. I heard he was in the hospital at 9 pm Saturday, and he was gone at 3 pm Sunday. He'd had stomach flu, and a headache for almost a week, which he posted about on Facebook, but no cancer or anything like that. He was such a vibrant guy. I've said this so many times to so many people, but he was literally my sunshine. He automatically saw the ideal version of who you were, everything you'd be in a perfect world, and somehow without putting you on a pedestal, that's just who you were to him. He came into our lives at a time when I was in a very dark place and just brightened it up, and I love him for that (yes, love - that is something that will never be put into the past tense) just as I love him for his love of us all, for his seeing so much more than any other guy his age would, for his open arms and heart and smile and oh shit, I really didn't want to start crying while I was writing this, but here I go.

I've had trouble with depression since I was fairly young - pre-puberty. I had a rough start and a shitty run with a shitty public school that made me literally hate everything about myself. Things got a little bit better when Concord opened in 1994 and I transferred there, but you can't automatically undo the damage of years and years of what I privately refer to as societal abuse. I was on a few different antidepressants, I tried my luck with self medication through poetry, drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, and talks with the few people I called friends. It was so hard for me not to believe that everyone was laughing at me behind my back. I was convinced that it was all one giant set-up - it had happened to me before. I left P-town and moved to the UP, and strangely, that helped a little bit. I dropped a lot of the angry teenager fat, grew my hair out, and learned how to fake confidence. I took a lot of the steps towards who I am today.

I came back home to P-town. Emmet County has some sort of weird magnetic pull over me - no matter how many times or how far I run, it always pulls me back. I dropped out of high school. I went to work in food service, further shaping me as an adult. That underlying paranoia was still there though. Always there.

I wonder if you, reading this, can understand that. I didn't come into the world loathing myself, my dark hair, my thick build, hazel eyes, round butt, small chest. I was a pretty confident little kid, up until my own personal hell began when I was 8 and did not let up. Four years might not seem like a long time, but the amount of damage it can do on a kid that age is fierce. Don't ever let anyone tell you otherwise. It's why I try to treat kids with as much respect as possible. I was smart - maybe too smart - and I always related better to adults. To this day, most of my friends are older than me. And to this day, I tend to back the losing team, because I was on it for so long. "The hero for the lost cause," like Green Day says. How long to undo four years, minus summer breaks, of daily torment at the hands of so-called peers? I don't know. I'm still clocking it.

I went back to school to get my diploma, still working food service. I also worked as a parapro at Concord, trying to figure out exactly what I wanted to do with my life. And that year was when Scotty came into our lives.

I've stated before how he drew me out, how it took me longer to warm up to him - and God, I'm still angry with myself for that, the missed opportunity, the fact that we could have been close for an extra month. But maybe me laying out my soul here can explain that a little better, and maybe by writing it out I can quit cursing myself for it.

I'll always be thankful for the time we had together. I just wish it could have been more. I don't give a shit about DNA or adoption papers or anything like that. He was my brother. As much as Travis is my brother. Who cares who gave birth to you? It's what is in your heart that counts, and he called me sister. That's all I need.


It's been hell. It's going to be hell for a lot longer, I expect. But at the same time, what I learned from Scotty has made it easier.

He stood by me, no matter how bad I fucked up. He helped me to know that I could actually let people in, no matter how much it freaked me out to do so, and while some of them might not be worth it, I could always learn from it, and there would also be people who were worth it.

He got me to shed my external armor of giant wide leg pants, yellow work boots, and mens' XL shirts, and start wearing jeans that fit and shirts that fit too, sneakers and such. He got me to look around at the world instead of always looking inward, and he was a master at getting me out of my own head.

I've pulled inside myself pretty hard since last Sunday. I couldn't help it. I felt like someone had carved out my heart and tried to feed it to me. My kids were freaked out. They couldn't understand why Mommy kept crying. Matthew wouldn't get more than six feet away from me, kept petting my head, and Jonah wouldn't leave my lap. I couldn't leave the house. I had people texting me and Facebooking me to see if I was okay - thank you Betina, Lopp, and Pepe - and I replied through this fucking haze of burnt smoggy pain. I wanted to try to comfort everyone else who loved him, and there were so many people who did, but I just did not have it in me. Nor did I want to be comforted. I just wanted to be left alone with my pain, but at the same time I so greatly appreciated everyone who cared enough to reach out. Sound conflicted? Sorry, that's just the best I could explain it.

I'm not the only one who's lost someone so dear when they were so young. I know that intellectually, and maybe someday that fact will help, but the cold hard truth is that when it happens to you, it feels like you're the only one.

So now, I'm angry. I'm angry that he wasn't back here in Petoskey. I'm angry that he had a headache for so many days and no one made him go into the ER. The autopsy results aren't back yet, so who's to say if it would have helped? But again, who's to say it wouldn't have. I'm angry that he's gone. I still want to fight something, anything. I can't really believe in any kind of God right now. If God is love like everyone keeps saying, and if God wants his message of love spread, then he's a fucking dumbass dipshit for taking someone who spread more love in 24 years than most of his so-called messengers do in a normal lifetime. If God is love, Scotty was the embodiment of that, and now he's gone, and it's not fucking fair. I want to find all those jerks from Westboro Baptist Church and rip their faces from their skulls. I want to find every gay-basher and stomp the shit out of them in my purple Doc Martens. The irrational part of me really just wants to make someone completely hateful hurt as bad as I do. But I know that Scotty wouldn't have wanted that, and so I won't. I'll do what he wanted for me. I'll take care of my little family, and keep in touch better with my bigger family. And I'll keep writing, because these outpourings of what may seem like melodramatic grief are helping to keep me sane, to keep me together. And I'll try to be happy again. I've started laughing again over the past few days, and I've sang a little.

As far as the faith thing, maybe it will resolve, and maybe I won't. I'm not a Christian. I'm not a Catholic. I wear this St. Bridget's medallion as a reminder of my Irish heritage, not for any sort of religious belief. I created my own belief system out of bits and pieces of what felt right, what my heart said, stole concepts like karma and such. I'd dearly love to believe in reincarnation right now. I believe that dreams can give warnings about things that are soon to happen, that they can send messages from your subconscious that you're too preoccupied to pick up otherwise, and that under certain circumstances, they can allow your soon to be departed loved ones to say goodbye. I believe in ghosts - I've seen them. And I believe in the concept of guardian angels. I know Grandpa and Matt and Corey are keeping an eye on me when they can. I draw a lot of my beliefs from the Odawa way of  life, just because that's what I grew up around and what I was exposed to most. I smoke a cigarette when I pray because my prayers are usually directed toward an indistinct force that guides the universe, and the smoke can carry my words with it. I believe that love is a fearsome and wonderful force, capable of miracles, and capable of great destruction at the same time. And I used to believe that everyone's life followed a pattern laid out for them at birth, and that when they were having "good luck," they were just following along with that pattern. There's patterns in everything, if you look close enough.

So will this crisis of faith resolve itself? I don't know. Scotty's death will never make sense to me. Even if these autopsy reports turn up some underlying condition, the overall thing is that it will never make sense. People have had cancer and been told they were terminal, and still survived and managed to go into remission and live for a while. A story in my family is that my aunt's husband was given six months to live when I was six months old, due to leukemia. He's still going strong - he actually outlived my aunt. I could cite hundreds of other examples, but I'm not going to. The point is, if the universe made any sense, if there were any compassion in it, Scotty would still be here. The end.

I'm so very fucking lucky. I've got the hopes of getting my dream job. I've got my health. I've got a lot of people who love me and whom I love in return, and they're the rope I'm clutching to help draw me back out of this black stormy sea of depression. It's treacherous. It's warm, and it's comfortable, because I spent so much of my life there. But I can't go back. I can't do it. I have these two little boys, who most definitely are not angels, but who are wonderful, happy loving little guys, and I can't let my depression scar them. I won't. I've always been good at fighting for other people, and now I guess I'm going to have to fight for myself, so that I don't go under the third time. And like I said, it's lightening up a bit. I'm starting to rally. I can hear him in my head, cheering me on, which makes it hurt worse, but hurt less at the same time, if you can understand that. I can't.


I have the necklace I was planning to give him as a belated Christmas gift when he came home for a visit in the spring. His dear friend Joe is taking me to see him either Thursday or Friday. I'll take the necklace with me. I'll tell him how much I love him again. And maybe it will help make this a little easier and a little less crippling. Or not. Either way, I'll survive.

But god, does it fucking hurt.