Day 6 Oh Donny Me Boy

Whenever I take time to visit Memorial Gardens, my day goes a bit better—except today.  This morning I met a woman I’ve been seeing for the last couple of days, visiting one of the newer resting sites—one without a stone pillow skillfully carved with names and dates and appropriate decorations.

I finished picking up some broken branches which had come down during yesterday’s wind and headed for her.  The day before I missed talking to her by a dozen feet; so I wasn’t going to make the same mistake by hesitating. 

When I boldly approached, she glanced up, grey eyes filled with grey grief which dampened tired, suddenly aging features.  She looked as if she hadn’t slept for quite a while.

I impertinently offered the sole condolence a stranger can to another—I simply asked if she would like a hug.  We embraced as if we had known each other for years.  She clung with such a profound need it took my breath away.

With a small amount of prompting she disconsolately informed me this newly-made bed composed of uneven squares of sod struggling to grow as best it could in such a desert climate belonged to her son “Donny.”  I muttered the expected reply.   She continued to answer my meddlesome questions.

Donny had been the 30 year-old father of two daughters.  He loved his mother, his children with a tender heart, but with such passion which tended rule his actions—like choosing to fall in love with an unfaithful wife who took advantage of his gentle adoration, until one night he caught her and her elicit partner in the act.  Such passionate men as Donny tend to give into impulsive actions, not thinking, not analyzing, not projecting consequences into future situations—consequences which would affect all the important people in his life—affect the true and loyal—particularly a dear mother and children.

I could almost hear him say as he gunned the car’s engine, racing from the mocking, ironically composed scene, blinded by tears of throbbing unhappiness which had habitually burned his face, “I’ll show her!”

“The police think he killed himself,” his desperate mother explained.  “They’re still investigating.”

When police officers tell family members this, they are really saying they pretty-much know what happened; it’s just a matter of how long it will take to get the report typed and sent in triplicate from the coroner’s office, stapled to another report from the investigating officer who finally intra-office mails it to the desk of one of dozens of city attorneys, who may or may not get around to tell this poor woman her son did take his own life.  Who in the hell wants to say this sort of thing to a mother who comes every day to the garden to sit next to Donny’s eternal resting place crying over the what-ifs, the if-onlys, and the might-have-beens.

The situation is a ubiquitous epic, an operatic tragic plot told for centuries.  I’ve read their out-comes in books or even felt the suicide wandered from loved one to loved one, begging them to forgive him for that one, stupid, impulsive act which was meant to solve one problem but ended up creating a hundred unintended ones.

These spirits do not rest easy in their coffin-covered beds.  They spend much of their energy going from a family member, a friend or a child, trying to explain that they never meant to hurt them—he was either so tired of the pain dying seemed to be the logical solution, or he did it to hurt someone else entirely.

This never works.  When a person does some act in the hope of cursing his adversary, he mistakenly believes she will beg forgiveness, will realize the pain and turmoil she caused and will plead for mercy from the torment her soul is wracked with.

One hundred percent of the time it is the man shaking a fist at heaven, cursing an unfaithful spouse, an unfeeling boss, or a tormenting neighbor who is the only one feeling the pain.  The opposite party is always oblivious, never realizing the ache of the situation, or (and this is worse) she knows exactly what she is doing and revels in the agony she has created as carefully as a master chef has conjured up a once in a life-time feast.

I’m sure Donny knows this—but now is too late.  Such enlightenment always comes too late.  That’s why suicide is life’s pathetic tragedy—why so many operas, plays, and novels center plots on these situations.  Why audiences come away with damp eyes, the arrogant-and-simple minded members  saying with worldly superiority—“I’d never be that foolish.  I’d have shot the b---- and that would have ended that story right there and then.”

What a piece of work is man—I mean all of us really.