So here's how it is.
Twelve hours and a pretty good day later, I'm still not completely sure how I feel about this. Wait, that's a lie. I just feel a lot of things. I keep bouncing back and forth from a sort of bemused "Wow, never expected anyone I knew to do something like that" to "Holy FUCK a guy I knew and liked FUCKING SET HIMSELF ON FIRE."
It's weird. I..do feel grief, even though Steve was not someone I knew enough to keep in contact with after high school. If I saw him on the street, I'd smile and say hi, maybe stop to shoot the shit and see what he was up to depending on where we were both going, but I want to make it clear that while I am feeling rather rocked by this whole situation, this is not a "Angie lost a friend, how very sad for her" situation. Damn...that sounds callous. I don't consider myself someone who really has the right to be a mourner. Save that for the people who loved him. Save that for the mother that he had the decency to get out of the house before he committed his last act. Save it for his twin sister who is left with only one brother. But I do feel pain, and I cared enough to consider him a good guy, an acquaintance I liked, so...at the same time that I need to get smoe of this out of my head, I feel almost embarrassed to speak of this publicly, because it is most assuredly not something bad that happened to me.
So...a few more details. Steve LastNameDeleted was a year younger than me. I know his whole family. His sister I was sort of buddy-buddy with from choir. She did my hair for my solo at senior show and I was always impressed with how good she was. His older brother was in my graduating class and is so fuckin' smart that he got a full ride at some Ivy League place. Intelligence is something Steve had too, though apparently not as much. His father is actually my doctor.
When Mom called, the first thing she told me in this hesitant voice was that Steve McConnell had died. I thought maybe it was a car accident at first. But then she went on. According to my mother, Steve had been having some mental issues and was receiving counseling at the Mill Center, this mental health facility in our town. That's when I knew.
"Did he kill himself?"
"Yes."
His mom brought him home and he asked her to get some McDonald's. Glad he had the decency to get her out of the house. He went back to his room, doused himself with gasoline (and possibly accelerants, not really sure of that point) and ended his life. I don't know if it was with a match or a lighter or what. I don't really want to know. In the end, a lot of their house was damaged. I'm not sure how extensive it was, or if any of it burned down, though I've asked my mother to save the newspaper to save the articles so I can know the facts when I go back for Thanksgiving. I do know that the headline of today's Journal-Tribune was simply "Suicide." Really fucking sensitive there.
I can't stop thinking about what this will do to his family. For some reaosn I thought of how when people are young and first having kids or thinking about having kids, and what they imagine for their lives. They picture the things they will do to raise their kids, the memories they will make. No young parent ever thinks "I will raise a child who will then kill themselves in a raging destructive act." This is what Steve's parents will have to live with. For the rest of their lives, they will have to bear not only the loss of a child but the knowledge that their child ended things himself in such a horribly violent manner. His twin sister will never see her brother again. The person she shared a womb with distanced himself in the most extreme way.
I understand that when it comes to suicide, there's not much use in dissecting motives and asking "Why?" Suicidal people don't think of the people they will hurt, at least not in any meaningful act. It the ultimate selfish act, but the way Steve did it just extended that selfishness. If someone wants to end the pain and nothing more, they don't do it this way. They take pills, they breathe in car exhaust, they even shoot themselves in an unfeeling instant, but they don't choose to die in a blistering, raging inferno that anyone could tell would not be instant death. It's difficult to imagine that Steve was trying to do anything other than spit on the people around him as his last act. As if making the people who loved him lose their son, he also took away a part, if not all, of their home. I couldn't begin to discern what he was thinking but it's hard to interpret it as anything but "I hate you."
I want to yell at him. I want to shake his shoulders and shout "You stupid fuck, how could you hurt your family this way? Maybe you hated yourself but they loved you. Didn't they mean enough to you to at least try and make this less painful for them? How could you? How could you waste everything that you had, everything people admired about you? You fucking idiot!" I want him to be alive so someone can do that.
It's not fair. It's not fair that a good person who was talented, intelligent, nice, and a million other things had to feel this way. It's not fair that the people around him can do nothing but carry the load of their grief. It's not fair that they will never completely understand what drove him to this. It's not fair IT'S NOT FUCKING FAIR. It's not right. It's not right. This should not have happened.
But it did happen. And in the end we ask "Why" because there's not much else to do.