Now what?

Still May 14, 2019

Mom and I went for a drive. She couldn’t sit still and I didn’t want her to be alone. The silence was uneasy and awkward, definitely unusual for us. She drove aimlessly but I knew eventually where we’d end up. At his apartment. She wanted to be where he was last. We wouldn’t be able to get in of course, one had to be buzzed in by an occupant and ours was now in the morgue. Cold. Unseeing. Dead. The coroner told mom we couldn’t see him. Apparently that is something which only happens in the movies and on television. He had been identified by fingerprints, mugshots, and tattoos from his arrest records so there was no need for his body to be viewed.

On top of that, the coroner gently  told her viewing his body was discouraged as the state of decomposition was advanced and no mother should have to see their child in that state unnecessarily. I suppose it was intended to be a kindness, however, in our case all it did was make us picture the worst case scenario. The only description aside from “advanced decomposition “ was his skin was blackened. That made me wonder how long he’d been dead before he’d been found. After driving for about an hour we arrived at Tonys apartment building. 32 Orel Avenue. Not the best area of town, not the absolute worst either. We knocked at the door several times but no one came. Mom wrote a note and stuck it in the door hoping someone would call her, then she walked over to the gas station across the street. I sat in the car in case someone came out of the building. Maybe ten minutes later mom returned with a man who said he knew someone who lived there and would try to get them to answer. They didn’t. But he took moms number and promised he’d get in touch with her as soon as he could and with the apartment managers contact info.

He kept his promise. He texted mom a few hours later with Rocky’s number and said she (Rocky is a chick) was expecting mom’s call. Mom immediately called Rocky and set up a time to go to Tony’s apartment the next day, Tuesday, so we could get some of his personal effects. I couldn’t sleep. Neither could my mom. We talked about things left unsaid, the last times we spoke to him, memories of him as a little boy, silly things he did as a teenager, stuff like that. Still I didn’t cry. Mom teared up a lot. Surely I was numb or in shock, I don’t know. I felt awful for her. I couldn’t imagine losing one of my boys. No one looks at their child while they’re growing up and thinks “they’re going to grow up and be an addict and alcoholic and break the law and totally screw up their lives!”... Of course not.  Parents do the best they can, well, most parents do anyway. They love and nurture and teach their children how to be good people and somewhere along the way something goes wrong. With Tony it happened slowly, I always wondered what was the point of no return. That one thing that changed him forever, irrevocably marking him. I’ll never know. It doesn’t matter now.

I sat beside mom on my couch, listening to her, knowing she needed me to listen until she was all talked out. Then she leaned over, putting her head in my lap as my boys did when they were younger in need of my comfort. All I could do was stroke her hair as I had done with my sons so many years ago, with the knowledge nothing would ever bring her comfort. Obviously she felt it too because she crawled to the floor and curled up into the fetal position and began to weep. I’d never seen her cry like that. I bent over to rub her back, just let her know I was there with her though I shouldn’t have as she moved from her spot on my floor to the end of the couch close to my bookcase, curling her petite frame into a tight ball she’d rock from time to time as her weeping turned to wails. Witnessing this was gut wrenching. Seriously. It nearly made me sick to my stomach. I could only try to understand the depths of despair she was falling through. I hope I never know. I sat there with her like that until after 4:00 am. I certainly couldn’t get up to go to bed with her spiraling in misery. So I sat and she wailed. Until she ran out of tears and her voice box failed her.

Finally she weakly stood and turned the television and lamps off and went downstairs without a word. Since Jamie gets up around 5:30 for work I didn’t want to risk waking him with less than an hour until his alarm went off, so I found a blanket and slept on the couch. That first night was awful. Monday’s really are terrible. I drifted off thinking at least now we knew why Tony didn’t call mom on Mother’s Day.

 

Shall we begin?

Maybe I should start with an introduction? My name is Gretchen, I’m a mother of four sons. Two are out of the house already- Elijah is 22 and Austin is 21. Both live with their girlfriends and are happy. The other two are still in high school. Xavier is 18 and will be a senior this year. Chance is the baby of our family at 16 and will be a junior. Both play football and are in track & field in the spring. My husband, Jamie, and I just celebrated our sixteenth wedding anniversary last week. I collect rocks and books and all sorts of other kitsch which drives Jamie nuts. I’ve written and published a young adult paranormal novel. I crochet (poorly) and cook (well). I lost my job of six and a half years last month and we moved the same week to an apartment to save money. My mom took over our house with the hopes things will change financially for us. None of this is why I’m writing though. I guess I just needed a buffer on that part. So here goes. To get where we need to go, we need to go back to May...

Monday, May 14, 2019 around 6:00 pm (day after Mother’s Day)

I hadn’t been home from work very long and I called the insurance company to file a claim for my youngest sons cell phone. He’d dropped it over the weekend on the sidewalk and the screen shattered.  I wanted a bit of peace and quiet which is difficult to come by with two loud teenagers so I’d gone into my room to deal with Asurion. While on hold I heard the all too familiar sound of the basketball out front, which told me my boys were out of the house waiting for dinner. My mom had moved in with us a few months earlier after she’d sold her house, she was helping out by helping Jamie with dinner when I walked in the front door. I don’t recall now what they were making. Possibly spaghetti. Anyway, still on hold, I heard voices somewhere in the house but didn’t recognize them. Mom called my name. I ignored her. I was on hold after all, I’d handle the broken phone first then see what she needed. A second, then a third time she called my name. She didn’t sound urgent or insistent, just trying to get my attention. I pretended I didn’t hear her. Then Jamie yelled for me, irritated I got up from the bed where I’d been playing a game on my phone while listening to god-awful hold music on speaker to go see what they wanted. The moment I opened my door I heard the representative come on the line and greet me generically. I also saw my husband with his arm around my moms shoulder and two officers standing in front of them at the top of my stairs. 

I apologized to the rep and asked her to hold on, telling her there were cops in my kitchen. My thoughts immediately went to my older sons. Were they okay? Where were they? What was going on? That sickening, heavy ache filled my gut as I numbly stood there waiting for words no mother ever wants to hear. 

With her head buried in Jamie’s chest, mom quietly said, “Tony. He’s dead.”

Not my sons. My brother. 

I lifted the phone to my ear and told the rep I couldn’t talk to her that I’d just been told my brother was dead. She offered condolences and I ended the call. I didn’t cry or tear up. I knew this day would come. I’d prepared myself for this very moment the best way I could. I asked what happened, what they knew, they meaning the cops. 

The female officer said they didn’t know much, only that they were notified by the Columbus PD a little bit ago to come here to make the death notification and that his body had been found by his maintenance man earlier in the day. His body was at the coroner’s office now and it sounded as if he’d been gone a few days. They handed my mom and I each a business card, offered sorry and condolences then they took their leave. I had to go back to my room to call my dad and stepmom, my sister, our sons, aunt, grandma, and my two best friends. In that order. My dad didn’t say much, he thanked me for calling him. I asked him to come up here (he lives almost two hours away) but he refused. My sister cried and howled. Everyone else made sure I was okay. 

While I was calling family, my husband finished dinner and talked with our younger sons, mom got busy calling the coroner’s office and getting information. The police were wrong. His body was found on May 9th. They couldn’t find mom to tell her because she hadn’t updated her drivers license after she’d sold her house. This was just the first screwy thing yet to come. I texted Tonys two ex-girlfriends, one from high school and the other he’d lived with for nearly a decade. I wanted them to hear it from me rather than social media. They were shocked but not surprised at the same time. 

Let me tell you a little about my baby brother. Tony was two years younger than me and when we were little we were your typical siblings- we’d be playing one minute and fighting the next. He was very kind and loved animals. Any type of harm towards women or children bothered him deeply. He failed the third grade because he was too smart for his own good. How does a smart kid fail? He did things like writing everything backwards so the teacher would have to hold his work up to a mirror to read it- he thought it was hysterical his name reversed was Y-Not. As he grew up he olayed baseball and football but hated being told what to do by coaches and didn’t think it was fair when he didn’t get to be the star of the team so he quit. He had good friends however they were all kids who had the same outlook he did, they didn’t care. So he started skipping school, smoking both cigarettes and pot, drinking, skateboarding, and other teenaged shenanigans. 

After barely graduating high school, he promised my mom he’d join the military if she’d allow him one year to do whatever he wanted. She finally relented. So for a year he partied and screwed around, wrecked his car a few times, brought various girls home, blah blah blah, but in April he left for the Air Force. That fall, terrorists attacked our country and in January he was deployed to Saudi Arabia for a year. When he came home, he got a few DUI’s and lost his driving privileges which made his job on base impossible to do. His CO came to him and basically told him his unit was about to be deployed again and since he was a total screw up he could give up everything except for his veteran benefits and get out with a general discharge a year early. Or he could stay in, straighten up, and go back to the Middle East. He couldn’t sign those papers fast enough. 

Before leaving the Air Force, he decided to have an elective procedure where he’d have a local pain block in his spine. The surgery went fine however he wound up contracting necrotizing fasciitis (flesh eating bacteria)  and MRSA at the injection site which nearly killed him. While he was in the military hospital he was given lots of pain killers, but once he left, they refused to give him any more. Only problem with that is her already developed a bit of an addiction to the dilauded and morphine and oxy contin, so when he drove cross country from California to Ohio he was withdrawing and desperately searching for pills. At first he paid street value for them then he met a server at the local steakhouse he’d been working at who suggested he give heroin a shot since it would take care of the pain and was a fraction of the cost. It didn’t take long for his addiction to move from pills to a needle, then nothing else mattered. 

That was 2004. For the next fifteen years my brother used every drug out there as far as we know. Now, he didn’t over dose. That isn’t what killed him. We got the autopsy and toxicology reports five days ago. I’ll go into the findings in a bit. I know they contributed to his death and he was using, the coroner detected numerous drugs in his system, but they weren’t the actual cause of his untimely death at the age of 38. I’ve decided to share his story, my story of a brother, with the hopes someone may see it and get help for themselves or use it to help a loved one, or maybe change the way you view addiction. I’m not sugar coating anything anymore. Tony could be awesome but he could be an ass, scary, and just plain mean too. I love my brother and I’ll always miss my little brother, the one I grew up with, not the man he became. I’m angry. I’m sad. I’m hurt. I’m fucked up. I don’t understand why he couldn’t stop. For himself. For my mom. For my sons. Why didn’t he want to live? I’ll never know. He was the only other person on this entire planet who shared my same DNA and now he’s gone. 

Until next time... 

7/23/19 1:51 am