The Great Escape Artist

I vaguely recall being in the Garrett Memorial Hospital chapel room, while my grieving parents were taken down to the morgue to identify my brothers body. I didn't want to exist, I wanted to crawl out of my own skin. Not in that room, not in that hospital, not in that small town, definetly not in my own head. I just didn't want to be me. Hospital staff, family members, friends of mine, friends of my brothers, etc shuffled in and out. I was just there, hazily existing, the conversation around me sounding like Charlie Browns teacher.. 

I finally had a reaction to the news I had heard an hour earlier, but prohibited myself from accepting. I ran outside to the parking lot and threw up the greasy El Lobo's meal I had eaten a couple hours earlier. About the same time my brother was being ejected from the car he was a passenger of, exhaling his last breath, left lying lifeless on a grassy bank, I was sitting in a grimy dive joint inhaling pizza.

Call me crazy, but somehow pizza is still my favorite food group

After I finished dry heaving, I noticed someone smoking, so I bummed a cigarrette. At less than a week away from my 16th birthday I decided to start chain smoking in the parking lot outside the entrance to the hospital. I didn't really care who saw me, as adults, my parents, everyone witnessed it and didn't seem to care either. At that point I think it made them & more importantly myself realize I was alive & breathing as each exhalation of smoke dissipated into the cool air of that April evening 19 years ago.

Upon leaving the hospital & arriving back at our house on Pennington street, I didn't believe anything could ever change this feeling, this all consuming pit in my stomach. A doctor had apparently offered my parents something to help them sleep... any kind of rest was out of the question of even being a possibilty as my mind was spinning out of control. My mom then handed me one, and just like that cigarette I put it in my mouth & swallowed without hesitation. 

I woke up sometime the next morning to the sounds of Spring, robins singing in our yard, the sun shining softly through the blinds of my second story room. I had apparently slept. Was it all just a bad dream? I didn't want to open the door or walk downstairs to find out.. If this nightmare was our reality, I wanted more of those pills. I wanted all the pills and to fall into a coma until the second coming of my older brother could happen.

Elias Black #85 after catching the game winning touchdown. Circa 1995

If reality is the iron shackles that bind us like prisoners being force fed the truth, then I was about to become Houdini. I would liberate myself from any pain, discomfort, & the truth. I remember the wave hitting me as I looked out the window and saw a row of visitors cars parked outside of our house. My mind trying to bend so it could wrap around this concept of death in our immediate family. I wanted to break out. I wound up searching for escape in many forms, but the freedom I found in mind altering substances always worked best. It delivered relief as promised & it was usually instant gratification. 

I have always thought of death to be the ultimate escape. I didn't even believe in a heavenly after life, I just assumed that when you died, it was all over, the pain of living was alleviated. I have been so selfish in my own pain, struggle, & existence, that I began to idolize his death. Not always to the point of being suicidal, but always to the point of being reckless in my escape to where I wouldn't have minded if I had "an accidental overdose" that would allow me to fade into oblivion.

 This being the 19th anniversary since Elias' passing & marks a point at which he has now been dead longer than he was alive at 18 years 7 months young. It is still as surreal today as it was back when I heard the news and the world turned a few shades greyer.

There have been two people close to me in life that have passed away before their time, that I have always looked up to, always admired.... though recently to the point of being jealous that they escaped before life had a chance to chew them up and spit them back out over & over again like it has in my cycles of 

addiction.

I do not have the need to run away today. I can rely on something greater than myself, and I like to think my brother Elias has had a hand in "assisting me" on my path to spiritual enlightenment so to speak. I just have to walk, wade, & sometimes swim through this pain & not escape one day at a time. This is the second anniversary of his death that I have been able to stay clean & sober. I have surrounded myself with friends, my daughter, my mom, and most importantly my recovery. 

Your Loving mother, niece, and brother on this day 4-27-2015