Suicide Awareness/Prevention PoetryWith Author's Commentary NotesA Poem by Marvin Thomas Cox-Flynn de Graham True life events that I share in hopes that, perhaps, doing so may save a life ... Suicide Awareness/Prevention Poetry With Author's Commentary Notes:
Calmly Comes Clarity:
A Tribute's Memorial For My Friend Andy G
Written By Marvin Thomas Cox-Flynn de Graham Copyright © 2011 Marvin Thomas Cox DBA: Marvin Thomas Cox-Flynn de Graham All Rights Reserved
Genocide! Fratricide! Patricide! Serial killer! Self suicide! Those I love chained by my side! No humbling nor amount of pride will ever stem the awesome tide, or set them free from this ride, -- as long as I draw breath!
Need this clanging rhyme of mine make a lick of sense in time, word after word all in a line, poorly written or mighty fine? Could this indeed be a sign -- Of impending death!
What cost could be so great? Not speaking here of fortune's fate, but of those whom to emancipate, to set free before it is too late, while opportunity lies at the gate -- And I yet have breath!
Hold not my evils against my kin, put a smile on my wife's face again! Bless my kids with many friends, Successful lives without end! Allow their wounded hearts to mend -- Long after my death!
____________
AUTHOR'S PERSONAL NOTE:
In reference to the above piece of most Dark Poetry, please know and understand: I do not glorify, advocate, nor condone the act of self-murder, known as Suicide. Allow me tell you an all too true and real life story that, I hope, will explain my many reasons of why I fervently attest that no Human Being -- with their entire life ahead of them, no matter their age of young or old -- should choose to die by their own hand, as per detailed just below.
In addition, please also know that memorial pieces are most always written out of hindsight's arrival of grasping and understanding realities that we, simply, failed to comprehend in that way back when of before someone, whom we truly cared for, up and died via that singularly defining act -- which takes no prisoners, gives no pardon, or quarter's clemency -- called Suicide:
Many years ago, I had a good friend, named Andy G. -- his last name withheld for obvious reasons. Andy had lived a rough and tough life, from childhood to manhood, to spending some time in the State Joint, to marrying a beautiful girl that he was, absolutely, crazy about, and the result had been that of a couple of beautiful children -- a boy and a girl.
Andy was what we men tend to call a Best Friend. He was also one of the meanest, toughest, guys I have ever chanced to meet, much less become good friends with, within the entirety of my life, to this very day of my current existence at age 69 -- as an old fart from Smalltown, West Texas.
Andy was also one of the sweetest and kindest guys I have ever known. Problem was, life seldom allowed Andy the option or opportunity to be sweet, or kind, to live his life as that truly gentle hearted Andy that I had come to know over a great number of years.
As a result, Andy had problems. To attempt to pinpoint precisely what, exactly, I cannot say, be they that of mental issues, excess baggage carried over from his childhood, or the reality that, upon many a drunken night together, he had shared with me that he had been forced to take the lives of unmentionable others for the sake of his own survival -- acts of self preservation which continued to haunt and plague him each and every single day of is life -- acts of simply wanting to see another day of life that had permeated his relationship with his wonderful wife to that point to where she could no longer deal with his guilt and memory laden ghosts of a past that could never be changed or undone. Truth be known, it was the twenty four hour a day presence of those ghostly memories which had served to destroy his marriage, and that despite his fervently passionate love for his wife and children.
Yeah, hindsight. Now, far too late, I understand that hindsight ain't worth a tinker's damn in saving a friend's life in that yesterday, you'll never forget, nor cease to regret. Hindsight. What a f****n' crock of s**t!
Despite of his inner demons, Andy was the kind of guy whom you just naturally knew was good to have by your side in a fight with more than one guy as an adversary who decided that he wanted to kick the living s**t outta your a*s. Andy loved playing the odds, and he always won, because -- throughout his life -- there had never been any other choice of selection: Life had not given Andy the choice of choosing to win, or to give up and lose. Survival demanded he win, and never give up, or give in.
Over the years, Andy had stepped in, personally, to insure that, if I got into a fight, only one guy and one guy alone, would undertake to kick my little a*s -- and that without any friend's or buddies' assistance: Andy, with his bright blue Spaniard eyes, and likable face, that caused guys, looking for trouble, to mistakenly, misjudge, and underestimate the man that he really and truly was behind those gentle and kind eyes, and that friendly, wanna like and get along with everybody, face.
I had witnessed Andy get the s**t beat out of him by two to three guys -- damn fools who didn't know the merciless adversary that Andy instantly turned into when cornered or faced with possible defeat. The smirks and taunting jeers of, “Get up B***h,” would suddenly turn to stone cold silence, as Andy struggled to his feet to merely wipe the blood from his eyes and mouth with his shirtsleeve and face them eye to eye with a most sinister of smiles painted upon his beaten, battered and bloodied face -- his eyes become cool, calm, and quite dead and empty.
Whenever that undesired but provoked transformation took place, Andy would not stop beating on his opponent(s) until they were unconscious -- or some crazed idiot like me was willing to chance taking a jaw breaking punch in trying to pull him off of whoever the hell it was that he had beaten knocked-out senseless -- as though they were paying the tab of all the pain and misery he had suffered throughout the entirety of his life, forced to do things that he really had no wish to do -- and in that moment, brother, it was one hellish payday for those on the receiving end of Andy's sledge-hammer fists of pent up rage at a life that had never done anything to help him, save forcing him to survive -- or else. For, there are things in this life far worse than any man's death.
Yeah, damn hindsight again. I should've seen it coming, but I didn't. I was so busy looking up to Andy that I never looked down and around to see the onslaught of inner demons which beset him without reprieve. Not that I didn't believe him, but I sorta wanted to believe that he was just bullshittin' me a little, because he could. I guess I couldn't fathom the notion that a guy as tough as he was could actually possess -- weakness. I was wrong. I failed to take into account that those very invisible inner demons had recently destroyed his marriage. What's more, I never considered that, just maybe, Andy looked up to me (not sayin' he did, but) -- a scrawny skinny-a*s wiry little s**t, who totally lacked the sense to know when to back down, come an a*s whippin', or not. Life had taught me, as with Andy, that backing down hurt far worse on the inside than any beating a man could give you on the outside. I guess that was why Andy and I had hit it off as friends: We both understood that the only true pain that can hurt any man, comes from within his wounded and battered heart.
And, then, came that one night that changed everything:
It
was a beautiful moonlit night, when Andy and I were returning from a
long night of carousing -- Andy having split the sheets with his wife
about a year before -- as he asked me to pull over so he could take a
whiz. On his side of the road, there was a freshly plowed cotton
field. So, Andy slowly made his drunk-a*s way from the car, and
hobbled into the freshly plowed midst of the dirt clod laden cotton
field, while I sat listening to music, sipping quietly on my
open-container beer.
I
had known for several years that Andy toted a gun, but had never seen
it, had never known him to pull a gun on anyone, or threaten to,
since I had first met him years ago -- much less pull his own damn
pistol and point it at himself. It was just too f****n' much to
believe.
Yep,
hindsight was still then a word that I had never heard nor ever
known before, much less having come to understand as understood, and
it had not, as yet, made its prying-eye's opening debut into my life
of that very night, though I was far too stupid to honestly realize
it -- that dumb-a*s friend of Andy's who had it all figured out,
except for how to deal with any thought of any son of a b***h wanting
to off his own damn self, and, simply, call it Suicide.
After that... A dead silence permeated the interior of the car like a hovering, ever lingering, rotten fart that you never heard eased out, damn sure could not see, but could almost taste, as the air in the car had become so thick and saturated with emotions that you could almost cut it with a knife. Music played on unnoticeably from the radio. I was off in another world that I never imagined would ever have come to exist -- that Reality-TV-like world of being forced to show tough love to a friend who was a helluva tougher than my sorry a*s. Andy? I guess he was somewheres else too.
Our little get together fun nights of drunken comradery were obviously over, at least, for a while. Andy had moved out of town, after he and his wife had split up. It just so happened that I worked in the very town he had moved to, thus our more than ample opportunities of drunken revelry now gone south of culminating in this very night, done gone wrong.
Neither of us spoke a word as I drove Andy home. It was getting late, and I had a forty mile drive to negotiate, if I hoped to get home safely, and without being pulled over for DWI. I wanted to tell Andy that I was sorry for all that I had said. Except, I wasn't -- at the time. Andy simply stepped out of the car, slammed the door shut, and walked away.
After that night, I didn't hear a word from Andy, not even a phone call. I assumed he was pissed off at me. Usually, I would stop by his place every evening, after work, and have a beer with him before heading back to Smalltown. Now, I wish I had.
Days turned into weeks, and still not a word from Andy. I was too stubborn to drop by his place. I did call one afternoon from work, but got no answer. I just up and assumed that he was home, and didn't want to talk to me.
A few weeks later, I did get a call, but not from Andy. It was Andy's wife. A few of his friends had called asking if she had spoken with Andy recently, because his pickup wasn't at his house, and no one had seen him for days. She called me, because she knew that Andy and I were close friends. What she did not know, was about that night, and that we had seen or spoken to each other since that night. I didn't have the guts to tell her what had taken place, and what I had told her husband in alcohol saturated anger. She loved Andy. She just didn't know how to help him, anymore. Little did she know that I was as clueless as she. Little did I know just how truly clueless I was a the time.
A few days later, the authorities found Andy's pickup. Andy was seated in the front-seat driver's side, the cab filled with empty beer cans, with an open beer in his lap. Andy was slumped over the steering wheel, a self-inflicted bullet wound in his temple that had blown a large hole in the driver's side window as it exited his skull, with blood and brain matter spattered over the entire driver's side of the pickup, his 9mm pistol lay just below him in the floorboard, as his dead hand had relaxed and released its death grip upon the very gun which had assisted him in murdering himself.
F****n' Hindsight is totally worthless s**t as a -- looking back at that which can never be changed -- perspective, when you hadn't come to realize that you really were a scrawny skinny-a*s wiry little s**t, a s**t who had risen to that insensitive plane of taking an a*s whippin', rather than accept that your best friend was in trouble and needed your help most desperately, and you had failed him as a friend. Goddammit to hell! I didn't even stick around long enough that night, to even see if he had tossed his gun or not -- the very gun he later used to take his own life.
It had all come crashing and rushing in, that utter simplicity which I had failed to see, because I was too macho man mind blinded: Andy didn't really want me to kill him. Andy wanted me to know just, exactly, what had been going around in his head for a long time before that night, when instead of asking him what was up and why, and listening, I had lit into him about daring to ask me, his friend, to kill him. He was reaching out. He was allowing me to witness a scenario that he had probably played out in his head as pleasant emotional pain relieving fantasies (suicidal-ideation1), time and time again, maybe even going through failed attempts, as dress rehearsals, of killing himself, over and over again.
Any true friend, would have called the Suicide Prevention Hotline, but not me. That thought never entered my pea-sized mind. Any true friend could have stopped by the next morning, or called, to make sure that Andy was okay. A true friend would have apologized for failing to understand what he was going through. A true friend would have been there for a true friend, a friend that obviously trusted me, and had no one else to turn to. But, I was to s**t-a*s dumb to see that reality. I see it now, far too f****n' late to do Andy any good.
Hindsight? Hindsight shouts to the skies above that I was too f****n' stupid to grasp any concept of a most trustworthy and dependable notion of a true friend who was in trouble, who needed my help at a time in his life that required me to be that stronger man, a man whom I, to this day, have never felt that I am, but should have been for a truest of best friends, when it counted the very most of all him as a friend, as a fellow Human Being. And so, I failed a true friend in his time of direst need -- and selfishly so, and that is just the way it is, and, like Suicide, it can never be changed or undone.
Andy often spoken, in drunken reverie, of needy to find clarity in his life. Because, I never took the time to sit down and talk with him, I shall never know what he meant by finding clarity. I can only assume that he believed that he had found clarity in that very moment when he pulled the trigger on the gun that ended his life, and gave him that false clarity he so avidly had sought after -- clarity which I have scrawled to page as Calmly Comes Clarity, a piece of sheer mindless madness that best describes the reality that I shall never know the reasons of why he killed himself. And, I guess I never shall.
Andy G was but the first of two people that I have known, people whom I truly cared about, who chose Suicide over living.
Suicide is an irreversible mistake from which there is no returning, no second chances, no coming back.
If you (or someone you known are pondering Suicide, entertaining suicidal ideations of how you will end your own life as a solution to your inner emotional pain, get help NOW! Before it is too late.
(Written December 25th, 2011�" Andy G Tribute & Memorial Written March 4th, 2024) 1 Suicidal-Ideations -- “Suicidal ideations (SI), often called suicidal thoughts or ideas, is a broad term used to describe a range of contemplations, wishes, and preoccupations with death and suicide.” https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33351435/ © 2024 Marvin Thomas Cox-Flynn de GrahamReviews
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2 Reviews Added on March 5, 2024 Last Updated on March 6, 2024 Tags: Life, Death, Suicide, Suicidal-Ideation, Relationships, Best-Friends, Profanity Author
Marvin Thomas Cox-Flynn de GrahamSmalltown, TXAbout“Hello! Welcome to my profile page. As a Creative Writer, I pen a variety of material that ranges from piss poor attempts at Poetry, to morbidly Dark Fiction, to investigative, in depth, re.. more..Writing |
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