Grief and guilt can destroy you. I learned that the hard way, but by no means did it happen immediately. Entirely too many things occurred one after another before my sorrow ever really had time to surface. By then, it had built up so much pressure inside that it was more akin to blowout than release.
When someone dies, one of the worst feelings is knowing that you're only going to see them that one last time. Not that you really do. When you're sitting in that funeral home, you're only viewing a shell that once held a soul. But you look anyway, because all that's left after that are faded photographs, a dimming memory, and your dreams (or nightmares, if you aren't lucky). It's the life cycle's only true goodbye. The final one.
The first real day of my life as one of three sons began with me arriving on a drilling rig in the Green Canyon sector of the Gulf. I'd always worked on the smaller workover rigs, and I'd gone out the previous hitch as part of a skeleton crew. They'd wanted to make sure I was up to speed on the holding tanks and my pumps. No problem. You just trace your lines as needed until you have the system by heart. Then there was the derrick. Not only was the pipe 2" larger in diameter, a stand was also 30-ish feet taller. When you're handling it at that height, there's the bowing to contend with. It's trickier, so more often than not a winch is used instead of handling it with a rope. I'd gone home nearly three weeks before adequately prepared for the kickoff of this job.
There was only one problem now, albeit a major one. That briefing had occurred in another life. Now drilling operations were underway. I had to learn everything on the run. The frustration at not understanding my job blended with my sorrow and yielded poisonous results. I began to lose control of an emotion that I hadn't succumbed to in nearly 15 years: that of anger.
Before the two-week hitch was over, I was called into the Rig Manager's office to address my issues. He told me that I needed to reign my emotions in for my own safety and that of my crew. He wasn't beyond giving me a chance to do better, but insisted that my brother would have wanted me to move on.
My brother hasn't been gone two weeks and you want me to get over it?!? How could you be such an asshole? I screamed on the inside.
Nights were no different. The seventh and (at the time) final Dark Tower book had been released six days prior to the accident. I'd waited so long for it that I'd read the entirety of it's 800+ pages in less than two days. No matter, though. It - along with nearly every other bit of information I'd absorbed over the years - was gone. I took the series to work with me so I could experience it (once again) for the very first time. For those of you who aren't in the know, the story's protagonists only deal in lead. I saw each death that occurred through a new set of eyes. Every loss pierced me deeply.
Unfortunately, torturing my already raw emotions with some book was the least of my worries.
During the week leading up to the funeral, I'd sworn to stay closer to family than I'd previously done. Most of that agonizing time was spent visiting family and leaning on one another for support. I decided once offshore to call them as much as my phone privileges would allow. I talked to several of my aunts, Yale & Vicki, my brothers, my dad...
And then I called Mom. I expected what we were all grasping at straws for. You can call it comfort, or support, or just fill in the blank. It doesn't matter in the grand scheme, because I got none of those things.
What I got was fury.
She came right out and told me that she was reserving a large part of the blame for me, because I should have put my foot down. I should have controlled my wife. So what if I hadn't been there. I should have done something.
"Don't you see that if she hadn't had him arrested when he came to get Jane, he would have been on the boat that night? And regardless, his license wouldn't have gotten suspended. He'd have been driving his truck. It's too late now, but I still have to lay part of the blame on you. YOU should have stopped her!"
Needless to say, I began to fear telephone calls a little. I don't know what I was more afraid of, though - bad news or the accusatory finger being pointed.
It isn't very hard to begin blaming yourself. Another step down the ladder, and you start to think it would have been easier had it been you. I began to think of situations that could have been fatal to me. The head injuries during my childhood; the car that had hit me in front of the student parking lot when I was in the fourth grade; the van that had nearly run over me at the shoe store across from the high school during my senior year (damn, that school was pretty hazardous to my health!); the time I was coming down the hallway and Michael - barely old enough to walk - had Mom's .22 pointed at me.
Gun. Shit.
Recently I'd gone to grease the crown block, some 200 feet above the main deck. It's fairly safe on top. The entry hatch closes, and the sides are enclosed by handrails. Getting to the snatch blocks for the tongs and winches on the underside was an entirely different story. You had to tie a lanyard to a steel rod that had been welded overhead, then walk out onto a crossbeam. The beams were extremely slippery with excess grease spillage. After doing my business with the grease gun, I turned to leave and discovered that my lanyard was frozen in the open position. It had come off with ease, and was hanging uselessly behind my back. One slip and I'd have fallen all the way to the steel deck below. The people below me looked roughly the size of action figures. Would they have gone into hysterics when my body exploded on contact? I would have, had I been in their shoes.
All of that to say that death - that senseless, tragic, final machinery - began to cloud all cohesive thought. My mind was crumbling.
Since early adolescence I'd written hundreds of poems, a handfull of short stories, a novel that I never showed to anyone, and several essays (one traced the roots of punk rock). I might've had a small glimmer that I needed to write about what had happened to us, but I slammed the doors on such a notion and ignored it. I didn't write one original thought for years.
I met my brother and played music from time to time. One night we brought acoustic guitars to the mausoleum, then played until the sun came up. But for the most part it was unsatifying to me. That sort of release seemed barred as well.
One thing we all became very passionately dedicated to was visiting Michael. Dad would stop by on the way to work. During the first few weeks, I'd more often than not run into someone at the cemetary. More condolences (or someone pointing a finger and screaming "J'accuse!" - hmmm, how prophetic) was the last thing I needed. In record time, I was coming after dark. Soon, I began drinking when I'd get there. See, we all vowed to celebrate and remember his life each and every day that we had left. We'd visit daily, and go to the cross at least once a week. We kept the grass cut so the Parish Rec Department wouldn't knock it down with their bushhogs.
It was a way for us to carry a torch, but for me it was also penance. It's a terrible thing to have to do this and live with the fact that your own blood relative went to the grave estranged from you.
To begin to hate yourself for your inaction.
I stayed busy. Yale called one day to see if I could meet him at an old dock. One deckhand had quit, and the other one had gotten sick. He had a net full of mullet, and the sun was beating down. I drove to Buras, helped clean the net, then Yale saw fish and made another set right outside of the cut. We loaded them in the back of two trucks and raced to Empire to sell them. I wound up fishing with him every night I was home for the next month or so.
It was a strange time for us. Alongside the usual adrenaline rush (when we'd suddenly have the boat flattened out with fish) & the frustration (when we'd be stuck, or have a breakdown of some sort) was the grief. They had been so close that they were more brothers than they were cousins. We spoke of him when we were out on the water. How he would have been working alongside us. But to me he really was. When we were side-by-side pulling a net with several pounds of fish onto the back of the boat, we could feel another set of arms lifting the load. Sometimes we'd tie up at a dock, put on our slicker suits to keep the chill and the damp out, then take a nap while we waited for the moon to rise. Once again, it felt like he was lying there beside us. No matter what was going on, his presence was strong.
At the turn of midnight on New Year's, as we all sat in the Other Place (the old Balliviero's. My aunt had rented it and took up managing a second club) merrymaking, I couldn't help but notice how Tammy & Joseph looked at my brother and I as we screamed our triumph at the worst year ever being over. It's something I remembered with such bewilderment a few months later, when it became apparent that 2005 was the worst year for them.
Tammy was married to my wife's uncle at one time, so they were family. When we first started dating, she would sometimes stay there to babysit her younger cousins. Tammy took an instant liking to me and I was welcome to come over as well. I watched her children grow up, just as she watched us grow up. She was a surrogate mother to a lot of us during our teens and early twenties.
One night in early March, Tammy was shopping in New Orleans. She called home to tell Joseph that she'd be there in a few hours. He said that was fine. He was picking at his zits, then he was going to take a bath, and relax until she got home.
We had gotten the kids into bed and laid down to watch a movie. Fifteen minutes after it started, Tammy called us in hysterics. When she got home, the house was deathly quiet. Maybe she thought he had been too tired to even turn on the tv. When she got into the bedroom, he wasn't in bed. I'm guessing that the bathroom light was still on... because that's where she found Joseph, drowned in the bathtub. I don't know if he merely fell asleep, or took the wrong medication, or someone came. She wasn't in Plaquemines Parish very much after that, and unbeknownst to all of us, we were rapidly running out of time to talk. She did tell us before his funeral that she suspected foul play. His backpack, which contained his licenses, certifications, money, his vitamins, and medications had disappeared. And the Caller I.D. on the home phone had been erased. I don't even know if the matter was ever investigated, because we were nearly out of time for that too.
In the months after Joseph's funeral, I continued the process of trying to heal. Work, while still stressful, was somewhat better. I'd begun to adapt. I only had one week that was particularly hellish.
On the day before I had to go to work, Mom called and asked me to come help her hang a wreath on Michael's headstone. When I got there, it was already up. She rolled her window down and asked me to come talk to her for a few minutes. She was quite visibly upset.
Over the next hour or so, my mother never stopped crying, most of what she said was shouted, and all of it was bitter.
She started with the same song and dance we'd gone through the steps of countless times.
"Do you realize what kind of woman you're married to? She has destroyed our family! If she hadn't had Michael arrested, he wouldn't have had to go to court. He would have been in the bayou with Yale that night. And regardless, his license wouldn't have been suspended. He would have been driving his truck, on the highway."
I tried to interject with something about God's plan - how He alone knows when your appointed time has come, and maybe something would have happened no matter where he had been - but she was having none of it. She quickly went to work on my wife's character.
"You think you know her, but you don't at all."
She proceeded to tell me about things she and Steve had seen, alluding to instances of videotape and pictures. Supposedly my aunt had witnessed some things at a local bar. All pointed to infidelity.
"Michael saw some things, too. But he said, 'I'm not gonna be the one to tell him, Mom. He needs to know, but every time you try to help someone it gets turned back around on you.'
"They really got him good this time. And no one can take it back. You should have stuck by family. When it all boils down to it, she's really just some girl you hooked up with. You can replace a piece of ass any day of the week, but you can't replace your brother! He's gone! It's final. For that I can never forgive her. And neither will you. Your marriage will end... but I'm not going to be the one responsible. I'd hate for it to get turned around on me, too."
For someone who wasn't trying to end my marriage, it seemed like she was trying awfully hard. Needless to say, I went back to the rig in a terrible state of mind. Things got so bad that I nearly got into an altercation with a co-worker. For this I was written up - the first time in my working life. At one point, the rig manager asked if I had ever considered taking time off to deal with my problems.
By this point, my journey of healing had turned into a near-90 degree slide in the opposite direction. I was sinking (but no time to hit rock bottum yet).
We'd had a few minor hurricanes and tropical storms during our lifetime. Nothing like what our parents had gone through as children during Betsy and Camille. So I thought nothing of driving to work as Tropical Storm Cindy came ashore. Besides, I was going to Intracoastal City, far west of the weather.
After landfall, analysis showed that it had in fact been a Category One hurricane. I believed it, too. Man, that weather was nasty!
I drove toward New Orleans through blinding sheets of rain. I don't think I got above 25 mph much (or stopped riding the center line, for that matter). When I got to the GNO toll bridge, I had to take a detour back to Woodlawn Highway. The foot of the bridge was underwater, rendering it impassable. On Woodlawn, trees were down in the road. Inmate laborers were out in the early-A.M. monsoon with chainsaws, moving the debris. I finally got back to 90W, and then the bottom fell out of the sky. There was a traffic light dangling a foot from the road at Manhattan Blvd. Once I got out of Westwego, I saw no other traffic. I crept along at my still sedate 25, hugging the center line. But it was still nearly too fast to see the tree that a tornado had dropped across the highway. Or the next, flung like a torpedo almost completely into the opposite shoulder. This horrific drive didn't end, either. At the St. Charles Parish line, the roads were closed. I crept towards home, back through the same weather. Either from the sideways rain, the patchy flooding, or both, my car was an electrical failure waiting to happen. The idiot panel was glaring an angry orange and red, and the lights and air-conditioning were flickering. I stopped at the gas station just north of the Belle Chasse tunnel (what a leaky venture that always is!) to call my boss and tell him that I couldn't make it.
"It's calm here," he said smugly.
"You're 3 or 4 hours west of me. There are trees down and the roads are flooded. Impassible. My car is fucked. I'll try to get home, then I'll have it looked at by a mechanic tomorrow. I'll have to come out the next day, after the electrical system's dried out."
He accepted, after telling me I'd lose two days worth of pay.
No mechanics were opened the next morning. Almost nothing was. I finally found a hardware store that was just getting set up. The power was still off, but a cash transaction was no problem. I bought electrical cleaner, then unplugged everything and soaked it down. That did the trick, and soon enough I was back at work.
My wife had been watching my downward spiral for nearly a year. Several times she had sent me to doctors, intent on having me discuss my depression. I would come back with sinus meds every time. One day in late August, she told me that she'd had enough. She was coming with me.
"We've both learned to live with the OCD behavior. At least you're still functional with it. But this has got to stop. When you're here, you do nothing but sit around sighing all day and looking through the blinds in paranoia. And the disappearing acts you've been pulling, Mark! I don't know what to tell our kids when they ask me why Daddy jumped in the car and left without saying anything. You're falling apart, and I don't want to have to explain to them later that I did nothing to help you... when you could have been saved."
That's how on Friday, August 26, 2005 I found myself at the Azhar clinic in Buras talking about depression and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. I tried to go into the usual spiel about my sinuses and the allergies (which is very true; this humid climate has always played hell with my respiratory system) and throw the emotional/mental/whatever issues somewhere in the middle. My wife was sitting there listening, so I had to.
"Stop! Let's talk about the depression and we'll come back to your sinus congestion later," said the intern.
(She never did. Fool me twice?)
"OCD, huh?" she continued. "Does any of this sound familiar?"
She opened her mouth, and out poured dozens of little routines, numeric sequences, phobias, tics like cracking your knuckles and picking at every little bump or scratch. All things I'd been doing since I was born.
"I was worse off than you, you know. I would pull my hair out when I'd get nervous. And I was clawing every little blemish into ugly scars. I had to wear socks on my hands for a couple of weeks."
"Well, it's not all bad," I said in my defense. "Although it weirds people initially, they wind up respecting me because my work is meticulous."
"Yes, but this depression you spoke of won't help anyone. Is there anything that's bothering you?"
Then my wife spoke up.
"He lost his brother less than a year ago. What I see happening to him is terrifying. He has no appetite. He barely sleeps. He gets in the car and leaves without saying anything to us. Sometimes he'll be half an hour. Sometimes all night."
"I'm not doing anything wrong. I'm going to either the cemetery or the cross when I leave."
"Did you say there's a cross?" asked the doctor. "Was it an automobile accident?"
"It happened on a four-wheeler. He used to tell me that he was going. He doesn't talk to anyone anymore."
"Just how bad is this depression, Mark? Do you ever have thoughts about harming yourself? Of dying? Do you ever feel like it should've been you?"
"Oh, you have no idea."
"So you're saying that it wouldn't bother you much if a train came through the side of this building and took you out?"
"I would welcome it. I must admit that sometimes I think about running off the road into a tree or an electrical pole."
"Do you ever think about it when your family is in the car with you?"
"I try not to, but sometimes it comes to mind."
"I'm going to tell you what happened to me. I tried to take my own life. I wound up being hospitalized, and they tried several different medicines on me. Once they figured out exactly what I needed, I've seen nothing but improvement. Here's what I think: If taking a pill every day will make me function normally, then so be it. I'll pop pills.
"I'd like to write you a prescription for Zoloft. I also want you to get in touch with the Parish Mental Health Unit. If you feel comfortable talking to me, I'll be opening my own practice in Belle Chasse this winter. But get in their system for now. My other advice to you is this. Start eating right. To help you sleep, I'll give you Lunesta. It's the newest sleep-aid on the market. One other thing that helps with depression is to get some sunlight. Once a day, I want you to go sit outside for half an hour and relax with a cool drink in your hand. Preferably not alcohol, but I'm not exactly forbidding a little."
She wished me well and we headed home, stopping to fill the medicine on the way. My wife objected to the sleeping pills, so we left them alone.
I never made it to the Plaquemines Parish Health Unit, and I never saw that young doctor again. That night, we sat down to watch the weather and got a shock. The 11th named storm of the year, a small tropical storm named Katrina, had made landfall in South Florida a day or so previously. Everyone wrote it off then, but I guess all the swampland in the Everglades did nothing to weaken it. It became a hurricane while on shore, had intensified quickly, and now covered almost the entire Gulf of Mexico.
I have never, before or since, seen meteorologist Bob Breck look so grim. He traced a route straight through the southern end of Plaquemines Parish and said, "Things don't look so good for Buras."
We started packing our pictures, medical records, and 5 days or so worth of clothing the next morning. Shortly after lunch, my wife called her father in Empire to see if he was preparing for evacuation. He told her that he was sitting outside, enjoying the view.
"You know your lungs can't handle the smoke from the pogie plant. Why are you sitting out there?"
"You should come have a look, too, because you're never going to see it again."
So we went over and talked to him. He hadn't left for a storm since the 60's. This man, who had laughed as tornados destroyed the boat sheds at the foot of the Empire bridge during Ivan the previous year, told us that he had every intention of leaving. He could always read the weather. He'd walk outside and KNOW that it was time to go shrimping. He'd been expecting the total destruction of our community all year long.
He called us the next morning at dawn.
"Are you guys packed yet? We need to leave now!"
My wife turned to me.
"As sick as my daddy is, he's up and moving this early? We need to go, Mark!"
My Camry was already loaded down with boxes, luggage, and water. We put all the frozen goods we could fit into the ice chest and somehow made room in the trunk.
We woke up the children and asked them to pick a few of their favorite toys. Their reaction was the clearest indication of how we'd done as parents.
My daughter looked up at me and said, "Daddy, we've been talking about it, and we don't want to bring any toys. We want to bring our cats instead."
(Talk about making a person cry! - which is exactly what a friend of mine did when I tried to tell her about this last year. She wouldn't even let me finish.)
So we narrowed it down to which cats were coming. My wife was a cat person her entire life. She always had at least one. Hell, at one point she had 22! That day there were 13. We narrowed it down to 6, but while she was inside grabbing something she'd forgotten, my daughter started crying for our long-haired tabby, Sassy.
"Uncle Cody will never forgive us if we leave her."
I'd been wrapped around her finger from the moment she was born, so I snuck Sassy into one of the cardboard boxes we had taped them inside of after making breather holes. We had to leave the rest of them outside so they would have at least a fighting chance of swimming to safety.
I stopped at my dad's house to see if he was ready to go. He told me that he was staying.
"I have both vehicles loaded down. If it looks like it's going to get bad, we'll get some gas and get out."
"Everything's going to be closed. How are you going to fuel up? You'll be stranded. Is it a money issue?"
"Well... I have twelve dollars, but I'm not going to spend it unless I'm forced to."
I looked at his Suburban, my stepmother's car, Jeffrey's car, Cody's...
"Look. Come with us. I'll buy fuel for everyone. I'd rather see you all get out safely."
That's how we all wound up in a 13-person wagon train headed west, to Abbeville.
(My stepbrother, Kevin, and his girlfriend took Carol's car.)
Highway 90 westbound was a parking lot. A trip that normally took me three hours lasted a whopping 13. There were points when I got out of the car and walked around for 15 or 20 minutes. There had been an accident in Morgan City, and once we finally got past there, the traffic began to move a little. As we exited near Houma with a bathroom, a walk for the cats (who had clawed their way out of the boxes long ago. My cat was perched on my shoulder like a parrot for most of the drive), and oil for the leaky Suburban in mind, the first bands of the storm were beginning to inundate us with rain. The weather report on the radio didn't ease our minds either. Hurricane Katrina had just been upgraded to a Category 5.
We didn't choose Abbeville out of any affection for the place. We wound up there because my wife's sister-in-law let us stay at her dad's mobile home. He was a welder, and not due back from a job in Colorado for 6 months.
We had lived Down the Road all our lives, but that was - for the most part - at an end.
