When you wish someone would just die already

He’s dead now, and given the right set of circumstances, I might have killed him myself. I even thought about how I would do it — and with his endless list of vices, it wouldn’t have been hard. I considered starvation because he scarcely ate food with nutrients anyway, but I had no interest in torturing him; he’d tortured himself enough to fill the quota.

I’d thought about sending over enough alcohol to drown him out or doing research as to what pill would do the trick. He loved pills. And alcohol. And God only knows what else. But he died without my help.

Raised in a middle-to-upper income family in a beautiful home near the beach in Fort Lauderdale, Fl., my grandparents afforded my mother and uncle every opportunity financially and educationally. They were heavily involved in one of the largest churches in town, prominent community members, hard workers, well-liked, polished. 

But, behind closed doors, my grandfather was a terrifyingly-abusive person. And as I understand it, my uncle took the brunt of the beatings. 

I did not grow up in a scary house. I had the Norman Rockwell of childhoods. I will not pretend to understand what it does to a person when they are physically assaulted and mentally abused for the better part of two decades. Couple that with an early introduction to drugs and alcohol, I suppose he didn’t really stand a chance at anything “normal”. It twisted him into something mean and craven and suspicious. He assumed the worst in everyone, talked of nothing but the ills of the world and how put-upon he had always been.

But then I see my mother, and I see the abundance of beautiful “normal” she created in the world. I suppose it’s internal — chemical really — to evolve beyond the hand the world dealt you. She took from that horror a strength to just get out and rise above. He didn’t have that.

His true weakness, in the end, was his talent. My God, the talent. But it’s ultimately what killed him.

To understand this, gentle reader, you must understand where I’m coming from. I am the product of two world-class musicians, generation over generation. I’m not a musical rube. When I say he was talented, I tell you this from a place of exposure and education and practice in the field. Not to boast, but my family has musical talent pouring out its ears, and infuriatingly, it’s possible that he was the best of us. 

I say this, of course, having never witnessed his true potential. No one ever got to see what he could have been.

He was a percussionist, a vocalist, a pianist. He was one of those guys who could pick up any instrument and — within an hour or so — play it better than most. You’d think my grandfather slamming my uncle’s head through a bass drum when he was 15 would be enough to derail him, but it didn’t. He went on to pursue a degree in music education and graduated summa cum laude. He was 6’2” and dashing, smart and funny. He toured the world as a drummer in both symphonic orchestras and rock bands. 

“He was 58 years old when my grandmother moved him in with her so she could save him. She lived only seven houses down from my parents, and it’s a decision that would forever alter our family dynamic.”

But the drinking never stopped. The drugs were celebrated in his circles. I imagine he tried most of them, too. In the end, when his medical issues had taken over, he embraced the easy-to-obtain pills over injectables or snortables. 

And when the rock band life dried up for him in the early 1990s, he just spiraled into the worst of himself. He bragged for thirty years about evading taxes and never having paid a bill in his life. He mooched off my grandmother, mooched off my grandfather, used friends and family; endlessly whining, always job-hopping, and couch surfing. It was 25 years of shallow, pitiful self-destruction.

Yet when he arrived for Thanksgiving one year, broken and disheveled, wreaking of stale cigarettes and cheap alcohol — after years of leading what must have been the most pitiable life — he devolved into the most unnerving, obscene tantrum when he realized my mother had no fresh lemon for the iced tea.

I suppose even vagabonds have standards.

He was 58 years old when my grandmother moved him in with her so she could save him. She lived only seven houses down from my parents, and it’s a decision that would forever alter our family dynamic.

Her guilt had contorted her into his biggest enabler. And we watched and endured and grew embittered, spending hours in hospitals as he bit back at nurses and threw tantrums and threw bedpans and hollered out obscenities and ebbed and flowed through the extremes of a body in a perpetual state of detox. 

He spent every waking hour annoyed by anyone who tried to help him — unless he needed assistance trying to get money from the government. Then he would whine, yell, and scream at my mother to help him because he was desperate for disability funding to feed his prescription drug habits. It would go on like this for four years.

Sixty-two years old, living with his mother, high on smuggled or prescribed pills, addicted to his oxygen tank, he fell asleep and never woke up. 

There’s a piece of this story I cannot tell because it absolutely is not mine to tell. But I leave you with this: there were decisions he made in his youth that compromised my mother’s childhood. When she finally, at the age of 56, chose to confront him about that chapter of their history, he set off in a series of denials and misrememberings, and then fell asleep when the discussion no longer interested him.

I have never grieved his passing. I spent too many years grieving the gifts he threw away and the relationships he destroyed. I’m so glad he’s dead.