Dead Friends

Despite the title, I promise not to make this too depressing.  However, I’m back in a hard running mode and this is where my mind has been during every run for a couple weeks.  I promise there will be something useful.

I’ve been thinking about all the funerals I’ve ever been to and realized that the  majority have been for dead friends that barely made it past 30 either because of disease, suicide, or war.  I want to tell you about two:

Duane

Duane was a soft-spoken man who really took care of me when I came to work for him.  He was my boss and friend who suffered from depression for most of his life that he hid quite effectively and was outwardly a very positive and upbeat person.  He had a young family.  He was an amazing drummer.  He was a cool boss who liked to make things fun, and would tell us “this doesn’t have to suck.”  He was right, and I had a blast at that job and had no idea he struggled with depression.

One day Duane felt himself spiraling so went to a local hospital and asked to be admitted and treated for depression.  He had been medicated in the past and that kept him straight, but in this case, the hospital did not treat him and told him to come back if the condition persisted.  He went home and committed suicide that evening.

That was the first funeral I had ever been to, and I remember the priest telling us that Duane had sinned — meaning, I assume, that he was now in Hell.

Steve

Steve was a giant, loyal man who was always pissed off.  He was incredibly intelligent and had one of the sharpest and most fearlessly sarcastic senses of humor that I have ever encountered because he was miserable.  He reported in to my unit on September 11th, 2001 in the middle of DEFCON Delta and we were deployed 1 month early as a result — with no scheduled return date.  We became instant friends as we worked extraordinarily long hours in the same confined space and forged a deep understanding of each other that happens when people suffer together — lots of laughing, bitching, dreaming, and philosophizing.  We worked some intense ops together, and for some reason he always put on the song, “Africa” by Toto looping in the background for hours.  I didn’t mind.

Steve got really, really sick out of nowhere.  A lot of people thought he was malingering because everybody knew how miserable he was and wanted out.  I could see in his eyes it was real, though.  He could barely walk, so was medevac’ed.  With a helicopter hovering overhead I rigged the rescue stretcher that would take him to a hospital, and he stared at me in pain.  I went to signal the helo, but he grabbed my hand in his enormous hand, and I knew he was scared which scared me — I had never seen him like that.  I got close and shouted above the noise that I would see him soon.  Stretcher up.  Tagline removed.  Helo on the horizon.  No more “Africa.”

Steve spent the next 2 years in undiagnosed pain and fell into a deep depression.  He moved to his parents’ home which embarrassed him and often could barely move.  I was deployed all the time, so only kept up with email.  He went through a lot and his writing became deeply introspective and profound.  He talked about the time he served in the Middle East, and he felt a lot of remorse for complaining so much while he was healthy.

He did have periods of improvement and would try to go hunting with his brothers on his good days.  I gave him my Remington 870 Express shotgun because I had given up shooting at birds, and he got a dog as a companion.  One evening he was in a hotel with his brother preparing for a hunting trip and started feeling poorly so he sought the nearest Veteran’s Administration hospital and requested to be admitted.  The VA rejected him and sent him home — again untreated and undiagnosed.  He died that night.

I was so angry with the VA for months that it started to burn me up a bit, and I ultimately had to let it go because I could find no positive resolution.  I realized that the VA is merely a giant bureaucracy that struggles when presented with situations outside the manual and that Steve went untreated mostly out of a systemic failure and a lack of energetic innovation.  I’ve worked in tough bureaucracies and what takes a normal person 15 minutes in the outside takes 3 months on the inside unless somebody is willing to break a whole pile of rules.  Nobody was willing to take the 3 months or break the rules, I guess.  This is a system where  “fault” is impossible and Steve’s death, while perhaps preventable, is simply a passage.  Declaring war on bureaucracy is like declaring war on terror.  It is an ideology with no clear enemy — only agents and believers.  I can find no utility in assigning blame.

My father is a great man, and one of the simplest and most helpful things he ever said to me was, “when somebody asks for help, you help them.”  I remember very clearly when he told me this as a result of Duane’s death.  He was very broken up about the situation, and it’s become a guiding principle for me.

But help is a funny thing to figure out.  Constantly giving somebody what they tell you they need versus finding out what they REALLY need is a serious challenge.  A homeless person on the street needs help that is both immediate and apparent, but the condition that caused homelessness is most likely not going to be unraveled right there on the street.

An artist sometimes  needs help to find inspiration.  An empty person needs help finding meaning.  A garden needs help to thrive and produce.

The core of help is a connection that becomes severed by a factory mentality.  Patients are processed, resources are extracted, products are manufactured, waste is removed.  Do you feel a connection to any of the 10,000 widgets made today?  Can you feel affection for a cost-minimizing, lowest skill level possible process?  I was surprised to find in a military manual just how much money a soldier gets for losing a leg.  There’s a number because an actuary figured out how much a leg, eyesight, or mental instability cost.  While this creates a very efficient system, it fails at everything “undetermined.”

The faceless nature of corporatized “help” doesn’t always yield the intended result.  Institutionalized help feels more like maintenance.  Once life becomes a process that can be written in a manual, we separate from meaning and cognition.  If you’re working with TGIF laborers in a law firm, hospital, restaurant, military unit, or hardware store you’re running the risk of being swept up in a process that consumes its own citizenry then claims, “there’s nothing we could have done.”

There’s nothing that could be done because nobody did anything and it became institutional.  Does this mean I believe those hospitals wanted my friends to die?  Absolutely NOT.  I believe most of those people had every intention of doing the right thing, so how does the wrong thing happen?  How is it that some things suffer while others mend?

So, listen to this cheesy song from 1982 and think about it.  I’ve probably heard it 1000 times.  In this case, there is nothing to be angry about, just remembered.

“I seek to cure what’s deep inside, frightened of this thing that I’ve become.”