One of my cousins killed himself today.
We weren’t close, by any means. R was older than me—only 7 years, as it turns out, but it always seemed much more.
I didn’t even know that he’d been hospitalized last year—few people did, because that was embarrassing. R told his brother that the voices were telling him to kill his wife and babies, and his brother very wisely had him hospitalized. I always did think C had the best head in that entire branch of the family.
R’s mother had told a few people that R had some “nerve problems.” Everybody assumed he was doing drugs again, so of course, he didn’t get the kind of support he needed and deserved as he was desperately trying to stay clean and sober and drag his ass out of the chasm of hellishly dark depression.
Well, there you go. That’s what happens when you’re too fucking embarrassed to admit that somebody has a mental illness to openly support him and get the family to rally around him. His sister-in-law got better treatment when she had leukemia, now didn’t she—even though she and C were divorced?
Dammit.
I’m sorry, R. I would have been there, had I heard a hint of it, but I never did.
R leaves a wife, K, and two children (10 and 6). K (and, it seems, the kids) found R when they got home this afternoon. I don’t know when the funeral will be yet, but I plan to attend. It’ll be in Alabama, but we don’t know which end of the state it’ll be in (north, where my family is, or south, where they were living).
