Requiem [COMPLETED]

Insert Obvious Foreshadowed Tragedy Here

[TRIGGER WARNING: SUICIDE]

As I lay there unable to sleep, I tried to backtrack, to pinpoint where the chain of calamities had begun. The religion paper wasn't the beginning; it was a symptom that something had started long before and had a long incubation, had gone unseen while it festered.

Our mother's death seemed to be the instigation of all the losses that followed. Her action was the sin by which all subsequent unhappiness and pain could be traced to, the source spring upwelling the floods which rolled through plunging everyone into the flotsam, bashing us on the rocks as heavy debris threatened to jam behind us, trapping us in the undertow of deep eddies. Why did she leave us so dramatically, so absolutely? Why hadn't she loved us enough to keep living? What had we done to lose her love and leave her no reason to go on? Her abandonment was the sign to other adults that we weren't worth the effort, the singal that caused the cascading disappointment we felt with each loss or rejection. Even grandpa, who wanted the best for us, couldn't seem to show us love.

Sven had always had a pervasive nameless deficiency since I was old enough to recall, though I hadn't ever analyzed it then. Nor had I realized that it must have grown over time; he was almost a mute emotionally and displayed a sense of superiority mixed with aggrievedness, of shame. He refused to acknowledge it, but he still had the reek of perpetual anger at being parentless, loveless. Maybe he strove so hard to prove his intellectual superiority because he felt inferior in general. Maybe he could never forgive me for having grandpa's love (what meager sign there was of it), but Sven had always preferred to battle with grandpa, perceiving every softening as pity. Grandpa had given him away, hadn't fought for him as he should. He could never open his heart to grandpa after that betrayal of not keeping us. His anger and shame finally swept him, like a riptide, off the shore. His waves of anger and sorrow sucked him into the ocean of his own making, where he could see only what he didn't have and feel only his own pain, shielded from feeling my love by the enormity of his own obsession.

He was angry at everyone that last year, even Chuck and I. Not with; I sensed it wasn't personal. He was angry at everyone. I hadn't understood. I'd thought he was just being a sullen teenager like half our friends, that it was a normal stage between childhood and adulthood: anger. I didn't realize.

I'd come inside in the middle of evening chores; I'd seen grandpa come out from the house and check in on me at the barn before going to the outbuildings. My hands were cold and I'd forgotten my mittens upstairs this morning; otherwise I wouldn't have gone in for another half hour or more, feeding cattle. As I passed Sven's room on the return trip I paused; he should be outside with us. It wasn't normal for his door to be closed at such a time anyhow; he preferred to keep it open when grandpa was home so he could always better hear where he was coming and going. Both he and my grandpa showed the same tendencies for keeping tabs on everyone else. The light wasn't even on. He didn't answer my knock and I tentatively opened the door.

It didn't compute, still doesn't now, thinking about it. His chair was overturned at his desk across the room, papers scattered onto the floor. He was hanging from the exposed beam next to the light fixture in the middle of the room, arms and legs barely shaking—or twitching—in the darkened bedroom. 

I don't really remember what I did clearly; I vaguely recall dialing 911 at some point and also standing under Sven, trying to hold up the weigh of his body even though he was twice my size and I was balanced on his wobbly desk chair. Most things that night seemed blurry and out of focus. I mostly remember grandpa walking in when I first started to hear the ambulance siren in the distance, finding me staggering and trying to brace myself, my sweaty fingers slipping against Sven's jeans, the utterly astounded look on grandpa's face. I don't remember how I felt, if I felt at all.

The EMTs borrowed a kitchen knife to cut the rope, one of them taking over and holding him better than I could. He was blue and limp, unresponsive to their efforts to revive him on the floor. Grandpa regained his composure and helped them carry him downstairs and outside. One of them flicked off the light but I felt frozen where I was. I stood in the darkened room, with a draft curling around my ankles like cold hands, watching the head lights flash across the walls before they pulled down the driveway. What had just happened? Grandpa's shadow crossed the rectangle of fading evening light I stood in. His shadow contorted, an impossibly tall human.

"You must remember Isaiah; all this was foretold and commanded to end his sins: 'How the rebel has come to an end! How his fury has ended! The Lord has broken the rod of the wicked, the scepter of the rulers, which in anger struck at people with unceasing blows, and in fury sought to subdue his betters with relentless aggression.'" The partial proverb didn't comfort me; I barely heard him, the words didn't even register until later when I was sleepless. "I spoke with him before coming out for chores; he seemed to finally understand he wouldn't prevail against me. I didn't know how bitterly he would react... no one could have known."

I couldn't respond. The words seemed to slide off of me, unable to be absorbed when I was already in sensory overload—or shutdown.

"You're not going to stand there all day. Standing there won't do anything." After a long pause, a hand on my shoulder; "'The wicked offspring will never be mentioned again. Prepare a place to slaughter his sons for the sins of their forefather; they are not to rise to inherit the land and cover the earth with their cities.' There was nothing you could have done once he decided his course."

I looked blindly at the shadows of his room, filled with wintry moon and star light like gray dust as wind gnawed at the edges of the house. I couldn't help but recall another line from that chapter in Isaiah that grandpa had somewhat colorfully interpreted: How you have fallen from Heaven, O morning star, son of the dawn! You have been cast down ...! Was it not for the sins of our father, but our mother, that Sven felt it necessary to sacrifice himself for? He'd seemed so close to freedom, only a couple months away from being independent and graduating high school. Yet he felt he had no other choice, no better option. He felt there was no hope.

Then Oscar Wilde, one of Sven's favorite authors, came to my lips: dying for something does not make it true. It isn't true. Sven wasn't a bad person, he was just angry. He was just a boy angry at all the things he didn't have. It's not fair. It wasn't fair and even less now so; it's not true. He can't be dead.

Isaiah 14:3-6

Isaiah 14:21