As Wise And Warm As Any Street

A Eulogy for My Son

I’m 30,000 feet over some flyover state headed to the west coast, drawn there because the Brilliant Tragedy that was my second son is now gone forever. He finally completed the suicide he’s been chasing since he was 16-years-old. Sometime in the early morning of Aug. 31st he bled out in his apartment, alone and lonely.

The crush of Torrey’s death and the reality of its blunt force emotional trauma is as strong and real today as it was nearly a year ago when I first wrote those words.

Torrey was a complex but not complicated person. The arc of his life was marked by soaring highs and bottomless lows. He sketched out his life in bold, angular shapes and colored his world in black and white and filled in the spaces with a million shades of grey. He was as wise and warm as any street.

British philosopher and social critic Bertrand Russell once said, “The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.” By that definition, Torrey led a good life, but the road he traveled was arduous, fraught with self-inflicted peril and a desperate search for grace.

On July 14th, just six weeks before he died, he wrote the following in a journal:

“One day people, probably not very many at the rate I’m going, will read my journals and wonder…